After a few seconds of stunned paralysis over what had played out in the last ten minutes, she got up seeking thesolitude of her own, yes,privateoffice.
“Looking forward to it,” Rowan muttered as she moved toward the door, slightly betraying the now confusing thoughts running through her mind.
Was she, despite all of this, kind of looking forward to it?
Chapter 5
Juniper was quietly seething in the empty storage room. Were these really the conditions she would be required to work in? These constraints to her contributions, her hard work, her vision? She leaned her forehead against the wall and immediately felt bad for taking individual credit like that. This was her community’s hard work. Their vision. Together.
This wasn’t like her. She was way off balance and needed to get some air.
Once she heard Rowan’s office door shut, she quickly descended the stairs and bounded out of the front doors of the building and into the sunlight. The doors echoed a heinously loud screeching sound that jarred her out of her fixation on self-pity.
She sighed in intense irritation, wishing instead it could be the deepest, most guttural scream she could ever hope to muster from the depths of her soul. But she was in the parking lot. At work. Trying to do the job she wanted to do more than anything. Andthatconstraint just frustrated her further. Instead, she breathed in and out a large breath, named the types of trees she saw lining the parking lot as a grounding exercise, and walked back inside the building to do her job.
For the rest of the day, Juniper and Rowan managed to keep their distance until bumping into each other as they exited their respective offices at 5 o’clock on the dot, nearly closing their doors in unison. Even in heels, Juniper couldn’t go eye-to-eye with Rowan, yet all she wished she could do in that moment was take her down an inch or two.
Rowan stepped aside and let Juniper pass, and then walked several paces behind her until they exited the building. Something inside Juniper made her want to turn around and say something, anything, to her every few feet before they hit the stairwell. But she couldn’t find any words or come to any conclusion about what she wanted that message to be. Once she hit the stairwell, she simply focused her eyes forward and concentrated on every click of her heels against the stairs that would lead her out of there.
Instead of heading home though, Juniper diverted course and took a right at one of the only seven intersections on the Rez, and her cousin Wren’s small bungalow-style house came into view. As soon as she stepped one foot out of her car, Wanchese, Wren’s nine-year old son, came bounding out of the front door and into her arms. She squeezed him tightly and breathed him in, as she always did. She enjoyed a special closeness with him, not just from how often she spent time with him, but it felt like they’d spoken the same secret language since he was born.
“Were you waiting for me or something? Or could you sense I was coming?” She asked conspiratorially as she let go and put her hands on her hips.
He grabbed a hand from her hip and led the way back to the front door. “I could sense it.”
She squeezed his hand and hurried along behind him. “Good. The spell is still working.”
Wanchese opened the door for her, and she couldn’t help notice how long the single golden brown braid down his back was getting. He really was growing up so fast. Really way too fast.
She pressed the stray hairs on the top of his head down before planting a kiss on his center part, and said, “Good manners, nuqisus (my son). Women go first.”
Once inside, she instantly felt at ease. Even though it wason the small side, Wren worked so hard to make their home a cozy, family home, decorated with local artwork, comfortable throw blankets and pillows, plants, pictures of their family and their favorite places, and as much of Wanchese’s own artwork as she could possibly fit on their refrigerator.Somuch warmer than the homes they grew up in as kids.
Juniper found Wren sitting on her couch with her feet curled up under her, one of her many throw blankets draped across her lap. She was looking at a brochure for the Institute of American Indian Arts and sipping coffee out of a large ceramic mug with an intricate woodland floral pattern embossed onto it.
“Cute mug. Is that new?” Juniper asked, as she kicked her shoes off by the front door and headed directly toward the coffee pot for her own large mug.
“Yes! I saw a pottery artist from another Tribe on social media selling these, so I had to buy one. I like how it’s similar to our designs.” She paused. “I was inspired, I guess. I want to get into pottery again, the traditional way this time.”
Wren’s excitement drifted into a daydream tone as Juniper circulated the kitchen to make her coffee. Wren had always been drawn to the arts, and was really great at sketching and painting, but her chance to pursue her creative passions had been dramatically cut short.
No one really knew the full story of how Wren had gotten pregnant at 19, except Juniper. Just like no one knew what happened between her and Rowan, except for Wren. Juniper was also the only one who knew who Wanchese’s actual father was. It was not something Wren ever talked about, even to this day, and had lived the last nine years as a single parent trying to make ends meet, not necessarily by choice.
Losing her sense of freedom that young, especially for someone as carefree and wild-spirited as Wren had been, was a difficult transition, and she was still trying to figure out the balance of keeping parts of herself through motherhood. Wren was only a few years younger than her, but it seemed like shehad already lived a whole other lifetime before she got to her late twenties.
Through it all, they were happy to keep each other’s secrets and be each other’s biggest supporters. Juniper settled herself next to Wren with her mug.
“You should get back into pottery,” Juniper responded assuredly, “you would be so great at that. Do you remember Nunny gathering clay from the river?”
Nunny was what they had called their late grandmother, Helen Deerfoot. It was a shorter term of endearment for the word Nunohum, meaning grandmother in their language.
“Yes, and we were too stupid to ask her more about it,” Wren agonized.
“I know, but we didn’t know any better either. Look into it though. Maybe there are still some Elders around who can teach you. You know I’ll watch Wanchese for you.”
“I know. You just do so much already.”
Juniper reached over to put one arm around Wren’s shoulders, tilted her head against hers, and squeezed.
