Page 48 of Close To You
“I believe you now,” he said.“I should have believed you then.”
Kari looked at her father’s profile against the sky—the gray hair, the deep lines, the set of his jaw that she recognized because it was her own.She’d spent years angry at him.Not the loud, confrontational anger that announces itself and demands resolution, but the quiet kind that hardens into distance and becomes, over time, indistinguishable from indifference.She’d told herself the distance was professional.Colleagues first, family second.A working arrangement that kept the complicated parts at arm’s length.
But the complicated parts were the only parts that mattered, in the end.The professional relationship could be replicated with anyone.The fact that this man had held her as an infant, had taught her to ride a bicycle on a dirt road outside Flagstaff, had sat in the audience at her police academy graduation with an expression she’d pretended not to see—those things couldn’t be replicated.They couldn’t be replaced.And they’d almost been lost, not to malice but to years of choosing distance over difficulty, each year adding another layer until the distance felt permanent.
Kari put her hand on his arm.Not a squeeze, not a grip—just contact.The acknowledgment of a shared geography, the place where his loss and her loss overlapped.
“She’d be proud of you,” she said.
“She’d be proud of you.”James covered her hand with his.“She is.Wherever she is.”
They stood like that for a while.Ruth watched from a few steps back, her face quiet, the wind moving through her shawl.She didn’t join them.This moment was theirs—father and daughter, standing over the grave of the woman who connected them, finding their way back to each other by the simplest possible route: showing up, staying, and not pretending it was easy.
After a time, Ruth came forward and took each of them by the hand—Kari’s left, James’s right—and the three of them stood in a line before the stone.Three people who had loved Anna Chee in different ways and lost her in the same way and spent the time since navigating the aftermath separately.Now together.Not healed—healing wasn’t something that happened at a graveside, no matter what the stories said.But aligned.Facing the same direction.Ready to walk forward from the same place.
The wind carried the smell of sage across the hill.Below them, the town of Window Rock went about its business—trucks on the highway, children on a playground, the ordinary rhythm of a community that didn’t know and wouldn’t know how close it had come to being exploited by people who saw the land as a commodity and its people as obstacles.
They walked down the hill together.James helped Ruth over a rough patch of ground, his hand under her elbow, and she let him.Kari walked ahead and then slowed and then walked beside them, matching her pace to theirs.
At the car, Ruth said, “I’m hungry.”
“I’ll cook,” James said.
Ruth looked at him with an expression that conveyed, in a single glance, her assessment of his cooking, her tolerance of his effort, and her intention to supervise every step.“You’ll help,” she said.“I’ll cook.”
James smiled.It was the first time Kari had seen him smile—really smile, not the controlled professional courtesy he deployed in meetings—since before the arrests.Maybe since before the investigation.Maybe since before she could remember.
They drove back to the reservation.Ruth directed James to a grocery store in Window Rock, where she bought ingredients with the focused efficiency of a general provisioning a campaign.James carried the bags.Kari pushed the cart.
They cooked at Kari’s house—Ruth’s stew, Ruth’s fry bread, James doing prep work under Ruth’s instruction and occasionally being corrected with a specificity that left no room for improvisation.Kari set the table.Ben arrived at six, carrying a six-pack and a bag of oranges that nobody had asked for but that Ruth accepted with a nod that suggested she’d been expecting them.
They ate at Kari’s kitchen table, the one the construction crew had salvaged from the wreckage.It was scarred and uneven and it wobbled when Ben leaned his elbows on it.Ruth’s stew was perfect.The fry bread was perfect.James ate three helpings and Ruth watched him do it with the expression of a woman who considered appetite a form of respect.
After dinner, Ben washed dishes while James dried and Ruth supervised from a chair she’d positioned with a clear sightline to the sink.Kari stood on the porch and watched the sun go down.
The sky turned orange, then red, then a deep violet that held the last light like a hand cupping water.The mesas were black silhouettes.A coyote called from somewhere to the south, a single note that carried across the flat ground and was answered by another, further away.The desert settling into its evening rhythm, the ancient negotiation between day and night that had been happening here since before anyone had thought to name it.
Her phone buzzed.A text from Captain Yazzie:New case.Missing hiker, Tsegi Canyon area.Details on your desk tomorrow morning.
Kari read it twice.Then she put the phone in her pocket and went back inside, where the people she loved were arguing about whether the dishes were actually clean or just wet, and where the table she’d eaten a thousand meals at was still standing, scarred and uneven and exactly where it had always been.
Tomorrow there would be a new case.A missing person in a canyon, someone’s family waiting for answers.The work that had defined her mother’s life and had nearly ended her own and that she would keep doing because it was what she did and who she was and because the land and the people on it deserved someone who wouldn’t stop looking.
But tonight, the dishes.The argument.The coyote calls fading into silence.Ben’s laugh from the kitchen, which she hadn’t heard in weeks.
And which sounded, in this moment, in this house, like the best thing in the world.
