“No, up, please.” Annawake stares with her head cocked.
Her black hair is cropped so close to the nap it stands up like an exotic pelt, and her broad mouth has the complicated curves of a foreign punctuation mark, making it anyone’s guess whether she’s smiling or not. Jinny shrinks behind her glasses, wondering if Annawake is making a joke and she’s not getting it. “It’s just Oprah Winfrey,” she says.
“I know. I want to hear this.”
Jinny shrugs. “Okay.” She stretches one blue-jeaned leg out behind her for balance as she reaches across hills of papers for the volume knob, then slumps back down to her type-writer. Mr. Turnbo is out of the office for the afternoon so it’s just the two of them, and Jinny is unsure of her relationship with Annawake. Jinny has worked here longer—she started as Franklin Turnbo’s secretary-receptionist when she graduated from high school last year; Annawake only finished law school out in Phoenix a month ago, and has come back home to Oklahoma to intern here on an Indian Lawyer Training grant. Mr. Turnbo has never minded if Jinny’s little TV talked quietly on the desk, as long as she gets everything typed. She’s not wrapped up in the soaps, she just likes Oprah and Sally Jessy and sometimes General Hospital. Annawake doesn’t say she minds, either, but she makes faces at Sally Jessy and calls her the blonde Puerto Rican, which makes Jinny feel guilty for perming her hair.
For trying to look yonega, as her grandma says.
Through the front window she sees a line of dusty cars and pickup trucks pulling out of the parking lot of Cherokee Nation headquarters, heading back up the highway toward Kenwood and Locust Grove; the afternoon session of Tribal Court is over. Mr. Turnbo will be back soon and she’s still behind on her work, but that’s not Oprah Winfrey’s fault.
“That little kid in the overalls?” Annawake asks. She is staring with her chin on her hand. “I heard somebody say she was adopted.”
“Yeah. Before the first commercial Oprah introduced them as being somebody and her adopted daughter Turtle.”
“Cherokee,” Annawake says. “I’ll bet you a Coke.”
“Uhn-uh,” Jinny says, “Navajo, I bet. They’re from Arizona.
She looks exactly like my brother’s girlfriend’s little girl, out in Albuquerque.”
“Where in Arizona, did they say?”
“Tucson.”
Annawake eyes the TV as if it had just called her a name.
Jinny finds Annawake completely fascinating: she dresses like she doesn’t give a hoot, in jeans and moccasins and white shirts from J. C. Penney’s men’s department, and she totes around a backpack held together by gray duct tape instead of a briefcase, but she has that fashion-model mouth with a deep indentation in the center of her upper lip that’s hard to stop staring at. Men must want to kiss her every minute, Jinny thinks. When the perky music comes up and Oprah fades out to another commercial, Annawake takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. “Tired,” she says. “You too?”
“Yeah. Grandma’s mad at my brother Woody for quitting school. Nobody’s been getting much sleep at our house, except Woody. He took his bed out in the yard.”
“Robert Grass didn’t call yet?”
“Robert Grass! That turkey. Not since the drive-in two weeks ago.”
“He will,” Annawake says. “My brother Dellon knows him from the construction site over on Muskogee highway. He said Robert Grass is talking osda about his new girlfriend.”
“Maybe she’s nobody I know.”
“If she’s not you, you would have heard about it. Tahlequah’s not that big.”
“That’s the truth. The whole Nation’s not that big. Somebody all the way over to Salisaw told Grandma she’d seen me in a truck with the weediest Grass ever to come up.”
Annawake smiles. “There’s no getting away from the people that love you.” She slides her glasses back on and takes the pencil from behind her ear to mark up the page she’s reading. Jinny thinks: You don’t even know. Nobody would gossip about you, they all adore you too much, plus you have no noticeable habits other than working. She blows a puff of air through her bangs and flips to a new page of the Arkansas River Gravel Claim. Why anyone cares this much about river gravel is beyond Jinny Redcrow.
“This Oprah show is about kids that saved people’s lives,” she offers Annawake as an afterthought, wondering if there’s a legal angle she has missed. Annawake and Mr. Turnbo are always speaking to each other in a language Jinny types but can’t read.