Kind of Kin (7 page)

“Yeah, I can see that.” Sweet turned into the vast lot and started hunting for an open space. Not once in twenty-five minutes of driving had her niece asked her what she was doing here.

“Quit now, Lucha,” Misty said, half turning to the backseat. “You leave that seat belt right where it is till we get parked!”

“What did you call her?” Sweet asked.

“What? Oh, Lucha. It's like a nickname.” Misty tugged down the visor to check her face in the mirror. “Her daddy calls her that. For Luz, you know. María de la Luz. That was Juanito's grandmother's name, did I ever tell you that?”

“I don't know. It's cute, though.” Lucha. She liked
Connie
better, but
Lucha
was at least a name you wouldn't be embarrassed to say out loud in front of company. She navigated the Taurus into a narrow parking space about a mile from the store door. “Y'all ready? Lucha, honey,” she said, trying it out, her voice light, “hold Mommy's hand.”

Up and down the aisles they went, Misty pushing her somberly staring daughter in the shopping cart, rattling away the whole time—hey, that's a nice display, did you ever try these? you gotta read the labels though, they put all kinds of crap in there—until Sweet understood that the breathless monologue wasn't due simply to her niece's astonishing self-absorption. Misty Dawn was nervous. She kept dropping things, fumbling with her shopping list, reaching into the side pocket of her purse to rifle through a handful of coupons. Sweet thought about suggesting she not buy too many perishables, but there was no need. They sailed right past the produce section. Even with her husband gone, Misty Dawn was still buying Mexican—a big jar of picante, giant bags of Goya rice and beans—but she also loaded up on frozen French fries and Hot Pockets, artificially flavored Popsicles, sugary cereals, basically anything the child pointed to, except when they passed through the candy aisle and the little girl waved wildly toward a brightly colored package. “No, mami. Not today. We got your fruit pops, remember?” Then she said something else in Spanish, and the little girl lowered her arm as her mother pressed on.

“Lucha?” Sweet said. “You want Gummi Bears, honey? Aunt Sweet will buy you some.” She doubled back and grabbed a bag off the rack, returned to where Misty stood in the aisle sorting coupons. “Okay, well, that's it, I guess,” Misty said, glancing around vaguely; then she headed toward the checkout.

When the cashier deducted for the coupons and gave her the total, Misty slipped a brown plastic card from her back jeans pocket and swiped it. Sweet recognized the card immediately, and her jaw clenched. Of course she'd known money must be tight, but still, it mortified her to see her own niece using food stamps. “Oh, man,” Misty said, frowning at the display. She swiped the card again. The middle-aged cashier didn't try to hide her disdain. “You don't have enough balance,” she said, pointing at the register screen, as if the girl couldn't see that for herself. Misty Dawn tugged her plastic wallet from her purse and flipped it open, slid her finger along the empty fold. The side of her face flared a bright blazing pink as she started taking items out of the sacks and setting them back on the glide belt. She reached to take the bag of Gummi Bears from her daughter, who let out a shriek and started wailing.

“No, here!” Sweet said. “I was going to get that.” She pulled out her billfold. “How much?” The cashier glanced at her register. “Thirty-six fifty-two. Not counting the candy.” Sweet threw a couple of twenties onto the glide belt—a chunk out of this week's grocery money, but never mind; she'd figure a way to make up for it. “Count the candy,” she told the cashier, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from saying something else incredibly nasty.

“Here, baby,” she said as they rolled through the pneumatic doors, “let Aunt Sweet open those for you.” The child surrendered the bag, which Sweet tore open with her teeth and returned to her and, for the first time that Sweet could ever remember, the little girl looked up directly in her eyes and smiled. Misty Dawn walked on ahead of them, stood waiting at the back of the Taurus for Sweet to pop the trunk.

Wordlessly her niece loaded the bags into the turtle hull while Sweet strapped the baby in the backseat. Misty Dawn had shifted into silent mode again. On the way home she spoke only to give driving directions. A dozen times Sweet opened her mouth to begin, but getting started seemed even harder now. She turned onto North Peoria. “You know, hon,” she said.

“I should've brought my calculator,” Misty said.

“It's not a problem.”

“I'll pay you back.”

“You don't have to.”

“I wasn't trying to get you to pay for it! I lost count.”

“No, I know. I wasn't—”

“I'm going to get a different job.”

“I didn't mean that. I know it's hard with Juanito gone.” Sweet pulled into the yard and Misty Dawn jerked open the door handle before they'd come to a complete stop. “Wait!”

Misty sat staring straight ahead. “We're making it fine. I don't need any help.”

“Your grandpa's in jail,” Sweet blurted.

“What?” The girl looked not so much surprised as confused. “What are you talking about?”

“Don't you ever watch the news?”

“Not really.” Misty's voice had the faint, half-bored sound Sweet had heard earlier, but she could see now it wasn't boredom that caused her to sound that way. It was fear. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“Well, I did. I mean, I am. That's what I'm doing here.”

“I can't believe it. What happened?”

“Let's get these groceries in the house.”

All while they toted in the sacks and Misty Dawn put things away and Sweet opened a can of soup and tried to take the Gummi Bears away from the baby and gave up finally and set her on the loveseat to watch cartoons with her sneakers on and a pink afghan in her lap and the whole bag of candy in her hands, Sweet related the story. Misty Dawn sat in a folding chair at the card table in the kitchen, looking dazed. After a while she started mixing a jug of Crystal Light, stirring and stirring, saying nothing. Sweet poured up a bowl of chicken noodle and set it in front of her, but Misty Dawn just kept stirring the drink mix. “Who was it?” she said faintly.

“Arvin Holloway and his damn deputies. Pardon my French.”

“No, I mean, who'd they get? The Mexicans.”

“How should I know? Good grief. Are you listening to me? Your grandpa is sitting in the Latimer County Jail this minute! You need to come home.”

“What? I can't. I . . . I've got to work tonight.”

“Tell your boss you've got a family crisis.”

“I can't do that.”

“Why not?” Sweet's list of persuasions came back to her: “It'll be like a vacation, see? You won't have to work. And the baby can stay with you, she won't be having to go stay with strangers—”

“She's not a baby,” Misty Dawn said evenly. “And Blanca is not a stranger. She's the best friend I've got.” She got up and went to the front room. Sweet followed, stood in the doorway watching Misty wipe her daughter's sticky face and hands with the tail of her shirt.

“A week,” Sweet said. “Not even. That's all I'm asking. Just till Sunday. They'll let us see him on Sunday, I'll talk some sense into him then. Or
you
can. He'll listen to you.”

“If it wasn't for Blanca and Enrique these past few months,” Misty said, “I don't know what I would've done.”

“I'm sorry,” Sweet said. “About the truck. I really didn't have the money, I wasn't lying.”

“It's not that.”

“What then?” No answer. “One little week out of your life is not going to kill you!” Sweet caught herself, shifted to a lighter tone: “I'll drive you back up here on Monday. If your boss won't let you off, I'll stay and help you look for a new job. Okay? We can use my gas to go around.”

“Hold still, mami.” Misty fussed at her daughter, who kept pulling her face away so she could see the TV.

“When we come back,” Sweet said, “I'll help you get enrolled in school. In a GED class. Like you mentioned.”

Misty Dawn's expression was flat and closed. Sweet had seen that same look on Gaylene's face a thousand times when they were kids. Not refusal or defiance but a fixed, shut-down expression that said no power on earth was going to make her do what she didn't want to do—which in those days had generally been whatever it was Sweet wanted her to. Misty Dawn didn't have Gaylene's coloring or physicality, but she had surely inherited her mother's willful stubbornness. Sweet bit her lip. Please God. Don't tell me I drove all this way for nothing. She watched as Misty Dawn took her daughter onto her lap. The child nestled against her with two fingers in her mouth, her beautiful eyes drowsing closed.

“Last summer,” Misty said, stroking Lucha's hair, “when we had the party. He's the only one who didn't act like they were, I don't know, poison or something.”

“What are you talking about?” But Sweet knew. The memory unfolded fast: the baby's birthday party in August, all the Mexicans on one side of the yard and her family on the other, and her niece traipsing back and forth, back and forth. That was the first time Misty Dawn had tried to blend the two families, and it hadn't exactly worked. The Mexicans weren't, strictly speaking, Juanito's family—except for this Blanca person, apparently, although Sweet couldn't remember which one she was. Mostly they were guys he worked with, Misty said, fellow roofers and their families. After a grinned hello and handshakes all around, Juanito had gone back over to the Mexican side and stayed there, turning the chicken pieces on the grill, handing around beers. To Sweet, everything had seemed so foreign: actual beer cans in people's hands right out in the open, and that rapid accordion-filled music, trilling voices, all the dark-haired men standing around their big pickups in cowboy boots and snap-button shirts and the women in lawn chairs in full skirts and high heels, talking high and fast. The only English she'd heard over there had come from the mouths of the dozen or so children shouting and chasing each other—all except the baby, who'd trailed silently after her mother in a frilly red dress with so many layers of netting the skirt jutted out from her thin legs like a bell. It had been one of the longest afternoons of Sweet's life. Her husband acted awful, leaning against the church van all day with his arms folded—they'd borrowed the church van for the trip so they could bring Mr. Bledsoe's wheelchair—refusing to eat anything or even drink an iced tea, and Carl Albert had acted just like him, except that her son ate plenty and drank lots of pop.

And then, after an hour or so, Daddy had left their side of the yard and gone over to the Mexican side. He didn't speak Spanish—or not enough to not have to try to show what he meant by using a lot of hand gestures and acting everything out—but that didn't stop him. After that, Misty Dawn had just seemed to shine. She would go stand next to her grandfather and translate for him, and when she'd finished, the Mexicans would all laugh. Then she'd step back inside the little house and bring out more chips and salsa or whatever, come over to Sweet's side of the yard to see if they needed anything, go back to the Mexicans and rattle along in Spanish, make them laugh again. Sweet remembered one moment in particular, when Misty picked up her little girl and perched her on her hip, the frilly dress spilling out over her arm like a giant red poppy; she'd come sashaying broad-footed toward them, smiling, her wide heart-shaped face lit with happiness, like this was the day she'd been waiting for all her life.

Was that it? Sweet suddenly thought. Was that day of the party when her daddy's weird save-the-Mexicans thing started? Daddy had always had such a soft spot for Misty Dawn—the same as he'd had for her mother, Gaylene, and for Gaylene's mother, Carlotta. An old hard bitterness rose up in the back of Sweet's throat. She shut her eyes. Opened them seconds later to see her niece picking up the remote and aiming it at the television.

“I need you to come take care of Dustin.” Well, there it was. All that prayerful practicing, and still she'd blurted it straight out. But Sweet's needs weren't anything that would move Misty Dawn, or Dustin's needs, either. The two siblings weren't even all that close—so much difference in their ages, different fathers, different raising. They hadn't lived in the same house, or even the same town, since Dustin was a toddler and Misty Dawn a young teen. What
would
move her niece, Sweet believed, was her love for her grandfather. She tried again. “Misty, this is your family, hon. Your grandpa needs you.” But Misty Dawn sat staring at the television, where a bold-featured blonde in a clingy dress and too much makeup pleaded tearfully in Spanish with a disdainful dark-haired man. Sweet looked at her watch. It was after one o'clock. She had to get on the road right now, or the boys would be home before she got there. She prayed that Mr. Bledsoe was still asleep, that Terry hadn't been trying to call. That she would get home before Dustin and Carl Albert did.

Stepping back to the kitchen for her purse and keys, Sweet asked for the right words, the last word, something, her mind awhirl with every line she could think of to guilt Misty Dawn into coming for the sake of her grandpa. But of course there was nothing Misty could do to help him—it was Sweet who needed the help. It was Dustin. She had to get the boys separated! She'd seen what her son did to him, not just that fistfight on Sunday, but last night, in the bathroom, when Dustin yelped and then went suddenly silent. She had rushed in to find Carl Albert, all hundred thirty pounds of him, pinning his little sixty-five-pound cousin to the floor, with his knee, the full terrible weight of him, pressing on the boy's throat. Dustin's face was turning blue, his arms flailing in that horrible silence, his bruised eyes wide with fear. The urgency and pain surged through her. She turned back to the living room. “Come home with me! Please.”