“Um, yeah,” Aria said, her cheeks flushing.
“Well, you can’t just drop somethin’ like that and not say nothin’ else about it, in’it?” Wolf said.
Robert explained. “Aria here had a secret admirer. But it looks like he ain’t so secret anymore.”
“His name is Omkar. I met him in a shop he works in, actually,” Aria said, hoping her lightweight answer would satisfy their curiosity.
“Omkar ain’t sound like a normal name, in’it?” Wolf asked.
“No. Actually, he’s from India,” Aria said.
Wolf’s white teeth shone when he smiled at the idea of her being with someone who wasn’t white. Even though he felt a duty, if he ever settled down, to preserve his dying race by marrying another Native, knowing that Aria had fallen for a boy who wasn’t white made him feel one step closer to love. He let the conversation rest at that.
An hour passed before Luke returned to the car lot. Aria made herself a place beside Robert and spent the hour listening to the three men talk. Palin spotted Aria long before Luke did. She pranced up to Aria with her tail furiously wagging. When Aria reached out for her, she flopped upside down to expose her belly and flailed with excitement in the dirt, the ground leaving her white fur dusted with ash.
Luke started jogging when he saw her. “Hey, how’ve you been?” he asked, out of breath.
“I’ve been OK, how about you?” she asked.
“Dude, that was some crazy shit. I’ve been seriously worried about you,” Luke said. It surprised Aria that Luke had even thought about her. On the streets, you could never be sure if the people you spent time with really saw you as a friend, or if common circumstances simply caused you to trespass across each other’s lives. “Hey, there’s a festival next weekend up in Portland. I got us a ride if you and Tay wanna come.” Though it bothered Taylor, “Tay” was Luke’s nickname for him.
“Oh, thanks. I kinda need to stick around here. I got a boyfriend now,” Aria said.
“Oh really? That’s great. What’s his name?” he asked.
Aria told him, but Luke had asked out of formality. He was not even listening when she said his name.
The mood between them seemed immediately colder. It was a chill that was noticeable to all of them. Wolf was the first to try to remedy it. “Hey, you had somethin’ you wanted to talk to Aria about, in’it?”
Luke took a stick and poked at the ground. What little maturity he had, drained from his appearance. “Yeah, you wanna take a walk?” Luke asked her.
Aria looked toward the rest of them as if asking permission. Anthony and Wolf, who took the social shift as a cue to start walking toward town in search of an open meal program, stood up. Anthony shook her hand warmly. Wolf, as if sensing it would be a long goodbye between them, hugged her and placed his palm over the crown of her head. Aria didn’t understand the words he said quietly under his breath, but when he placed his palm against her, he said an ancient blessing for her wellbeing. “See you around,” he said.
She turned to allow Luke to lead her wherever he had it in his mind to go. In her heart, she missed them already. It was strange to her that people could come and go so fast from her life. It was even stranger that people who came and went could leave such permanent footprints inside of her.
Luke led Aria back in the direction that he had taken her on one of the first days she had been at the car lot. Back in the direction of the stream, which was now more of a river. Back in the direction of the place where they had laid bare their life stories to each other.
Seeing a cluster of plants with leaves that looked like lily pads, Aria squealed, “Hey look, it’s mallow.” She plucked a few of the tender young leaves of the plant and inspected them before biting a piece out of one and holding it out toward Luke. “Try it, you can eat it. Apparently you can eat the seedpods, too, as long as they haven’t gone woody. This is so exciting; I read that they didn’t really grow like this until spring.”
Luke took a curious bite out of the leaf. “It’s not that bad,” he said, suddenly stopping to hold his throat, pretending to be poisoned as a joke.
“Good Lord, cut it out. It’s really good, I swear,” Aria said.
“I didn’t know you were into this kinda thing,” Luke said. “You’d love this lady I stayed with up in Mount Shasta. No joke, she knows like everything there is to know about plants and plant medicines. She’s kinda like a witch. This one time I was up there, I got such bad allergies and she collected this batch of stinging nettles. It was so cool – she poured boiling water over the leaves and let them sit there for like ten minutes and made me drink the water. I swear to God, I didn’t have any more problems the whole time I was there.”
Her interest in foraging revived, Aria chewed on the mallow leaves as she walked. When they arrived at the spot where she and Luke had spent the day together months earlier, Luke sat down on the same rock where they had sat before. The water had swollen beyond the confines of the bank. Aria sat down beside him, waiting for him to initiate whatever he had wanted to talk about.
“It’s just kind of strange that you are just now telling me you have a boyfriend,” Luke said eventually.
His obvious irritation bemused Aria.
