“That was a good idea to meet out here. It’s nice.”

“Well, it’s private. We used to come out here when we were kids, for the summer, and we felt like we’d gone to California. We thought it was a hundred miles to Uncle Ledger’s. If anyone would have told me you could walk out here from town in half an hour I wouldn’t have believed it.

Because nobody ever does.”

“Didn’t even take that long. Twenty minutes.”

“You’re a fast walker.”

“I always was. If you’re going someplace, I figure you’d just as well go on and get there.”

She and Annawake look each other in the eye for a second, then retreat.

“So, you’ve got something to tell me.”

“To ask, really,” Alice says.

“All right.”

Alice takes a breath. “Would it make any difference about who gets to keep Turtle if I was, if her mother and I were enrolled?”

Annawake looks at Alice with her mouth slightly open.

After a while she closes it, then asks, “You have Cherokee blood?”

“We do. I found my grandma yesterday in that roll book.”

“The Dawes Rolls,” Annawake says. She blinks, looking at the water. “This is a surprise. I thought I knew what you were coming here to tell me today, and this is not it.”

“Well, would it make any difference? Would that make us Indian?”

“Let me think a minute.” She runs her hand through the hair at her temple, pulling it back from her face. Finally she looks at Alice with a more lawyerly look. “First of all, yes, if you enrolled then you would be Cherokee. We’re not into racial purity, as you’ve probably noticed. It’s a funny thing about us eastern tribes, we’ve been mixed blood from way back, even a lot of our holy people and our historical leaders.

Like John Ross. He was half-blood. It’s no stigma at all.”

“That just seems funny to me, that you can join up late.

Wouldn’t it seem like showing up at the party after they’ve done raised the barn?”

“I guess it could be seen as opportunistic, in your case.”

Annawake gives Alice the strangest grin, with the corners of her mouth turned down. “But generally there’s no reason why enrollment should be restricted to full-bloods, or half-, or wherever you’d want to make a cutoff. Anybody who lives our way of life should have the chance to belong to the tribe.

I sure don’t think outsiders should tell us who can be enrolled.”

“Don’t it kind of dilute things, to let everybody in?”

Annawake laughs. “Believe me, people are not lined up on the Muskogee highway waiting to join the tribe.”

“So I’d be as Cherokee as any soul here, if I signed up.”

“Legally you would be. And I’ll be honest with you, it couldn’t hurt your case.”

“Well, then, I’m going to enroll.”

“But that’s kind of missing the point, where your granddaughter is concerned. You’d be Cherokee legally, but not culturally.”

“Is that the big deal?”

Annawake presses her fingertips together and stares at them. “When we place Cherokee kids with non-Indian foster parents, we have a list we give them, things they can do to help teach the child about her culture. Take her to the Cherokee Heritage Center, get Cherokee language tapes, take her to Cherokee National Holiday events, things like that.

But that’s just making the best of a bad situation. It’s like saying, ‘If you’re going to adopt this baby elephant, you must promise to take it to the zoo once in a while.’ Really, a baby elephant should be raised by elephants.”

“She isn’t an elephant. She’s a little girl.”

“But if she’s raised in a totally white culture, there’s going to come a time when she’ll feel like one. And she’ll get about as many dates as one. She’ll come home from high school and throw herself on the bed and say, ‘Why do I have this long, long nose?’ ”

Alice wants to argue that there are worse things, but she can’t immediately think of any. She still doesn’t want to buy it, though. “If I’m Cherokee, and Taylor is, a little bit, and we never knew it but lived to tell the tale, then why can’t she?”

Annawake lays her dark wrist over Alice’s. “Skin color.

Isn’t life simple? You have the option of whiteness, but Turtle doesn’t. I only had to look at her for about ten seconds on TV to know she was Cherokee.”