There There

Part 3 opens on Opal at her job as a mail carrier for the US Postal Service. She thinks about when she first took in Loother, Lony, and Orvil—and about her life’s trajectory and the “troubled water that lives in her” (162). The day before, Orvil “left her a message telling her he’d pulled three spider legs out of a bump on his leg” (162). This does not surprise Opal much since she experienced the same thing at Orvil’s age. Opal also recently found a video of Orvil practicing powwow dancing, and this reminds her of a boy she once knew and loved named Lucas—Dene’s uncle—who recently returned after almost 20 years away “wanting an interview for an Urban Indian documentary” (164). He gave Opal the regalia and then passed away. The thought of spider legs brings back a memory, of her mother’s adopted brother, Ronald, with whom she and Jacquie were left after their mother’s death. Opal remembers feeling ashamed of both her new menstruation and the spider legs; she kept the secret from Jacquie, who was pregnant at the time. Ronald “started to walk by their room at night,” and, one night when he tried to “pull at Jacquie’s ankles,” Opal hit him with a baseball bat (166).