“Have you ever eaten an Indian onion?” Jeff pulled the lone purple flower out of the ground. A baby bulb, white and covered with dirt, dangled off the end.

“Nope,” I said, “and if that’s your idea of ‘grub,’ this date’s over.”

He laughed. “I was just thinking that if you ever got trapped on the Minnesota prairie, you’d be able to survive if you knew how to forage.”

“Thanks, Pa, but me and Mary always carry pemmican in our bonnets just in case,” I said dryly. “So what exactly are you looking for out here?” I made a sweeping gesture toward the Jorgensen acreage.

“Evidence of artifacts, burial grounds, ceremonial sites, that kind of thing. We have to make sure we don’t disturb anything where we dig and build.”

“But wouldn’t that be in the town records?”

“Not necessarily. A lot of official records involving Native Americans are spotty at best. The government did quite a bit of shady dealing back then.”

“So what if you did find evidence of sacred ground?” I tried to stand lightly while glancing around surreptitiously for any bony, angry fingers pointing out of the ground at me.

“It would depend how much area the artifacts covered.”

“What if they were wall to wall?” I asked.

“Then likely the theme park would need to be built elsewhere.”

“Theme park?” I asked, amazed. I put my full weight back on my feet. “You’re going to build a theme park out here?”

“Not me. The company I work for. Trillings Limited.” He grimaced slightly as he said the name.

I was too self-involved to be much of an activist, but the rolling hills, arching oaks, and dancing bugs really were beautiful, and the air moved a soft breeze laced with the smell of apple blossoms and spring wildflowers. I wiped the sticky white sap from the milk flower I was twirling onto my pants. “But you come off as Mr. Granola. You’re going to destroy all this to build some plastic carnival?”

He tensed slightly. “Not a carnival. A heritage museum with outdoor attractions. It will glorify the original culture of this region. It’ll be an outdoor museum with various distractions for kids.”

I furrowed my eyebrows. “You mean like the Paul Bunyan Land Amusement Center, glorifying big blue oxen and enormous pancakes? Or like the statue of Chief Wenonga, glorifying the twenty-three-foot Indian warrior? Sounds pretty cheap to me.”

I thought briefly about cleaning my social filter. These bursts of metallic honesty hadn’t won me any long-term relationships to date. Nope, I decided a full second later. I meant what I said. I softened my forehead wrinkles as a compromise.

He looked hurt but laughed softly. “This land is important to me, too, Mira. That’s why I’m here. I need to make sure it’s regular land. And if it is, they’ll build the heritage museum and you’ll see that it’s very tasteful. People will see authentic Dakota and Ojibwe homes,
artifacts. They’ll get to see and respect how the original people lived. Sure, there’ll be a couple rides, maybe a Ferris wheel, but you need that to draw people out here.” He touched my cheek and pretended to brush something off. “I’m working for a very responsible company, Mira. Or they never would have sent me out here.”

His warm hand softened me a little. “Well, the locals will never go for it,” I said grumpily. “They’re all garage sales, jelly jars with quilted, ruffled covers, and mailboxes shaped like fish. They like it slow and clear, and a Native American theme park isn’t that.”

“You’ll see, Mira,” he said, laughing ruefully. “It’ll bring jobs, and as far as progress goes, it’s pretty harmless.” His hand was still on my cheek, and he looked at me with a peculiar light in his eyes, like he’d just remembered something that had been nagging at him. He leaned in closer. “You know, you’re very attractive when you’re righteous.”

“Mmm. You should see me when I’m drunk,” I said, immediately wondering why I said it. I tried to smile, but my lip caught on my tooth. I looked away and pushed some imaginary hair from my face to distract him from my double-crossing mouth. The cosmopolitan me was supposed to be much cooler than this.

He pulled back and grabbed my hand impulsively with a half-smile on his face and then towed me off into a slow hike, and we both quietly contemplated our surroundings.

The green in Minnesota springtime is so intense it becomes a smell and taste along with a color. It is a vital, almost desperate green. The trees and grass and shrubs and plants seem to know that they only have four months or so every year to stretch, so like a painter with only one canvas, they throw out everything they have in a wild flourish. This turns a simple oak into an exotic rainforest masterpiece and a white ash into a monument that feeds the eyes. The yellows and whites of the spring prairie wildflowers contrast and deepen the nearly audible activity of life in the outdoors.

I ran my fingers through my hair and was surprised by thoughts of my father forcing themselves into my head like angry bees. I missed him the most when I was outside in the spring, and I didn’t know why. It certainly wasn’t because we ever spent much time outdoors together. Most of my memories are of him sitting in front of the television, in his hand a glass of vodka that he would claim was water. It was funny how much more I was thinking of him now that I had returned to the backwoods.

Jeff stretched his fingers around my hand and pulled me back into the moment, making me realize that I had been squeezing his right hand tightly. I flashed a lips-only smile at him and looked away. We walked for a long time in silence, each of us studying the land for different reasons. It took us over an hour to circumnavigate the hundred-plus acres that made up the Jorgensen estate.

“I need to head toward the middle of the property now,” Jeff said. “You tired yet?”

“Not at all.” I reached down and plucked a buttery dandelion and held it to my face. The warm, hairy smell tickled my nose and made me smile. I recognized wild honeysuckle as we passed the edge of the woods, but when I pointed it out to Jeff, he corrected me.

“That’s actually columbine,” he said, leaning down to break off a blossom and bite the sweet nectar balls on the end of the watermelon-colored flower. He handed me another blossom, and I did the same. “I’m actually surprised at the number of wildflowers already in bloom. It must be this warm early spring.” He pointed out the patches of white dotting the field in front of us. “Those are bladder campion all around there.” The bright petals looked like a simple oat flower, but underneath every one was a large swelling. I was familiar with them. As a child, I used to pull open reams of them, always looking for what caused the swelling. I think I expected to find baby worms, or pearls.

“And of course these are wild strawberries.” He pulled me into the woods and pointed out the miniature, jagged, three-leaved plants, some of them looking ready to sprout tiny blooms. “Nothing like eating wild strawberries. My mouth waters just thinking about that tartness . . .” His voice trailed off, and he let go of my hand as he stepped off the trail. “Well, I’ll be,” he said softly, and leaned down. In the rich undergrowth of the forest edge, there was a stalk, eight inches or so, protected by a large, showy leaf. On the end was a simple white flower with a yellow pistil.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked, to no one in general. “It’s a bloodroot. Come here, Mira.”

I knelt beside him and heard the crisp snap of a juicy green. He held the severed flower in front of me, red-orange sap dripping from the bottom. “See that?” he asked me. “The bloodroot bleeds.”

“Maybe we should become blood brothers,” I joked.

The sunlight dappled his hair and eyes as I looked at his excited face. I was surprised at how comfortable I felt with him, considering I had only met him that afternoon. In my experience, it takes an hour or two for some major flaws to surface in a potential partner, flaws that usually only intensify the closer I let him get. Jeff was skating by pretty well so far, but I was sure something would float up. The strange thing was, I found myself hoping I was wrong. I held out my hand, palm up, and smiled weakly.

“It’s a deal,” he said, laughing. He rubbed some of the sticky orange sap on my palm, some on his, and then we clasped hands, my right to his left, and he kissed me softly on the lips. It reminded me of what I always wanted to happen when I was an adolescent girl and would run off into the woods to play with my friends. We would make up games, like “Run from the Prince,” or “Look Stricken under the Tree Waiting for the Prince,” or “Where’s My Prince?” The basic plot was waiting for a boy, preferably a prince, to come and whisk us away. Sickening, to be sure, but I guess all that practice was paying off now.

The warm stickiness melting on our joined palms was pleasant, but it made further intimacy difficult. We both stood and walked back out into the warm sun. He shivered.

“Cold?” I asked.

“It is only May in Minnesota,” he said. “That sun can be a little deceiving. So anyhow, Mira, what brings you to this part of the world? You seem a little incongruous out here.”

I hope he didn’t mean out in nature, because I was really trying to fit in. “Oh, I grew up in a small town a lot like this one.”

“What was that like?”

I immediately felt the familiar defensiveness, the need to distance myself from my past. “Nothing much.”

Jeff looked at me quizzically, then turned away. “We all have stuff we’d like to get away from. How about we make a deal? I don’t ask you about your past, you don’t ask me about mine, and we’ll take this as it comes.”

It was too good to be true. “Deal, blood brother.”

“It is beautiful here,” he said vaguely, rubbing my back. “And it’s a good place to spend a summer, or longer. It’s always good to refocus before forging ahead. And speaking of which, I need to take some field notes as we walk. You mind?”

I shook my head as he pulled out a worn leather notebook and an exquisite pen. I’m a sucker for good pens. As he scratched out his notes, I followed alongside, feeling the warm sun coax out my freckles. The world felt a lot more right for me than it had in a long time. We walked, almost touching, exchanging body heat and stories in hushed voices, giggling like old friends, and smiling at the sky.

When we ended up at my place early that evening, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. And when he kissed me, it itched like new love.

I felt overwhelmed and like I was in the right place at the right time. “I could make us some supper,” I suggested.

His face was inches from mine, and he was looking at me with warm, predatory eyes. I felt fireworks in my pants. I think I may have even smelled sulfur. He leaned in purposefully to finish the kiss, and either my legs buckled or we both decided to drop to the floor and make love like forest creatures.

“Morning,” he said sleepily as I shifted in the bed.

“So that’s what you meant by ‘grub,’-” I said, laughing. I looked at the cool early-morning sun spotting his hairy chest. We never had gotten anything to eat the night before. “I thought you meant supper.” I tried to feel guilty about being easy, but I just couldn’t muster it. I felt too safe and cozy, in a way I hadn’t with Bad Brad or my two boyfriends before him.

Jeff pulled me toward him and kissed me, and either he was getting even better at it or we were starting to meld. “So how long did you say you plan to stay in this town? You’re definitely not cut from librarian cloth.”

I looked across the room at the full-length mirror on the closet door. My hair was tousled with a fair-sized screw knot making shadows in back, my gray eyes a little puffy but otherwise acceptable. I had never liked my pointy nose, but sometimes I convinced myself my lips made up for it. They were perfectly curved and plump, at least when I wasn’t smirking. My boobs, on the other hand, were doing that awkward, lying-down-in-different-directions, every-nipple-for-herself thing that Playboy boobs never did. I pulled the sheet up and leaned into the crook of Jeff’s arm. “I’m taking a break from life,” I reminded him. “I’ll know when it’s over.”

“So you don’t mind working at the library?”

“And the newspaper,” I said. “Nope, I don’t. I’ve been going to school for almost six years in a row, and it’s time for a break. I can finish my master’s when Sunny gets back.”

I was happy to hear a conviction in my voice that hadn’t been there yesterday. I had never been certain about school. Growing up, I had always planned to be a psychologist or a lawyer, but somehow English fit. A master’s seemed like the next natural step after I earned my BA. Plus, there’s not much to do with a four-year degree in English, short of opening an English store.

“I miss college.” He played with my hair and looked at the ceiling. “Pennsylvania is a beautiful state, and the U of P in Greensburg has an amazing archaeology lab. I felt like we were discovering everything for the first time. Digs were like Christmas.”

“You still have the option of discovering new stuff now, right?”

“Yeah, but now they don’t always want me to,” he said. His voice seemed a little deeper than usual.

Intrigued, I asked, “You mean Trillings doesn’t want you to find anything on the Jorgensen land because then they couldn’t build there? Isn’t there plenty of lucrative theme park land elsewhere?”

“Yes, but not with the built-in tourist flow of this area. The lakes bring in a lot of people. Plus, this is the site of one of the most famous Indian battles in Minnesota, and it was a precursor to the Dakota
uprising. This area has the history, the layout, and the clientele. It’s perfect.”

“You know,” I said, chewing my thumbnail, “I should write a piece on you and the potential heritage museum for the paper. If I got it into the Recall office before Friday afternoon, it would make it into next Monday’s paper. Would you be OK with that?”

He thought for a moment. “I don’t see why not. It would be some good advertising, and we’re not doing anything illegal. Ask me some questions.”

“How about over breakfast? I’m hungry, and I believe you still owe me a meal. Whaddya say?”

He rolled over on top of me and pushed the hair back from my face, his eyes inches from mine. The pressure between my legs told me we weren’t going to be eating anytime soon. “Don’t you have to work today?” I asked him.

“Don’t you?”

I smiled. “The library doesn’t open until ten o’clock on Saturdays. And except for an article on a hot archaeologist, I don’t have anything on my plate. Speaking of which, aren’t you a little worried we’re gonna starve?”

“Oh, we won’t starve,” he said, lowering his mouth to my stomach. Sure enough, it stopped growling as he kissed it. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the ride. For an aspiring loner, I can get used to people pretty quick under the right circumstances.

The next few days sped by exactly like the falling-in-love sequences in the movies in which two destined lovers meet. There might have even been a soundtrack. Jeff did as little work as possible, and we snuck time together in the corner of the library, at the base of Chief Wenonga, in his bed in Room 6 at the Battle Lake Motel, and in mine in the doublewide. We were even starting to finish each other’s sentences. When he trotted out the “I think I’m falling for you” line, I rode it all the way home.

We had been together only a week, and already I felt a stability that I never had with my family, even when my father was there. My mom was always kind, but she was aimless, bopping from one secretarial job to another so she could support my dad’s twisted lifestyle, which consisted of waking up and drinking, going to the mailbox to see if his disability check was in yet, and then strolling back to the couch to drink some more. My dad, well, he was my dad. With Jeff, though, I felt like I finally had someone on my side.

On Friday night, a week after we met, we were at the movies, my head on his right shoulder, and we both went for the popcorn at the same time. Our hands bumped, and he grabbed my left with his right and kissed my ring finger. “You’re the kind of woman a man could grow old with, Mira,” he whispered in my ear.

I snuggled in closer to keep from floating away. Looking back, I wonder if I could see the shadow of death hanging over Jeff even then, waiting to rip yet another man from my life.