Niceville

Littlebasket felt his left knee begin to quiver. To cover it, he went over to a bar and cracked open a bottle of vintage Cuervo, making a ceremony of pouring four fingers into a crystal glass with the logo of the Cherokee Nation Trust on the side.
    Everyone let him fumble around for a while, but once he got settled into a big leather chair and opened his mouth to start in on one of his prepared speeches, the man called Coker lifted up a remote and aimed it at the big flat-screen Samsung above the fireplace.
    It bloomed into light and everybody was looking at a picture of Twyla and her sister, Bluebell, both girls obviously in their very early teens, together at the entrance to a large tiled shower area, arms folded across their breasts, naked, engaged in what looked like some serious girl chat. No one said anything.
    Morgan Littlebasket swallowed hard a few times, worked out what he was going to say, opened his mouth to say it, but Twyla cut him short.
    “Don’t, Dad. Just … don’t.”
    Littlebasket looked over at her, composed his features into a semblance of outrage.
    “Twyla, why are you showing me these nasty—”
    Twyla held up a hand, nodded to Coker, who pressed the FORWARD button, rapidly flicking through a series of images taken over a period of years, shots obviously copied from a larger digital file, but clear enough, color shots of the girls—alone, together, occasionally with their dead mother, Lucy—in their bathroom, doing all manner of things that all people do in their bathrooms, and in each shot the girlswere growing older, filling out, blooming, as if the shots were taken from a time-lapse film of two naked young girls turning into grown-up women.
    No one spoke.
    Coker never looked away from the screen, Charlie never looked at it, instead fixing his hard flat stare on Morgan.
    Twyla had never taken her eyes off her father, and her father, after a few frames, was staring into his tequila glass, his shoulders slumping, his hands shaking, his breathing labored and heavy.
    After a while Twyla held up a hand and Coker shut the flat screen down.
    Twyla walked over and looked down at the top of her father’s head.
    “Look at me, Dad.”
    Littlebasket slowly raised his old bull buffalo head, his glazy eyes wet, his large mouth sagging.
    “Say that you did this.”
    He shook his head, mouth working, but only a small squeaky whisper came out.
    “I didn’t hear that,” said Twyla, in a low whisper, her head cocked to one side, her expression as white and hard as quartz, her eyes burning.
    Littlebasket tried again.
    “Your mother … Lucy … she asked me to. It was only for … your safety … in case you fell down—”
    Crack
.
    No one saw the move. Just a blur, but the sound of the slap filled the room like a whip crack. She followed through, Morgan reeling, and brought it back fast and mean at the end of the arc, raking him across the left cheek with the back of her hand, a well-aimed strike from a very strong, very angry young woman. Blood came out of her father’s open mouth, his teeth showing red with it as he stared up at her.
    “Don’t even
try
to blame Mom for this, you shit-heel fucking coward.
Say
that you did this.”
    A silence, while the old man moved his lips, his eyes darting around the room, as if rescue was at hand.
    No one moved a muscle.
    Outside, the shafts of sparkling bright sunlight faded into palegolden beams, filling the earthy, comfortable room with a gentle amber glow.
    “I … did this,” he said, after a long time.
    He lifted his hands to his face, started to sob. Twyla stepped in and ripped his hands away, leaning down to speak directly into his center.
    “You’re dead to me. You understand me?”
    “But … Twyla …”
    “No tears, no tears from
you
. You’re only crying because you got caught. All those years, you made Bluebell and me feel like whores, just because we were growing up into women. You treated us like lepers, never hugged us, never said we were pretty, never made us feel …”
    Her voice choked into silence.
    She pulled herself together, stood up straight again.
    “And all the time, you were doing … that,” she said, her hand sweeping out towards the television, the sudden motion making Littlebasket flinch as if she was about to hit him again.
    “Listen to me now, Dad. Listen and remember. You will never know what this has done to me. You will never know what you took away from me—”
    Littlebasket whispered