THE END

So I’m standing there in the dollar store with my underwear in my hands — well, almost my underwear, can’t quite buy it yet, the checkout line is molasses, the self-serve station is dead — and this old lady in front of me turns around and looks at the package and says, My husband always bought that kind, he loved the camo style.

I give a faint nod, which eggs her on. Not that he ever went hunting, she says. And not that it matters what you’re wearing down there when you’re trying to kill a deer. Right, young man?

Her mouth stretches, seems to be on the verge of laughing. Or maybe she’s just reacting to the mop-bucket fumes.

Right, I say, taking in the missing teeth, the doughy face aflame with blotches. My drawl switches on — it has a life of its own — and I hear myself saying: Nobody’s called me young in a month of Sundays.

The line lurches forward.

I do a quick inventory of her cart, the half-gallon bottles of antifreeze-green soft drinks and shitload of cat food cans. She studies my threadbare T-shirt, the fading images of the buffalo and the spirit shield. Our eyes lock. Her mouth stretches again.

Are your people Indians? she asks.

And I almost say yes and I almost say no and I almost say I don’t know who my people are anymore, but then I think, this little town’s going to be home now, there’s no point in pussyfooting. So I say, My ex-husband is. And brace for impact, with her or an eavesdropper.

But nothing happens except another lurch of the line, and maybe her nostrils flare a tad, and she says, My heart’s with the Indian people, I was a nurse to them in my younger days, my favorites were the babies.

Indian Health Service? I guess.

Oklahoma, she says, beaming now, transported. They sent us all over eastern Oklahoma, Broken Bow to Bartlesville, those beautiful hills, those precious, precious babies.

Another lurch. Now she’s unloading, unloading, unloading. Drops one last can to the floor. I’ve got it, she says, waving me off, barely able to bend over and pick it up.

The girl behind the counter rolls her eyes my way. A gum bubble billows from her mouth. Pop! it goes as the old woman hands over two twenties and asks if by any chance I have children. When I nod, she says, I’m going to put you on my prayer list, and you put me on yours, OK?

So I squeeze the briefs and manifest my best bovine face and mumble something about these hard times we’re living in, and she says, I believe we’re getting near the end, don’t you? And I say, Ma’am, I am not in the business of predicting.