The Never-Open Desert Diner by James Anderson Page A

recliner snoring softly. The leg rest was up as high as it would go. There were small irregular holes on the worn bottoms of her pink high-top Converse Chuck Taylors. I concentrated on the shoes. I didn’t care to extend my sight to her dark skirt, which was unfastened and hiked up in a bunch at her waist. The white tub of her belly was suspended beneath it. Below that were her laced fingers.
    I covered her up with an old red Indian blanket off my bed and opened the refrigerator to see if the food fairy had stopped by. It hadn’t. What few containers there were inside had reached the age of consent. I closed the door. She snuggled deeper under the blanket with a contented whimper.
    The kitchen counter was littered with the signs of Ginny’s foraging. She had gone through a mostly full jar of peanut butter and a whole box of saltines, and a cube of butter. My eyes followed the trail of white crumbs from the counter across the shabby carpet to the La-Z-Boy.
    The last time that blanket had covered a baby, I was the infant. My mother abandoned me wrapped in that blanket at the clinic on the Warm Springs reservation in Oregon. It was the only possession I’d had my whole life, and it had held up well over the years, through two foster homes until I was six years old, then stayed with me when I was adopted. Now it covered two babies, one inside the other.
    My living room, dining room, and kitchen were all one room. I took out a ruled tablet and hunted down a pencil before grabbing the cheap accordion folder with all my bills, past due notices, and accounts receivable. It was a thick, disorganized file. I reached into the folder and withdrew a random handful of papers and dropped them on the little kitchen table. Aces and eights. There was one unopened envelope from the IRS requesting payment for the last two quarters of estimated income tax, plus three threatening letters from the leasing company about my truck. I took the envelope I had received from Robert A. Fulwiler, Station Supervisor, and tossed it onto the pile. A busted flush.
    Ginny moaned in her sleep. Her hands moved under the blanket, probably trying to lift her stomach for a little relief from the weight. That blanket, as far as I knew, hadn’t been cleaned since it was made. I couldn’t even guess when that had been. Mr. and Mrs. Jones, the older, childless couple who adopted me, had been savvy enough to never touch the blanket.
    The subject of cleaning the blanket came up only once, at dinner a year or so after the adoption was final. Mrs. Jones said she would like to have my blanket cleaned for me. I told her something bad would happen to her if she ever touched that blanket. The two of them just nodded. A threat from a seven-year-old was serious if not dangerous. I asked them if they were Indians, too. Mrs. Jones said she wasn’t, that she was just an old woman. Mr. Jones, a quiet man who rarely spoke and never raised his voice, volunteered that it wasn’t a question he ever thought about one way or the other.
    They asked me if I thought about it much, being Indian. I don’t think I had, at least until I left the reservation school and came to live with them in Utah. In no uncertain terms I told them never to forget I was an Indian. Something I thought only because I had been with Indians at an Indian school, though without any tribal affiliation. Not having a tribe, and with no parents, I was an outcast.
    Years later, in my early twenties, I tried to find out something about my birth parents. A retired nurse’s aide I’d reached by phone in Seattle told me she was at the clinic the morning they discovered me. There was no note. She did remember that someone thought they had seen a young female, a Jewish social worker or college student, on the porch early that morning. The young woman had been volunteering at a reservation mental health clinic several miles away.
    The nurse’s aide said, “One of the bucks probably had at her. Poor thing.”
    I asked