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that goddamn steak, right down the drain. I don’t even have any left to put on your eye. Are you okay? What about you, Lola?”
    Joshua turned his head to one side and spat a tooth into the mess on the floor. “Sure. Everything’s great.” He spoke around a hard lump in his jaw.
    Lola winced. “I’m fine.”
    Nell kicked the bucket away. “Go on home, Joshua. I’ll pay you for the day. I’m already out so much money, what’s a little more?”
    The door banged behind him. Lola reached for the mop. “I’ll help you clean up. I’ve got a little while yet before I have to be at work.”
    Nell disappeared into the kitchen with the bucket and came back with it refilled with water so laced with bleach that Lola’s eyes watered. She dipped in the mop and squeezed it against the side of the bucket and drew it across the floor. The blood ran pink and gradually disappeared. Nell righted the chairs and swept the broken dishes into a dustpan and tossed them with a clatter into a trashcan. She picked up the newspaper and hesitated over Judith’s photo.
    Lola looked over her shoulder. “Do you think she really went to the patch?”
    Nell wadded the paper into a ball and hurled it toward the trashcan. It bounced off the rim and lay uncrumpling on the damp floor, revealing Judith’s face by degrees. “Could be. The way these things usually go, the men make their money off the rigs and the women make their money off the men. It’s tough to think about Judith that way, though. She was a sweet girl who got dealt a hard hand, what with losing her parents and then her grandmother. No surprise that she started using. A lot of people do without half the reasons she had. But she worked so long to get straight. Never thought she’d end up like this.”
    Lola stooped and picked up the newspaper and shook it out. Judith’s face was wet and blurred. Lola threw the paper away. She wished she’d gotten a chance to ask the men about Judith before Joshua had started in on them. She said as much to Nell.
    “They probably wouldn’t have told you anything, anyway,” Nell said. “Half the guys working there are running away from something. The last thing they want is somebody nosing around about their personal lives. You could be something even worse than a reporter. A parole officer, maybe. Or somebody’s ex-wife, trying to collect child support. You want to find out about the patch, you need to know somebody who works there.”
    “I don’t know anybody like that.”
    “Yes, you do.” Nell stood the mop in the bucket and wheeled the contraption across the floor, letting Lola work it out for herself.
    “The uncles,” she said to Nell’s retreating back. “They’ll be at the funeral. And so will I.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    T he uncles made it back for the funeral, just, the scents of clean snow and dirty industry accompanying them as they eased into pews beside their families just before Father Szczepanski raised his arms in benediction. Somehow he’d managed to avoid being rotated to another parish, as was customary. He often speculated that was only because the church hierarchy had assumed he’d been dead for decades.
    He and Alice Kicking Woman, the tribe’s oldest member, were contemporaries and great friends besides. In warmer weather they sat at the picnic table outside the rectory, reminiscing about earlier times as they softened biscuits in glasses of syrupy unconsecrated communion wine. Over the decades, every last hair had fallen from the priest’s head, leaving its surface as shiny and smooth as the marble baptismal font that was the pride of St. Anthony’s, paid for with years of bake sales. Lola suspected that his hair hadn’t actually fallen out, that instead it had somehow wormed its way under his scalp and reemerged from his brows, dense white thickets that grew so long and snarled they threatened his vision and negated the need for his impossible name. People from outside referred to him as “that priest with