Cold Betrayal

On those occasions when Aunt Edith had stopped to gas up before heading home, Enid was allowed to go inside and use the restroom. She may have paused briefly to admire some of the items under the glass counters, but because she never had any spending money, she never bought anything. That made it unlikely that the clerk would know her on sight. Still, once Enid got to the station, she waited until several people entered the market at once and inserted herself in the middle of the group.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. From her visits to the grocery store and from watching people standing in line at the checkout counter, Enid knew this was the time of day when tourists who had spent the day wandering the Vermillion Cliffs or the North Rim of the Grand Canyon headed south to Flagstaff or Phoenix. These were folks who loved taking their hulking RVs and minivans off the beaten track. Enid understood from what they said and from the curious glances they sent in her direction that Colorado City was definitely off the beaten path. She was hoping she’d be able to convince one of those hardy-type travelers to take her along wherever they were going.

The first group waiting for stalls in the restroom consisted of two families with several school-age children. Standing in line behind them, Enid gathered from their conversation that they were all on spring break—whatever that was—and they were heading home to Phoenix. The kids went into the stalls first. Then, after washing their hands, they ducked out into the market to buy treats. When the first mother emerged from one of the three stalls and went to the washbasin, Enid found the courage to speak to her.

“Is there a chance of getting a ride from here to Flagstaff?” she asked.

The woman looked her up and down, with her gaze pausing a moment too long on Enid’s bulging tummy.

“Certainly not,” she said firmly. “I’ve warned my children to never have anything to do with strangers, and I have no intention of setting a bad example.”

Flushing with embarrassment, Enid fled into the nearest unoccupied stall and stayed there. Once the group left, she stripped out of her dress. Then, wearing only her shift, she sat on the toilet and used the stolen pair of scissors from her cloth bag to remove a foot or so from the bottoms of both the dress and the shift. She didn’t worry about the jagged cuts on the shift as she whacked that off just above her knee. After all, the shift wouldn’t show. The hem of the dress was the problem.

The full gathered skirt contained plenty of material, and the scissors were small. By the time Enid had cut her way around the whole thing—trying to keep to the same line of checks as she went—her hand ached and a blister was forming on her thumb. She wadded up the discarded material and tossed it into the trash, then she took out the needle and thread. She could have done a better job of hemming if she’d had straight pins and an iron to work with, but the best she could do was turn up a tiny hem as she went, tacking it with long, efficient stitches.

As she worked on the dress, Enid tried to reassure herself, Not all the people on the Outside will be like that.

Several women came and went while she was sewing. One of them rattled the door on Enid’s stall and demanded, “What are you doing in there, having a baby?”

Enid had to stifle a giggle because, in a way, that was exactly what she was doing—having an Outside baby.

With the hemming job complete, Enid slipped the dress back on over her head. The new length seemed strange. She wasn’t used to seeing bare skin above the tops of her heavy-duty shoes. Ducking out of the stall, she examined herself in the mirror, but the one above the sink was too short for her to see the bottom of her dress.

More women came and went. Most of them were older women with silver hair and with varicose-veined legs sticking out from under Bermuda shorts. The weather seemed cold to Enid. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would be dressed in summer clothes. They talked about places like Wisconsin and Mi

In The Family, women were not allowed to wear jewelry of any kind except a plain gold wedding band. Any other jewelry, including watches, was considered vain, ungodly, and wicked. From fifteen on, boys were allowed to wear watches, while the womenfolk were forced to tell time by following the positions of the sun. There was no window in Enid’s restroom refuge, so the sun’s timekeeping abilities were lost to her. Even so, she knew that more than an hour had passed, and she was starting to grow anxious. By now Aunt Edith, finished with her errands, was probably at home or very nearly so. Soon someone would sound the alarm that Enid had gone missing, and the search for her would be on in dead earnest.

The restroom door opened again. The two women who entered wore boots and jeans and hiking boots. Their hair was cut short. They weren’t wearing lipstick or makeup. In fact, they looked more like men than women, although they went inside the stalls the same way the others had. Through the intervening walls, they talked easily of the hike they had taken and how soon they would arrive back at their RV park. They weren’t particularly threatening, and they seemed kind enough, nodding to Enid as they left. Still, their ma

The woman who arrived immediately after they left was an older Indian lady with iron-gray hair pulled back into a complicated knot at the back of her neck. Enid knew a little about Indians. The ones who came through town occasionally were mostly Navajo. The men wore jeans, cowboy shirts, and boots along with shiny silver and turquoise bolo ties or handmade belt buckles. The women often wore brightly colored dresses and amazing turquoise necklaces, similar to the ones that were for sale in this very gas station, where handmade jewelry was arranged in a glass display case near the register.

Boys from The Family always made fun of the “squaws wearing their squaw dresses,” but Enid often found herself envying those brightly colored, flowing dresses that bore little resemblance to the bland, home-sewn shapeless things she and the other women in The Family wore until their colors faded away to nothing.

Some of the older boys liked to tease the younger girls, telling them that the Indians came to town looking for women and girls they could kidnap for their scalps and claiming that Indians liked blond-haired scalps more than any others.

Based on what she’d been told, Enid should have been terrified of the new arrival, but she wasn’t. The old Indian woman had a wise, kind face that was creased with a network of sun-deepened smile lines. When she came out of the stall and went to the basin, she nodded at Enid’s reflection in the faded mirror.

“I need to get to Flagstaff,” Enid blurted out urgently, saying the words fast enough that there was no time to change her mind. “I’m looking for a ride.”

Drying her hands, the woman turned to Enid with her brow furrowed into a frown. “We’re not going all the way to Flag,” she said. “Twenty miles this side, but you’re welcome to ride with us that far if you want.”

When Enid left the restroom at last, she scurried along beside the heavyset woman, hoping that the Indian woman’s ample body and voluminous skirt would shield her from the curious glances of both the clerk and the customers gathered around the cash register. Once outside, the woman led the way to a dusty pickup truck, an older-model Ford. A scrawny Indian man in a white Stetson, a black shirt, faded jeans, and equally faded boots was finishing filling the gas tank and returning the hose to the pump.