“She was white,” he heard himself saying. “After the accident, I lived with my father’s parents on the rez.”
As he started to speak, Jane reached onto the platter and pulled out a pile of bones Will had left. She settled them onto her plate and moved them around with her hands, seemingly unaware of what she was doing.
She glanced up at him and smiled. “Go on,” she said. “Tell me how they met.”
Will had told this story many times before, because it tended to wrap itself around a woman’s heart so neatly she’d tumble into his bed.
“My mother was a schoolteacher in Pine Ridge town, and my father saw her one day when he was getting some feed for his boss at the ranch.
And her being white, and him being Lakota, he didn’t really understand his attraction, much less what he was going to do about it.” Mesmerized, he watched Jane’s hands wrap a strip of sinew from one bone around a second one. “Anyway, they went out a couple of times, and then it came to summer vacation and she decided things were moving along too fast, so she just up and left without telling my father where she was going.”
Jane neatly laid five bones in parallel lines against the edge of her plate. “I’m listening,” she said.
“Well, it sounds stupid, but my father said he was riding fence and he justknew. So he left in the middle of the day, on this borrowed horse, and he set out sort of north-northwest without any idea where he was headed.”
Jane looked up, her hands stilling. “Did he find her?”
Will nodded. “About thirty-five miles away at a diner, where she was waiting for a friend to pick her up and drive her home to Seattle.
My father pulled her in front of him on the horse and wrapped an extra saddle blanket around them.”
Will had listened to this story so many times as a child that even now, he imagined the words in his mother’s voice instead of his own.
“Years ago, this is how my people fell in love,” your father told me, and he wrapped that blanket so close we were sharing one heartbeat. “I would have come to you at night, and we would sit outside in this cocoon, and with all the stars as witnesses I would tell you that I loved you.”
“My God,” Jane sighed. “That is the mostromanticthing I’ve ever heard.” She pulled a new handful of bones from the tray between them.
“Did your mother go back with him?”
Will laughed. “No, she went to Seattle. But she wrote him letters all summer and they got married a year later.”
Jane smiled and wiped her hands on a napkin. “How come people don’t do things like that nowadays? You grope around in the back of a sedan in high school and you think you’re in love. Nobody gets swept off their feet anymore.” Shaking her head, she stood up to clear the plates. She picked up the near-empty serving platter and then dropped it, hearing its ring and the splatter of grease.
On her plate she’d re-created the skeleton of the chicken.
The bones were carefully structured, in some cases even bound together at the joints. The wings were folded neatly against the rib cage; the powerful legs were bent as if running.
She put her hand to her forehead as a wealth of terms and images flooded her mind: the slender arm bone of a ramapithecus, a string of molars and cranial fragments, green tents in Ethiopia that covered tables laden with hundreds of catalogued bones. Physical anthropology. She’d spent entire months in Kenya and Budapest and Greece on excavations, tracking the history of man. It had been such a tremendous part of her life, she was shocked even a blow to the head could make her forget it.
She lightly touched the femur of the reconstructed chicken. “Will,” she said, and when she lifted her face her eyes were shining. “I know what I do.”
CHAPTERTHREE
WILL liked Jane better before she remembered she was an anthropologist. She kept trying to explain her science to him. Anthropology, she said, was the study of how people fit into their world. That much he understood, but most of the other things she said sounded like a foreign language. On the drive to the police station Monday evening, she’d outlined the best methods for skeletal excavation. When Watkins questioned her for a notice he’d insert in theTimes, she’d told him that until someone came to claim her, she’d be happy to help in forensics. And now, the following morning, while Will was working his way through a bowl of Cheerios, she was trying to explain the evolution of man.
She was drawing lines across her napkin, labeling each branch with names. Will was beginning to see why her husband hadn’t shown up.
“I can’t follow this,” he said. “I can’t even do math this early.”
Jane ignored him. When she finished, she sighed and leaned back in her chair. “God, it feels so good toknowsomething.”
Will thought there were probably other things more worth knowing, but he didn’t say this. He pointed to a spot on the napkin. “Why’d they become extinct?”
Jane frowned. “They weren’t able to adapt to the world,” she said.
Will snorted. “Yeah, well, half the time neither can I,” he said. He picked up his hat, getting ready to leave.
Jane’s eyes brightened as she turned to him. “I wonder if I’ve discovered something really important, like the Lucy skeleton, or that Stone Age man in the Tyrolean Alps.”
