Free The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich

feel gratified, though I can see right now I will regret this revelation.
    “Gee,” he marvels. “I thought you guys were, like, Korean or something.” He turns his mouth down, lengthens and strokes his stubbly jaw. “Yeah. Whew. When should I start?” An unworthy thrill of gratification takes me by surprise. I’ve managed not only to thwart Krahe’s lawn-mowing plot, but also to punish Elsie by means so obscure she’ll never know what I’ve done. Now she’ll be saddled with Kit Tatro’s attempts to untangle his genealogy and join his tribe, and she’ll have to endure his questions about her own knowledge and upbringing, which will disappoint him, as my mother is perfectly assimilated, cold-blooded and analytical about the reservation present, and utterly dismissive of history.
     
    I am not inexperienced in love, I just haven’t been successful at it, if you count long-term marriage as the benchmark. But the couples I used to envy have all broken apart. And marriage simply scares me. Perhaps I excuse my lack of courage in the matter by observing that those I do know who’ve stayed together have fused or discarded chunks of personality. Canada geese. Swans. Crows. Ravens. All creatures who mate for life. Perhaps they have an ancient genetic command woven into them that we now lack and long for in equal measure. The phone beside my bed rings. Krahe calls me at midnight, knowing I fall asleep shortly after. Sometimes he calls to say good night, and tonight I consider not picking up the telephone.
    “Just called to say good night,” he says, and because his voice has always moved me with its resonance and depth, and because he is on the other end of the telephone, not here with me, I feel safe enough to be somewhat more direct than I usually dare. I actually tell him not to cut the grass because it makes me uncomfortable, because I can’t stand to see him doing something so mundane, and because I think it is a bad sign.
    “A bad sign of what?”
    “Your sorrow,” I say, wary of referring to our relationship. “Going around cutting people’s grass is so completely out of character that it signals, to me at least, how broken you are and how lost in your grief. Just to see you behind a lawn mower is disturbing.”
    But he seems pleased about that, and he laughs a little.
    “You don’t know me well,” he says. “You don’t know that I actually like cutting grass and that for me it is a sign of getting better. It represents new growth. Besides, it is not just anybody’s grass. It’s your grass.”
    “Which you are shaving to the bare earth,” I say, then I soften, and drop my voice. “There wasn’t any grass there to begin with, Kurt, it’s too early in the spring. The grass has really not begun to grow yet.”
    He’s very quiet. We breathe on the line. Eventually he clears his throat.
    “Oh, fuck,” he says, “maybe I’m in bad shape. I didn’t notice that.”
    Then he asks me to go out to dinner with him at Sweet’s Mansion, a grand house restored as a restaurant and considered quite romantic. He’s never asked me out or taken me anywhere in public before and perhaps out of sheer surprise I accept the invitation.
    After I hang up I unplug the phone. I have brought the drum back in and covered it with my favorite old star quilt, but I am very conscious of it and I have developed more affection for it than I should feel for an object that I intend to repatriate—for we’ll find the rightful owner by inheritance, I’ve no doubt of that. At the furthest reaches of my doubt, I admit of possibilities. In dark hours, my mind creaks open and allows a sensation of comfort in the great drum’s presence. The house is quiet, the road still, even the wind in the pines a mere shiver. It is one of those hours when the world takes a breath. When for a moment there is peace, not desolation, at the heart of things. I turn out the lights and lie on my back, bunch a fat pillow under my knees, stretch out