Kind of Kin (6 page)

Tuesday | February 19, 2008 | 6:45
A.M.

Main Street | Cedar

S
weet had the boys up, dressed, combed, cerealed, and in the car before daylight. When she went back to check on Mr. Bledsoe, she found him deeply asleep, curled on his side like an ancient, bald little fetus, the extra pain pills doing their work, and yes it was terrible, probably even sinful to dope the old man, but she didn't know what else to do. She needed to get to Tulsa today. The boys were quiet in the backseat as they drove along the dark Main Street, where a couple of mud-crusted SUVs stood parked in front of the old mercantile that housed Heartland Home Health. Sweet glanced inside the lighted window at the two women in loose smocks drinking coffee at the desk. She knew good and well Mr. Bledsoe would qualify for home health if they'd just put in for it, but Terry wouldn't let her.
His
family wasn't taking any government handouts, he said. Oh, but if she just had an aide coming in once a week to help, maybe she could manage to get a few things done. Drive to Tulsa to get Misty, for instance, without having to dope the old man. Or medicate him rather.
Medicate
was a better word.

At the end of the street she turned right, drove around behind the rock elementary building, and parked beside the prefab cafeteria in the back. Three yellow buses idled nearby, puffing white exhaust into the cold morning air. “Y'all sit here a minute,” she said.

“Where are you going?” Carl Albert whined.

“I'll be right back.”

Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Hale were stirring up powdered eggs and biscuits in the steaming kitchen. Mrs. Johnson frowned under her hairnet, but Mrs. Hale smiled. “Why sure, bring them on in here. We'll feed them with the country kids.”

“Oh, thanks,” Sweet said. “They've already had breakfast.”

“Did Mr. Travers say it's all right?” Mrs. Johnson wanted to know.

“I'll go check to make sure.” Actually, the notion hadn't occurred to her to talk to the principal, but she realized that maybe she ought to do that. She could explain about the boys missing school yesterday, give an excuse for Dustin's bruises. She stepped outside and motioned them to come on. Her heart caught when she saw her nephew climbing out of the car. His nose was still so swollen. The skin below his eyes looked like mashed blackberry pulp. Why hadn't she thought to smear a little makeup on him? Cover some of that color, at least. Carl Albert raced up the steps and ducked beneath her arm holding the heavy metal door open. Dustin came slowly behind him, head tucked, hands in his pockets. “Hurry up, Dusty,” she said. “I can't stand here all morning letting cold air in.”

After she got the boys settled—Dustin hunkering in on himself at one of the long cafeteria tables, Carl Albert hanging over the serving window watching the women work—Sweet went back to her car and sat a minute, glaring at the closed cafeteria door. She'd seen the look the two cooks exchanged when they saw Dustin's face. She felt like marching right back in there and saying,
What are you people staring at?
Or she wanted to give some reason: he'd walked into a door yesterday, he fell down playing basketball. What she did not want to say was,
Yes, my son did that to his little cousin who is half his size and weight.
Sweet's chest hurt, a deep searing burn radiating from her breastbone up into her throat. A sound escaped her then, a clutched, choking noise, not quite sob, not quite groan; it seemed to come from the same place where her heart burned. Sweet turned the key in the ignition, drove around to the front of the school.

She sat in her car staring at the administration building, a two-story octagon of jigsaw-puzzle-fitted native stone flanked on either side by the grade school and the high school, all built by the WPA back during the Depression. Little had changed since Sweet was a student here twenty years ago, except the classes were even smaller now because the town was shriveling to nothing, and the teachers she'd gone to school to were all retired now, or dead. But the beautiful old buildings looked the same. They would last till the Rapture if somebody didn't get a state contract to come bulldoze them down. Behind the buildings the sky was getting lighter, striated orange and pink. Sweet tried to make herself go in and talk to the principal, but she couldn't think of any calm sensible words to explain why she wanted to drop the boys off at school an hour early, or for them being absent yesterday, or for the bruises on Dustin's face. The cooks' judgmental glances returned to her. She put the Taurus in gear and drove out of the lot.

It wasn't until she was well north along Highway 82, navigating the twisting curves over the Sans Bois ridges, that Sweet remembered she'd left her cell phone plugged into the charger on the kitchen counter. She thought about turning around to get it, but a quick glance at the time dissuaded her—she was already getting a late enough start.

T
he whole drive to Tulsa Sweet alternated between praying and practicing what she was going to say to her niece. She had tried calling Misty Dawn last night but got a recording saying the number was unavailable. That meant a two-hour drive to Tulsa this morning because she didn't know any other way to contact Misty except that TracFone number. Actually, Sweet had felt a little relieved when she heard the recording. At least she wouldn't have to explain why she'd waited four days to let the girl know her grandpa was in jail.

Traffic on the expressway heading into Tulsa slowed to a crawl. A wreck or construction up ahead, or something. Sweet watched the time tick away. See, Lord? she told Him. Why can't there ever be an easier way to do things! Though in fact Sweet knew she would have driven up here today anyway, even if she'd been able to reach Misty Dawn on the phone, because the only way to talk the girl into coming back with her was to do it in person. What she'd been practicing for two hours on the slow drive from Cedar was how to make it seem like Misty Dawn's idea.

It took another forty minutes before Sweet turned onto a run-down side street in North Tulsa, drove half a block, and stopped in front of Misty Dawn's house—a tiny yellow rent house with a low roof and blue trim set well back from the road in the middle of a huge half-acre lot. Sweet hadn't been here since last August, for the baby's third birthday, when the yard had been filled with overlarge, overdecorated pickups and charcoal smoke and tinny fast music blaring from speakers. Now the yard was winter dead and empty except for two resin lawn chairs stacked together, a pink-and-lavender tricycle tipped on its side, and Juanito's big white Dodge Ram parked close to the house. Sweet was relieved to see the truck. The cops had impounded it when they arrested him in November, but apparently Misty Dawn had managed to come up with the money to pay the towing and storage fees. Sweet cringed, remembering; that had been the topic of their last phone conversation, actually. Her niece had called just before Thanksgiving wanting to borrow five hundred dollars to get the truck back. Sweet didn't have it to give her. Misty had said she understood, but had she really? A flicker of curtain in the front window caught Sweet's eye. That was the trigger, finally, that made her get out and go to the door.

She rapped on the frame—no answer, so she opened the screen and pounded on the wood. “Misty Dawn, it's me, hon! Aunt Sweet!” The house only had four rooms, the small kitchen and bathroom here on the left side, a cramped living room and bedroom on the right. There was no way Misty Dawn didn't hear. “I saw the curtain move!” Sweet called. “I know you're up.” Still it was several minutes before her niece opened the door. A big girl, solidly built, with a beautiful face and long sand-colored hair, Misty Dawn stood in the doorway in jeans and a black T-shirt. “Hi,” she said, her voice faint, almost bored sounding.

“Hi,” Sweet said. There was an awkward pause. Misty Dawn held the door partway closed, the way you'd try to ward off Jehovah's Witnesses. The blank look on the girl's face confirmed what Sweet had expected—she didn't know anything about her grandpa's arrest. “I tried to call last night,” Sweet said, “but it didn't go through.”

“I ran out of minutes. I got to wait till payday to get another card.”

“Oh. I was worried you'd had to get a different phone.” Her niece stared at her. Not a good start. Last night, when she'd heard that recording, it had occurred to Sweet that the cops might have confiscated the TracFone, too, same as the pickup, when they arrested Juanito. The point being: How many times had Sweet tried to call Misty Dawn since her husband got deported three months ago? Up until last night, actually, not once. “Can I come in?”

Misty slid her gaze past Sweet's shoulder to the Taurus parked in the yard. “I was just getting ready to go to the store.”

“Okay. I'll take you. But I gotta come in first and use the bathroom. I'm about to pop.”

Her niece pulled the door open, and Sweet hurried through the narrow kitchen into the bathroom. She could hear SpongeBob's goofy voice burbling in the front room. Moments later, pumping liquid soap into her palm at the tiny lavatory, she was struck, as always, by what a meticulous housekeeper her niece had turned out to be. The thin towels and washcloths were lined up perfectly on two shelves, color coordinated in greens and turquoises and purples that matched the shower curtain with its seahorse motif, which in turn matched the plastic soap dispenser she was using, with its floating array of purple seahorses and blue starfish. The medicine cabinet mirror had been recently Windexed; she could smell the ammonia. The sink was spotless. It was remarkable, really, when you considered how chaotic the girl's life had always been. Or maybe it was because of that, Sweet thought. Maybe the best order her niece could make of things was to keep her washcloths and towels color coordinated and stacked by size.

In the front room Misty Dawn was crouched by the worn loveseat trying to get the baby to let her put on her shoes. Sweet had never been able to bring herself to call Misty's little girl by her given name. Concepción was just too, well, Mexican. Not to mention Catholic. Not to mention plain icky—who wanted to think of such things every time you said a kid's name? Sweet had tried calling her Connie, but Misty Dawn always corrected her, so Sweet just went on thinking of her as the baby, even though she was three and a half years old. Misty Dawn swore her daughter could talk when she wanted to, but Sweet had never heard her speak a word of English or Spanish, either one. The child had no trouble making her wishes known, though. She shook her head fiercely at her mother, her thick mat of dark hair tossing side to side; she pulled up her legs and tucked them beneath herself, stared unblinking at the television. “Concepción María de la Luz!” Misty said, and then rattled off a long string of Spanish, ending with “ . . . or I'll wear you out.” Then she sighed, hoisted herself up from the floor, and went to the bedroom.

“Hey, those are really cute shoes,” Sweet said. “Is that Cinderella? Or no, I guess it's Snow White. Is it Snow White?” The little girl continued to gaze at the television with unblinking eyes. She was, there was no other word for it, exquisite. Her features combined the best of both parents, Misty Dawn's perfect nose and rosebud lips, Juanito's brushy lashes and dark eyes, except that the child's eyes were not brown but a smoky color halfway between gray and green. Her hair wasn't quite as black as her father's, but it was similarly thick and straight—Indian hair, Sweet would call it—and right now it hung in her eyes and looked like it could use a good wash. Quit, Sweet told herself. She had promised herself and her Savior the whole way here that she was not going to judge.

In a moment Misty reappeared in a denim jacket, carrying a white puffy coat for the baby. She'd put on makeup, dark eyeliner, mauve shadow, her lips glossed a soft pink, her cheekbones brushed with blush. “You want fruit pops?” she said. The little girl cut her eyes from the TV to her mother, held her grave look a moment, then her face lit with a gorgeous smile and she scrambled down from the loveseat, came and took the coat from her mother's hand. “You gotta put your shoes on,” Misty said, and the girl sat obediently for her mom to strap on her Dora the Explorer sneakers. Misty Dawn stood up and pulled a hairbrush from her back pocket, held the brush in one hand, a fuchsia elastic band in the other, looking at her daughter with eyebrows raised. The little girl jumped up, turned around to stand in front of her, and Misty Dawn swiped the brush through her hair a few times, gathered it in a loose ponytail.

D
riving along in heavy traffic, following Misty's chirped directions, Sweet tried to find the right opening. She wanted to ease into the news slowly; she didn't think it would be helpful to just blurt it all out. Misty Dawn had always been really close to her grandpa. He'd raised her until she was almost nine, until Gaylene waltzed home from Oregon one day and announced she'd come for her daughter and then moved the girl up here to Tulsa with that grease monkey dope fiend from Sand Springs. Not Dustin's father. The one before him. Sweet waited, but Misty Dawn had switched from mopey silence to nonstop chatter, and she couldn't find a place to jump in. Misty Dawn said she'd started working nights at a pizza place and the job wasn't too bad, except her boss was a jerk, but she was thinking about trying to get a different job anyway, she could maybe work as a translator or something, it might pay better, or have benefits at least, but she didn't know where to try, and anyhow you'd probably have to have a diploma, didn't Sweet think you'd probably need a diploma? “Um, well,” Sweet began. Anyway, Misty said, she'd been thinking about getting her GED, except then she'd have to pay somebody to watch Concepción while she went to class, Blanca worked days so she couldn't keep her in the daytime, did Sweet remember Blanca? Juanito's cousin from the party? She was legal so that wasn't a problem, but she worked all day at the Motel 6 so nights were all she could do, but Misty had been thinking maybe they had night classes for GEDs, that was a possibility, except she never knew what her schedule was going to be, the boss switched it around every week, and anyway she had to get in as many hours as she could, they were just barely getting by with her working thirty, or sometimes she worked thirty, sometimes the boss stiffed her, put somebody else on the schedule, he just did that, Misty Dawn thought, to keep everybody on their toes, plus he was a jerk. “Take a left here,” she said. “There it is.” Misty pointed ahead to a giant discount supermarket in an ocean of asphalt crammed with parked cars. “Usually I just walk to the bodega on the corner, it takes so much gas to come all the way out here.”