Henry Standing Bear reached for his phone even as it rang.
"I have waited for you," he spoke in his deep voice made even throatier by the emotion it contained. "My whole life I have waited without knowing. My whole heart filled today with your greeting."
Walt Longmire turned around where he'd been about to push open the door. When his friend turned his back on him and went toward the small office in the back he nodded to himself and let himself out, flipping the sign from OPEN to CLO ED as he went.
He recited the number and web address she'd provided as he went, jotting them down on the notepad in his truck. He'd start with those.
"I wasn't sure," the young voice said in response.
"That was immediately apparent," he noted. "And, had I been the kind of man who shied away from his family, his past, or his responsibility, I would have appreciated that. I'd like to return your mother's gift. Should I mail it or should I meet you?"
She laughed. "You don't even know where I am."
"A parent cannot go too great a distance to reach a child," he smiled. He relaxed. "I like your voice. I liked your words when they were on paper, but I read them with her voice in my head. I like yours more."
"Yours, too. It's comforting."
"Tell me how you got my records."
"I work for the Department of the Interior. I found my birth certificate and was gratified to find that the Standing Bear clan is not so huge as to be impossible to sift through. I had her journals, so I knew your birthdate and hometown. I made a phone call and spoke to the census clerk. Do you mind?"
"I do not. I have very little to hide from a child—less from an adult child who would have grown up hearing my stories."
"I can reciprocate. I know you're close to the sheriff's department in Absaroka. I'll email you my numbers if you want, so that your friend can run me, access my service record."
"You served in the military?"
"I did. I was medically discharged two years ago. There was a fire and I was damaged. I'm well on the way to recovery now, but at the time I was deemed unfit for further service."
"What branch?"
"Coast Guard."
He snorted.
"Now, now, we, too, serve, who bring home the lost."
"Yes. Serve. But it's not the military."
She was quiet. He didn't know she'd stuck her tongue out at the phone. He'd learn it soon enough.
"Why are you at the Department of Interior?"
"It was a job. I type well. I file well. I needed something to segue into civilian life. Government employ is enough like the military bullshit to breach that gap."
"If you could do anything in the world what would it be?"
"You'll not like the sound of this—but I'd take a crappy old bar and open it for lunchtime. Somewhere you could come get a great sandwich and soup and have a beer or a glass of wine with it. Nowhere around here does that. It's either a lunch counter and closes at dark—no alcohol. Or it's a bar that opens later in the day with typical fried bar food at the most."
"Why did you think I would not like to hear it."
"Two reasons: it sounds like a copy of your dream. And because you have a right to think your way of running your bar is correct enough. I'm not telling you to change."
"I started that a long time ago. I am open most of the day. And I serve my entire menu anytime I am open."
"Hmmm."
"What?"
"Nothing."
"My friend, Walt Longmire, Sheriff of Absaroka County, no doubt is running your phone number and what information he has regarding your name and address now. He got here almost as soon as the mail did."
"He'll be suspicious and disappointed. It's a pre-paid mobile and I opened the PO box in Laramie as a precaution."
"As a precaution?"
"I'm suspicious of nature and one of the most un-trusting souls ever to hike the Badlands. If the letter was to be intercepted or you turned out to be disreputable I'm not out anything and you have no way to track me."
"What is your Crow grandmother's family name?"
"I have no idea. I can get it!"
She sounded stoked as she started pushing and piling and shuffling.
"You mistrust me with your correct phone number and address, but you're willing to send me your family history?" he asked.
"I'm very Gemini. I was born under the ficklest of moons in the middle of June." She thought for a moment. "When I wrote that letter I had moments of disquiet. I sealed it and stamped it and put it in my purse so I'd send it immediately. Then I let it sit for a while. I became uncertain. Now I'm okay again. And grateful. It took four days for that talisman to reach you. Tell me what my mother felt when you gave it to her."
"Afraid. Surprised. I was worldly. I don't think she expected me to ask her to marry me. To ask her to stay and build a life with me. I wanted forever from her. I wanted sunshines and windstorms and to get snowed in so we could make love. And I wanted the small ones—lots of small ones to lavish my attention on. My best friend had a very young daughter then. I wanted my own. And I wanted her."
"You broke her persona of you."
"It seemed I did. She took my necklace, gave me no definitive answer, then bade me keep my silence while she thought. I made love to her carelessly—I thought she'd be my wife within just a few weeks, months at the most—and woke the next day in my bed alone. I never saw her again."
"My grandmother was Marian Black Leaf. Her mother was Anna Dawn Coyote. I don't know if Dawn is part of the surname. My great grandfather is Robert Black Leaf. He was decorated."
"Indeed he was. I know of both family names. It is Dawn Coyote. Not a popular name with the Cheyenne here."
"How did the Cheyenne end up with a reservation closest to the county named for the Crow Tribe's name for itself?"
"History has a way of making its own jokes, little one."
"I'm not little, Pappi. I'm six feet tall in my bare feet."
"Your mother was tiny—dainty."
"Yep. I was a constant amazement to her."
"How did she die?"
"She drank too much. Made bad decisions. And wrapped her car around a tree one night at four in the morning."
He was quiet. "When was this?"
"We buried her a little over a month ago."
"Tragic."
"Yes. I'm getting over the romance of it, though, as I dig through her personal effects. She was a selfish child when she met you. Her ways did not improve. She trapped a man into marriage as soon as she returned home—Oliver McDoughal—by arranging for their tryst to be interrupted by her father. My grandfather was his commanding officer. I was born seven months to the date after their elopement. He had the good sense to be killed in a peacekeeping mission in Bosnia."
"In your letter you said he hated you."
"None of my family is tall. None of his is tall. They, like my mother, tend to be fair-to-ruddy with curly hair. There are blondes, blue eyes, red heads of every shade, and a few paler spectrum brunettes on his side. My grandfather is very Irish looking. My grandmother had plain brown hair and fairly pale skin. Completely European bone structure. I remember her getting very tan in the summertime, but that was it. My mother—you know my mother was tan, but it wasn't necessarily red skinned. Her eyes held some exotic tilt like her mother's. Both of them had green eyes. Mine are hazel. More brown, really, and I'd be pigeonholed as an extra squaw in every B movie Hollywood made."
"Beautiful, then," he assured her.
"I wasn't his. He knew it. She knew it. And my grandmother told my mother once that I was not featured as the Crow Nation should be. My mother blamed increasingly complex genetics."
"Crow and Cheyenne have very distinctive faces. Whites might say all Indians look the same; we do not."
"So it seems."
"I'm 6'3."
"I saw that in your file."
"My parents would have loved you."
"You don't know that. You don't know me. I could steal cars or swindle old people out of their retirement funds."
There was a laugh in her voice.
"I do know this to be true. You would have been their only grandchild. You are my only child. And I hear so much in your words that you do not say. So many truths. Some off-colour humor that would have fit in very well with my family."
"I'm sorry. You sound sad."
"Sad. Hurt. Confused. But proud. You are twenty-three years old?"
"I am. For now."
"And you have timed out your birth to know that you would have been conceived the September after your mother finished her masters."
"High school. She should have been at Central Wyoming when she was with you. Her grades weren't that good and her parents wanted her to try small-town life for a while. So she'd stay out of trouble."
He was quiet.
"She was eighteen when I was born."
More silence.
"Still there?"
"I am here. I am digesting this information. Do you know how old I was in fall of 1985?"
She laughed. It sounded like delight to him. "Yup. I told you she was too young for you."
"She did not seem seventeen."
"So I hear. If it makes you feel better, when she was in her late twenties she still acted like a teenager."
"You have no idea. She was already an accomplished bartender when I hired her-"
"Trust me. When it comes to my mother, I have no doubts. She was far more experienced than any teenager had a right to be. I think part of it was the military life. She taught me to mix drinks with her after Cocktail came out. I was her parlor trick.
"I think, in her way, she loved you."
His new bartender came in and began making noise. Someone came in and spoke quietly to her. He had a lot of information to digest, so he closed the conversation, promising to answer when she called back later after he'd given her his email address so she could send him pictures and her information.