“I’ll be the one handing you a cup of coffee to share with me.”
“Can’t wait. Well, my personal time fun awaits…”
Gloria gave her one last wicked smile over her shoulder before turning back to her mystery honey, her thick hips swishing back and forth as she went. Juniper’s idea of having personal time fun fell more along the lines of soaking her feet in warm water while blasting her face with AC and eating her weight in ice cream after a day like the one she was having.
After not graduating from college, and having to leave the agriculture program she loved while there, she had managed her family’s food truck operations ever since. As the oldest daughter, it was her responsibility to bring money into their household where Anita was no longer able due to her health, which is why her studies were cut short. And why she still had to pay for student loans while not having a degree to show for it.
Running her mom’s food truck wasn’t her dream, by a long shot, but she knew this was her mom’s livelihood. The Banks family didn’t come from much of anything at all financially, and her mom didn’t have any sort of retirement planned out. Anita always joked that she would die and be buried with her food truck. As with most Native people, they shared a devious sense of humor. What Juniper didn’t share was that there was no way in hell she was going to run that food truck for the rest of her life. She had something different up her sleeve. She was in control of her redemption arc – one that was going to start bright and early Monday morning.
Juniper turned back to witness her mom struggling to use two hands to push herself up against her knees.
“Mama, stop. I got it. I got it.”
Juniper rushed over to grab the tickets from her hand.
“We’re getting backed up, Junie.”
“I know.” She sighed and turned back to add the order tickets to the fishing line, now having to double the new tickets up on the last remaining clothespins.
After three more grueling hours of food preparation, Juniper cleaned and sanitized every surface, and even thoughshe would regret having to do it in the morning, she locked up without prepping for the next day. That was a problem for tomorrow’s Juniper. Today’s Juniper was worn out.
She lightly, surreptitiously kicked the side of the food truck as she walked past it to her car where her mom was already waiting for her.
That was petty.
She doubled back and ran her hand over where she kicked it.
Now I know you’re tired. You’re petting a literal food truck, Banks.
She didn’t totally hate the food truck; she just had other plans for it.
Responsibility, not just to her family, but to her community was woven deeply into Juniper’s DNA. Her primary focus was always on what she could do to take care of others. She hoped to expand the new traditional foods program to break down even more barriers to accessing traditional food. Especially for Elders who didn’t always have reliable transportation, the Runapewak needed a way to actually distribute the food to the community. She dreamed about repurposing the food truck for that, but she was also realistic. Pragmatic almost to a fault, after a lifetime of serving as the family problem solver, the mediator, the unstoppable people pleaser, the one who despite all of those aforementioned titles feared more than anything else a life without her own personal fulfillment. She would have to put that dream off for a long time.
One day.
After showering and grabbing a strawberry shortcake ice cream bar from the freezer, Juniper clicked on the small television as she sat down across from her mom at their kitchen table and breathed in the scent of cornbread sizzling in a cast iron skillet on the stove. She lifted her feet up to rest on the chair beside her.
Juniper and Anita shared a small but cozy trailer on their land allotment on the Runapewak Indian Tribe Reservation. A river cut through the top of the 5-square mile Reservation,their Rez as they called it, leading out to the bay that flanked its outer edge. The Rez was small, sparsely occupied, and equal parts rural and coastal. It was where she had learned everything; it was who she was. Even though so many people from there dreamt about leaving, and to be fair she had at one point too, she couldn’t imagine that now. Not after everything her community had worked to build over the last ten years. Not after everything she’d built over the last seven.
“Junie, is that Rowan Birdsong on the tv?” Anita asked.
Juniper’s eyes shot up to the screen. She hadn’t been paying attention to where her mom had stopped flipping the channel. And when she looked up, she saw her. She let out an exasperated sigh.
“Yep. Sure is.”
“Wow, our little Ro on national tv. What’s it saying, I can’t read the captions,” Anita asked as she squinted at the text, her nose wrinkling up to displace the glasses that were clearly no longer useful.
“Rowan Birdsong, climate justice lawyer and international Indigenous environmental rights advocate, joins our show today to talk about honoring Indigenous leadership and traditional ecological knowledge in the global climate justice movement.”
Juniper couldn’t help the sarcastic drawl her tone had taken towards the end. She had followed Rowan’s rise to national prominence as a climate justice lawyer with absolute disdain, to put it lightly. Immediately after high school, Rowan had left to attend a prestigious university with a full ride scholarship without so much as a goodbye, even though they had spent nearly every day of their childhoods together. Juniper had seen her at a distance from time to time on school breaks when Rowan visited her father, but she didn’t make her presence known to anyone. On the off chance when Juniper had seen her around at the gas station or dollar store, Rowan couldn’t even make eye contact. At this point, she wasn’t even sure the last time she had even seen her around the community.
“Is that like what you do, Junie? With the traditional foods program?” Anita asked.
Juniper barked out a sharp laugh. “No, not at all.”
“Ayy, ok ok. No need to get snappy.” Anita cut her eyes at her.
“Sorry, it’s just that what I do is for the good of the community. What she does is to get national, and I guess now international, praise for environmental work that benefits no one directly.”
