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"This is brilliant! Why didn't I think of this before?"

"Because you were playing as if the game was fair. Everyone lies on their résumé. Play by everyone else's rules." Joanna was excited, and it was infectious. "You know," she continued, "we are the only ones who answer the phone around here. You can be the bookkeeper for Bobby Dean too. I can also be your reference here." With that last bit, she did her impression of Bobby Dean himself with his lazy Okie twang; it was a perfect match.

"So, I'm doing this then?"

"You're doing it." We squealed and hugged.

A rough and insistent tap on my shoulder reminded me that I was still at work. I turned around to see Bucky, one of our regulars. He played in the Little Big Horns bowling league of old retired Native men who thought Bobby Dean's, with the three-dollar beer, was the best place to spend most of their time. Their team name was totally a dick joke that no one but them thought was clever. None of them were Lakota.

"Toilet's backed up again." Bucky burped and used his thumb to point behind him toward the men's bathroom.

I watched Bucky make his way back to his buddies, dragging toilet paper that was stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

"It's your turn," Joanna said, and walked back around the counter.

 

I didn't care. With my new application strategy, this was going to be the last clogged toilet I was going to plunge at the bowling alley.

CHAPTER TWO

I was always early to everything. And not just a few minutes early. No matter what I did, I was always an hour or two early to things. Did I have a life? That was yet to be determined. There is a prevalent stereotype that Natives are always late to stuff, but it was physically impossible for me to be tardy for anything. It was written in my DNA that Ember Lee Cardinal was and always would be very early to everything. Especially if I was excited about something like, for example, an interview for an accounting assistant position.

That's right. I had an interview! My first application as the new and improved me was a smashing success. When they asked for my job history, I put accountant for Bobby Dean's Bowling Alley and Bar. For school I put that I was a graduate of the Oklahoma City Community College, with an associate's degree in business accounting / finance support. When I googled the school, they didn't offer just an accounting degree. News to me, and I took two classes there—English and algebra. Accounting / finance support sounded pretty fancy and qualified, so I put that down.

Then, when I got to the last question before submission, it read, "Check Your Ethnicity." The list included American Indian / Alaska Native (I steered clear of that one), Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, Hispanic or Latino, and then, lastly, White.

I clicked the box.

I submitted it and got an interview request back in a day. A one hundred percent success rate so far. The email in my inbox read, Dear Ms. Cardinal, we are very impressed with your application and would love a chance to learn more about you and discuss the position. Below are the times we are available for an interview. We are hoping to fill this position as soon as possible, so please let us know at your earliest convenience.

So here I was, loitering at a coffee place called Stellar Coffee Café, trying to calm my nerves. What made the coffee so stellar? It wasn't the price, but it had the best view of the prettiest building in downtown Oklahoma City—the First National Center. BancFirst Tower was taller by a few floors, but that building was an ugly rectangle. Devon Tower was super tall and new, and looked like aliens lived in it. The First National Center was stunning—it might as well have been the Empire State Building with its vintage art deco glamour. And I had an interview with a company that lived inside it. Things were really looking up.

I loved downtown. This was a metropolis, so much more than the mobile home I grew up in outside of Ada. The city center was beautiful and urban with green parks among the skyscrapers. There were cities with taller buildings, but I hadn't been to any. Sometimes, when I was downtown, I liked to pretend I was in New York City on my Okie-mind version of Park Avenue, with all the expensive shops and restaurants.

I breathed in the warm, earthy scent of my coffee and watched the street come alive with sophisticated commuters. People with what I liked to call dumb money. They drove expensive luxury cars that made no sense for a place like Oklahoma, where thirty minutes outside of downtown was flat rural land full of hay fields. The men and women hustled up and down the sidewalk looking at their phones, diamonds and gold winking in the morning sun. They were just like those people I'd grown up watching on television in Sex and the City and Law and Order. The high-powered lawyers with their briefcases and the bankers running late, needing to make their trades or whatever it was they did in there. I wanted to be just like them.