Mr. M looked at his watch. “We should go back to the gym,” he said, “so we can watch the end of the game.” Then he called something in Crow. A woman came from the kitchen, and Mr. M paid her.
They watched most of the last quarter. For the Indians, only the bench played in the second half. The final score was Lodge Grass, 56; Hill City, 52.
39
Lee was glad to be home. She’d almost never spent the night away from her daughters before. Bar Stool delivered her at her door in midafternoon sunshine, with the temperature 42 degrees Fahrenheit—shirtsleeve weather. Instead of going to the office after unpacking, she phoned Ben, telling him she was home, then drew the drapes, set an alarm clock, and napped on the sofa.
Previously she’d had her project tugging at her. It had been interesting and challenging. Often it had taken an act of will to leave work at the end of the day. But the project was finished, including the procedures for adjusting activities to the new chart. All that was left was any fine-tuning that might prove necessary. Lor Lu had understood it thoroughly, and been enthusiastic when she’d gone over the completed product with him. Minutes later Ngunda had knocked, asking to see it, and he too had left praising her.
She was proud of it, but its completion had left a vacuum in her life. It hadn’t, however, left her unemployed, for which she found herself grateful. She was to be Millennium’s organizational troubleshooter. Her first assignment was to get more intimately acquainted with people at the ground level and in the field, so on this afternoon it was easy to laze around for a few hours.
* * *
It was she who fixed supper that evening. She actually cooked quite well, when she took the time. Here they didn’t eat to television as they had at Bridgeport. Lee wanted as much communication with the girls as possible.
“What was it like on the reservation, Mom?” Becca asked.
“Cold.”
“Come on, Mom,” Raquel said, “she didn’t mean the weather. What was it like on an Indian reservation?”
“I’ve only seen one,” Lee said, “and it was cold.”
“Mo-om!”
“It was minus twenty-nine degrees the first morning at breakfast, and minus fourteen degrees at lunchtime. And windy! They’d had a snowstorm, and the snowplows were going all the time. Mr. Makes-A-Place-For-Them . . .”
“Mr. who?” Raquel asked.
“Willard Makes-A-Place-For-Them. That was his name in English. I didn’t learn to say it in the Crow language, but that’s what it means. He told me to call him Bill. I thought of him as Mr. M. It was he who took me around and showed me things. He said the snow never melts there. It just wears out, blowing around.”
Ben grinned. Becca laughed. Raquel broke up. “It really melts though, I’ll bet,” Raquel said when she’d regained her composure.
“Of course,” Becca told her. “I looked up the climatic data for Billings, close to the reservation. The thirty-year average temperature for January is twenty-one degrees, so lucky Mom got to see a cold spell, an ‘Alberta Clipper.’ It can get really cold, and then warm up big league when a chinook wind blows. It can be way below zero one day and way above freezing the next.”
Raquel gestured toward her sister. “An old scholar in observation mode,” she said, “with a goal of trivia.”
Becca began a retort, about old sages in idiot mode, with a goal of obnoxious, but their dad was frowning, so instead she turned back to her mother. “What was it like besides cold and snowy?” she asked.
“Well, the reservation is almost as big as Connecticut. But Lodge Grass, where I was, is about a quarter as big as Walsenburg. I went to a high school basketball game the first night, and was really impressed! They play so well! Their coach had set scoring records at the University of Montana, when he was a student there, and their school has won the Montana state high school championship several times, for schools its size. One of its graduates won the national best cowboy award in college rodeo last year, too.”