Kind of Kin

by Rilla Askew

“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.

  Driving 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.”

  “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, glanc
ing 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 t
he 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.