Kim Rogers
either, but only if it’s not red. “Red stuff coming out your nose will freak your mother out,” he’d said. Grandpa Lou makes the best fry bread in all of Indian Country; it’s my great-grandma’s recipe. He’s teaching me how to make my own. It requires no measuring cups. “Just eyeballing it,” he says. We like to eat our fry bread with ham hocks and beans or our favorite way, with powdered sugar like a giant doughnut. Sometimes Grandpa Lou pokes a hole in the middle of the dough before he fries it. “Like a real doughnut,” I told him. He winked. “Yeah, a Wichita doughnut.” Grandpa Lou and I always laugh and eat. Fry bread. Fry bread. Fry bread. Mostly while Mom is working late. Powdered sugar sprinkles our shirts like fresh-fallen snow. Fritz even gets a bite or two of Wichita doughnut and licks the snowy sugar off the floor. Grandpa Lou is a big kid in disguise. Mom said he never grew up. Grandpa Lou is six foot two, with wavy saltand-pepper hair. He takes me to places like the amusement park, then he rides the roller coaster with me and makes me sit up front, where he screams the loudest. Everyone stares, but he doesn’t care. Like Mom, he served in the military. Grandpa Lou was a sailor in the US Navy, where he says he sailed the seven seas. Sometimes he sings a silly song about it.
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