At the Center. Dorothy Van Soest

or the obscure language he’d used to cover up what he really meant.

      “We’re here to help. It’s important that children get the services they need early. You know what they say, Mary: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

      The soft cushion under her started to suck her down and she fought it off, extricated herself to the edge of the chair. “I would think Jamie’s teacher would have called me if he was having trouble,” she said. “I’m surprised she didn’t notice that he was being bullied.”

      Mr. Nelson picked up the phone. “Please ask Miss Withersteen to come to my office,” he said to the receptionist. “Great, tell her Jamie Buckley’s mother is here.”

      “Williams,” Mary said. “His name is Jamie Williams.”

      She looked at her watch. Only a few minutes left before school started. She shot a fierce look at the principal. There was nothing wrong with Jamie. He was reading at grade level. He was a happy, well-adjusted boy. Jamie was not the problem. The bully was the problem.

      “Good morning, Miss Withersteen,” the principal said. “I’m sure you remember Mary, Jamie Buckley’s foster mother?”

      “Jamie’s been with us since birth,” Mary said, her hand sweating as she shook the teacher’s much slimmer hand.

      “Mary and I were just wondering if Jamie might be having any learning difficulties...or any other problems,” the principal said.

      “Ray here is the only one wondering that.” Mary curled her fists into the soft folds of the chair cushion.

      “Is there something you’re concerned about?” the teacher asked.

      What a cleverly disguised accusation, Mary thought, from a teacher who looked too young to have graduated from high school much less have children of her own. What could she possibly know about Jamie? She took a deep breath and looked directly into Miss Withersteen’s eyes.

      “A boy in your class named Sean is pushing my son around. I want him punished and I want the bullying to stop.”

      “Jamie is the sweetest little boy,” Miss Withersteen said, “but he doesn’t like to read out loud. I was going to mention that to you at parent-teacher night. It’s not unusual for these children to have problems like that.”

      “What do you mean these children? Jamie is just like any other little boy.”

      “Of course he is,” the principal said. “I’m sure Miss Withersteen didn’t mean to imply otherwise.”

      “I certainly did not,” the teacher said. “What I am suggesting, though, is that it might not hurt to get him tested.”

      “What kind of testing?” Mary started to feel shaky. She’d noticed that Jamie wasn’t interested lately in reading his favorite Archie comic books to her. Was that because he was too upset about the bullying to read or because he was having some kind of trouble reading? Could it be possible that he didn’t want to go to school because of some learning difficulty? Could he have made up the story about the bully because he didn’t want to tell her what was really going on?

      “There’s a whole battery of tests,” Miss Withersteen said. “I don’t usually recommend all of them because they’re expensive, but in Jamie’s case the Bureau of Indian Affairs will absorb the cost. He’s enrolled with his tribe, isn’t he?”

      “I...I...I think so,” Mary stuttered, not because she wasn’t sure whether Jamie was enrolled but because one too many seeds of doubt had now been planted for her to ignore. She was floundering. Should she insist that Sean be punished and refuse to have Jamie tested? Was Jamie really having difficulty learning or did the teacher think she saw symptoms of learning disabilities, probably fetal alcohol syndrome, too, because she expected to see them?

      “Well, then,” the principal said. “It seems that the next step is for you to make sure Jamie is enrolled with his tribe, okay?”

      “He is,” she muttered.

      Miss Withersteen and the principal glanced at each other, eyebrows raised, then looked back at her.

      “Jamie is enrolled.”

      “Good.” Mr. Nelson smiled. “Then our school psychologist can take it from here.” He sat back in his chair, obviously pleased with himself.

      “It’s wonderful that people like you are willing to help children like Jamie,” Miss Withersteen said with a sympathetic smile. “He’s such a lucky little boy. So sorry, there goes the bell.”

      Miss Withersteen rushed out the door then, leaving Mary clutching at her self-confidence like a timid mouse trying to keep it from trailing behind an imposingly large and self-possessed cat.

      “Rest assured.” The principal stood up. “We’ll do everything we can to help Jamie.”

      Mary suddenly felt slow and heavy. It took all her energy to pull herself up and release herself from the chair. She stood as erect as she could and looked the principal in the eye. “What about Sean,” she said. “What about the bullying?”

      “This kind of thing happens all the time with boys. They usually work it out on the playground...if you know what I mean,” he said with a chuckle and a wink.

      Mary clenched her fists, then realized she didn’t have enough strength left right then to fight both Mr. Nelson and Wayne. The principal reached out to shake her hand and she turned away from him. At least she could do that.

      “We’ll be in touch,” he said with a wave.

      She dragged herself from the building, her steps weighed down by doubts now nibbling at the edges of the truth that had been so clear to her just an hour before. She sucked in the crisp fall air and spit out a wild fury of invectives through her clenched teeth. Wayne was right; she never should have come. She’d only made things worse.

      SEVEN

      J. B. Harrell glares at me and I glare back. His face shifts and changes into a man I knew on the reservation up north. I cringe. George’s long black hair flaps over his rage-filled eyes like crow’s wings and he screams at me, just like he did years ago. “We don’t need any fucking welfare bitches in our business. Get the hell outta here, white girl.” He vanishes. I’m back in the Laughing Buddha Lounge. I’m alone. My fingers shake as I curl them around J. B. Harrell’s glass and pick it up from the table. I gulp down what is left of his pinot grigio and call for the waiter. I order another glass of wine and then another and another until I pass out on the red velvet sofa.

      I woke with a start, relieved to feel the soft cotton of my sheets and threadbare nightgown on my skin. Everything on the bed stand was in its proper place—my reading glasses on top of my book, the beige doily my grandmother crocheted for me when I was a toddler, my black gooseneck reading lamp, my alarm clock showing three o’clock in the morning. I took a sip of water from the glass I fill nightly to ward off bad dreams, obviously nothing but a silly superstition, and thought about my meeting with J. B. Harrell.

      I got out of bed and made my way to the bathroom. I looked hungover even though, in fact, I hadn’t touched the glass of pinot grigio that J.B. Harrell left behind last night when he walked out on me, except in the dream. But I had wanted to and right now I craved that glass of wine more than anything else in the world

      You know what to do, I told myself as I pulled on the faded pink cotton bathrobe that I inherited from my mother. My bare toes gripped the parquet flooring in the hall, then sank into the long thick pile of the shag rug in the living room. I sat down at my oversized desk in the corner, turned on my computer, and signed into NAICS, the North American Indian Clean and Sober recovery website. I typed in my chat room screen name, Numees, which was an Algonquin name for sister that I chose because it had a nice ring to it. My online recovery sponsor was Hehewuti, a Hopi from somewhere in Arizona. She was always online. Sometimes I wondered if she was a real person, because she never slept. But real or not, over the years of our relationship, there hadn’t been a nook