Delia Ortiz—Lani Walker

Delia Ortiz’s relationship with Lani Walker is shaped by competing claims to family belonging and by Delia’s unresolved conflict with her in-laws. Lani’s concern for Fat Crack Ortiz is genuine, but Delia experiences it as an intrusion into the place she believes should belong to his sons and their families. Her reassuring reply to Lani conceals both Fat Crack’s grave condition and the depth of Delia’s resentment.

A Message About Fat Crack Ortiz

Delia encounters Lani’s email while browsing her new messages. The sender’s screen name, Forever Spinning, recalls the young girl who became Whirlwind; the subject asks how Fat Crack Ortiz is doing. Delia knows that Lani is writing out of concern, and she shares that concern. She also recognizes how much of what she treasures in life began with Fat Crack. Yet the message listing brings resentment to the surface before she even opens it.

Lani writes that she cannot sleep because she is worried about Fat Crack and offers to come home early if he is very ill and needs her. Delia reads this offer as a possible claim to a place in the family’s vigil. She resents the prospect of Lani returning to Fat Crack and Wanda Ortiz’s home and pushing Leo Ortiz and Richard Ortiz aside. In Delia’s view, Lani is not one of Fat Crack and Wanda’s two biological sons, yet she appears to receive a degree of attention that Delia thinks Leo is denied.

The Earlier Dispute Over Lani’s Future

Delia’s reaction has a history. She has heard that Fat Crack hopes Lani will become both a medicine woman and a physician, and she has taken particular interest in his plan to help make her a doctor. He insisted that if Lani returned to serve as a physician on the reservation, the Tohono O’odham should pay for her education. Delia, then a tribal attorney, opposed using tribal funds for medical school when Lani’s parents could afford the tuition. Although Delia accepted the need for locally trained doctors and nurses whose loyalty would be to the Desert People, she regarded this proposed use of public money as irresponsible and unfair.

Fat Crack was tribal chairman when Delia argued against the plan before the tribal council. She lost publicly, making the dispute a reservation-wide matter as well as a family conflict. The resulting difficulties with Fat Crack and Wanda persisted, coloring Delia’s interactions with both of them. Her anger at Lani’s email therefore arises not only from the immediate question of who will be present as Fat Crack’s health worsens, but also from an older disagreement over the support he gave Lani and the place Delia believes her own family should occupy.

Reassurance and Concealed Knowledge

Delia’s response separates what she knows from what she tells Lani. Privately, she acknowledges that Fat Crack is dying; in the email, she says he is fine and tells Lani there is no need to hurry home, promising to let her know if anything changes. She sends the reply before she can reconsider. The exchange offers no resolution between the women: Delia’s message postpones Lani’s return while leaving her anger and the underlying family tension intact.

After sending it, Delia can no longer concentrate at work. She closes her office and drives to the small chapel at Topawa reservation village, a place where her mother had sought refuge decades earlier and where Delia goes for relief from her persistent guilt. She understands that being at war with Lani would worsen matters with her father-in-law. Fat Crack is more than Leo’s father and the grandfather of the child Delia carries: he hired Delia, helped bring her back to the reservation after she and her mother fled Manny Chavez’s home, and made their escape possible. The relationship with Lani is thus caught in a painful contradiction: Delia resents Lani’s closeness to the man to whom Delia herself owes so much.