Tuesday, December 29, 1998 -- 2:30 a.m.

Shawna's home for Christmas break. She's different. Not a lot. She stands different. At supper at her grandma's she corrected how I say a Lakota word. She learned it the way the professor says it and I learned it the way my mom says it, and my mom was sitting right there, so there's going to be a war at that kitchen table sometime this week and I plan to be at work.

She got a B-plus in chemistry after all. She wants to do nursing. She told me there's a scholarship where they pay for school if you come back after and work for the Indian Health Service for a while. She said, "I'd come back anyway, Dad. They just don't know that."

I didn't tell her I cried in the car after. I'm telling the internet. The internet doesn't call you a crybaby.

Thursday, December 17, 1998 -- 3:10 a.m.

Derek made the JV team, and last Friday the varsity coach had him dress for the varsity game too, because two of the seniors were sick. He sat at the end of the bench the whole game in a warm-up jacket that was too big and never went in. I was there. I've changed my sleeping so I can go to the games: eight in the morning to three in the afternoon instead of till six. It's like living on a different planet's time, like the little Mars car.

He plays guard. He's not the fastest. What he has is he's calm. He doesn't rush. He looks at the whole floor before he passes, like he's reading it. I don't know where he got that. Not from me. I wasn't calm about anything in my life till I was thirty-eight.

If you don't know it, Lakota people are crazy for basketball. On the rez a good game fills the gym in any weather, grandmas in the front rows with blankets on their laps, everybody yelling. When I was a kid I played in high school down there. I was okay. Then I found other things to do on Friday nights.

After the game I told Derek he looked good on the bench. He said, "Dad, I didn't even play." I said, "I know. You looked good not playing." He shook his head at me. But he was smiling.

Saturday, October 31, 1998 -- 2:00 a.m.

They sent John Glenn back up in the space shuttle Thursday. Seventy-seven years old. The lobby TV's been showing it all week. My mom watched it on hers and called me before my shift. She said, "If that old man can go to space, I can stick my own finger." She's been making Uncle Wilbur's granddaughter do her blood sugar checks with the little meter because she doesn't like the needle. As of today she does it herself. John Glenn did that. Somebody should tell NASA.

Shawna calls Sundays, collect. She has a B in chemistry, which she says is a disaster, and an A in English, which she says doesn't count. She joined the Native student group. There's about fifteen of them, and they had a feed with soup and fry bread in a church basement, and she said it was the first time since August she didn't feel like a visitor.

Tomorrow's Halloween. Mrs. Bhakta bought a bag of candy bars for the lobby and a plastic pumpkin to put them in. She asked me what the holiday is for. I said I think it's for dentists.

Monday, August 24, 1998 -- 2:20 a.m.

Saturday I drove Shawna to Vermillion.

We left at five in the morning with everything she owns in the back of my Buick and the rest tied on top under a tarp: a lamp, a milk crate of tapes, the little refrigerator her mom bought, and the star quilt folded in a garbage bag so it wouldn't get dusty. We went the long way, down through the rez first, so she could say goodbye to her grandma. Mom stood in the yard and held Shawna's face in both hands for a long time without saying anything. Then she gave her a sack of fry bread wrapped in a dish towel, which she's not supposed to be making anymore, and told me not to tell the diabetes nurse.

Then east. All day east, across the whole bottom of the state on the two-lane, through towns that are a grain elevator and a bar and a church, and the last hour along the Missouri with the sun behind us. She slept some. She talked some. Somewhere around Winner she asked me if I was scared when I quit drinking. I said I was scared every minute for about a year. She said, "Me too. About this." I said, "Good. That means you know it's big."

The dorm is a tall brick building full of girls and their fathers carrying refrigerators up the stairs, everybody sweating and saying "excuse me" to each other. Her roommate is from Sioux Falls and has a telephone shaped like a pair of lips. They seemed to like each other in about four minutes. Girls are like that.

I left at six. She walked me to the car. She said, "Drive safe, Dad," which is what I used to say to her mom back when I shouldn't have been driving at all. I didn't tell her that.

Four hundred miles back in the dark with the passenger seat empty. Got in at two. The buffalo sign was on. I sat in the lot a while before I went in.

Tuesday, June 30, 1998 -- 3:15 a.m.

Mom finally went to the clinic. Uncle Wilbur drove her, because I asked him to and because she won't say no to her little brother, who is sixty-five.

Diabetes. Type 2, the doctor said, the kind you get later. Her sugar was so high the nurse made her sit down and did it again to be sure. She's on pills now, twice a day, and she's supposed to see a diabetes nurse and learn to eat different. No more fry bread every day. No more pop. She told me all this on the phone like she was reading me a list of people who died.

On my day off I went to the library in town and read everything they had. The pamphlets all have Indians on the front. That tells you something. On Pine Ridge there's hardly a family that doesn't have it. The old people say before the reservation there wasn't any, when everybody ate buffalo and chokecherries and walked everywhere. I don't know if that's history or just the kind of thing old people say. Probably both.

I told her I'd drive down Sundays and we'd cook together. She said, "You can't cook." I said I'd learn. She said, "You learn to cook, I'll learn to eat. We'll see who quits first." She's sixty-seven. She's never quit on anything, including me, and I didn't make that easy.

Monday, May 25, 1998 -- 2:45 a.m.

Shawna graduated this afternoon. I sat in the front row. Well, the fourth row, which is the front row for families; the first three were the band and the teachers. I got there an hour and a half early. The custodian let me in.

Her mom, Arlene, was there, and Ron, Arlene's husband, who's a decent man and a good mechanic and has been more of a dad to my kids some years than I was. I shook his hand. That was harder than the four years. We sat together. Derek sat between his mom and me, which is where he's been his whole life, I guess.

When they called her name, my mom stood up behind us and made the trill, the high sound Lakota women make to honor somebody, and the whole gym turned around. Shawna didn't turn around. But I saw her shoulders go up.

After, at Arlene's, there was a meal, and my mom gave her a star quilt she's been sewing since Christmas, blue and white with the big star in the middle. Shawna wrapped it around herself in the backyard in the heat. There were a lot of people there I hadn't seen in years. Some of them looked at me carefully. Some of them hugged me. It's okay. Both are fair.

I said I'd be in the front row. I was in the fourth. Close enough.

Thursday, April 16, 1998 -- 3:30 a.m.

A kid came in at two with no money. Nineteen, maybe twenty. From Rosebud, he said, or Pine Ridge, depending which minute you asked. He'd been drinking. He wanted a room and said he'd pay tomorrow. I've been that kid. Not exactly him, but close enough that I could smell my own old coat on him.

I can't give away rooms. Mr. Bhakta's a good man but he's not a charity. I gave the kid coffee and a sweet roll from the machine and let him sit in the lobby by the heater while it snowed. We talked. Mostly he talked. About his girl, and his uncle's truck, and a job in Gillette he was going to get. I didn't preach. Nobody ever preached me sober. Leonard didn't preach either. He just kept being there, like a mailbox.

Around five the kid fell asleep in the chair. At six I called his auntie in Rapid, the number he gave me, and she came in her housecoat to get him. She said "pilamaya" to me, thank you, and looked at me like she knew exactly who I was and what I used to be. Maybe she did. Rapid's not that big.

I wrote the meeting times on the back of a motel card and put it in his jacket pocket. That's all you can do. That's all anybody did for me, too, and then one day it was enough.

Wednesday, March 4, 1998 -- 2:40 a.m.

Four years yesterday.

Leonard picked me up for the noon meeting and gave me my chip, like every year, and said what he says every year: "Don't get proud, Vernon. It's just a day. Do another one." Then he bought me a cheeseburger, which he also does every year, and scraped the cheese off his own because of his heart. Leonard's seventy-four, Oglala, Korea, thirty-one years sober. He's the only person I know who can make "just for today" sound like a threat.

Four years. When I started I couldn't imagine four days. I'm not going to write much about before. I don't think it helps anybody to hear it, and I've heard enough of other people's to know they all end about the same. I'll write this: I used to wake up and the first thing I felt was scared. Now the first thing I feel, most days, is hungry. That's the whole difference, and it's a big one.

Derek called to say congratulations. His mom must have told him the date. He didn't know what else to say, so he told me the score of his freshman game. I keep thinking of him younger than he is. I lost some years there.

Monday, January 26, 1998 -- 2:10 a.m.

New year, new background. I found the stars in the clip art library. It looks like the sky over the parking lot when the buffalo sign is off, which is never.

The Broncos won the Super Bowl. You'd have thought it was the end of a war. West River is Broncos country; Denver's the closest big city there is, if you don't count Rapid, and nobody in Denver counts Rapid. When I came on at eleven, room 11 had eight grown men from Gillette in it still watching the highlights and yelling, and I had to ask them nicely three times.

Then good news of my own. Shawna got her letter from Vermillion. She's in. She called me at the desk at 11:15, which she knows she's not supposed to do unless it's an emergency. She said this was an emergency. She read me the letter twice.

I told the men in 11 when I went up the third time. They cheered for her, too, and one of them gave me a twenty for her "for books." I'll give it to her. People are strange. Mostly okay, but strange.