Kind of Kin

by Rilla Askew

  “Hey.” Misty Dawn’s faint bored voice. “Aunt Sweet? It’s me.”

  “I’m glad you called, don’t hang up! But don’t say anything, okay?”

  “Huh?”

  “Like location. Or any certain person’s name.”

  “Oh,” Misty said, and then after a beat. “Right, okay.”

  It wasn’t probable her phone was tapped, but Sweet couldn’t be sure. She felt like she couldn’t be sure of anything. “How’s it going?” she said.

  “Okay, sort of.”

  “How’s the baby?”

  “She’s okay.”

  “I’m really glad to hear from you. I was worried. Hey, we’ve got good news here, you know it? Dustin’s home. And things are looking better for Daddy. Or he’s got a lawyer anyway. And they dropped the harboring charge. So now it’s just, you know, that assault charge, but the lawyer says—”

  “Assault? What assault?”

  “Oh, just . . . never mind. We’re working on it.” Arvin Holloway had been furious when the D.A. dropped the harboring charges, even though it was Holloway himself who’d screwed up the paperwork, a bad warrant or something. Naturally he’d thrown the book at Daddy for what he could charge him with—felony aggravated assault with a dangerous weapon, which it turned out was way worse than harboring illegal aliens. Her daddy could get sent to prison for ten years, the lawyer said, just for jumping on Terry, but who could even blame him for that, really? Well, a lot of people, actually, the lawyer said. Not to mention the whole scene had been caught on camera. So that was the main problem right now—whether to take the plea bargain or let her daddy take a chance on going to trial. Well, and also the problem of where was she going to get the money to pay for the lawyer. But of course Misty Dawn wouldn’t know anything about all that, and Sweet didn’t want to go into it right now. “So, y’all are doing okay, huh?”

  “Not really. I mean, we’re here in this lousy motel by the train—”

  “Hush! Don’t say anything!”

  “Oh. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, you know. There’s no money. We got a job though. So that’s good.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Just, he won’t—it’s going to be a while before we get paid.”

  “Okay.” Sweet checked the caller ID, scribbled the number down on the notepad. “Can I call you at this number?”

  “It’s a pay phone. The Kum’n’Go on the corner by the—”

  “All right!” Sweet cut her off. “Let me just think a minute.” The same story, the same story, the same, same old story. “But the baby’s all right?”

  “Yeah. She’s better since we—” This time Misty Dawn caught herself. “Yeah, she’s doing good.”

  “Tell you what, you be at this number nine o’clock Monday morning. I’ll call ya. I’ll have something figured out by then.”

  “Monday. That’s a long time.”

  “A day and a half.”

  Silence on the other end.

  “It’s the best I can do. There’s a lot going on here.”

  “Yeah, okay.” More silence.

  “What?” Sweet said.

  “Just. We were wondering. All our stuff’s at the house.”

  “What?”

  “You know, all our clothes and, well, everything. Everything we own.”

  The jewel-colored towels folded and stacked by size. The worn, blanket-draped loveseat. The small, dim portable TV.

  “We thought maybe you could go up and get it?” Misty said. “The rent’s been due like three weeks. The landlord will probably just haul it off, or keep it. It’s everything we got in the world.”

  “Why don’t you have your friends in Tulsa go get it? That Bianca woman.”

  “They can’t. They’re not there. Actually, they’re down here with us, that’s how Juan—how we got a job.”

  “I can’t be seen going in there! No. Just leave it. You can get new stuff. It’s not like it’s worth anything.”

  “Our marriage license is there, Concepción’s birth certificate. All her baby pictures.”

  “Oh, Misty.”

  A sudden coin-dropping mechanical sound, followed by a digital female voice: Please deposit three dollars for the next minute. “I gotta go. I don’t have any more quarters. Please, Aunt Sweet? I won’t ask for anything else, I promise.” Please deposit three dollars for the next minute. “We need our stuff! We got to be able to prove our baby was born here! You never know from one second to the next if—”

  “Misty? Hello?” Sweet pushed the disconnect bar a few times, though she knew the line was dead. She stood blinking at the blank caller ID a moment before she finally thought to redial the number. It rang and rang.

  A man’s voice answered. “Hello.”

  “Is, is Misty there?”

  “Who?”

  “Um, a girl, Misty. She’s tall, got long sandy—”

  “This is a pay phone, lady. I don’t see nobody around.”

  Saturday | March 8, 2008 | 7:30 P.M.

  National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum

  Oklahoma City

  Monica steered the Escalade through the asphalt lot of the Cowboy Hall of Fame, as the locals all seemed to still call the place, even years after its name had been changed to something more sophisticated and tourism worthy. She squeezed her SUV between a Lexus and a Mercedes and parked. In the moonish dome light, she checked her hair in the rearview, tugged her bangs down with her fingers, plucked up the crown. Kevin was punishing her. For what reason, she couldn’t fathom, but she was certain that he was—and right here before her presentation, too, the traitor. She reached into the passenger seat for her clutch bag.

  Two things came immediately to her attention as she stood in line at the check-in table near the museum gift shop. One was that she was overdressed. Or underdressed, rather. Beneath her teal jacket, Monica’s shoulders were bare. She’d have to keep her jacket on. The invitation had said business attire, and she had assumed that a simple knee-length cocktail dress would be fine. But as she scanned the people milling about inside the huge entry hall, she realized that everyone, male and female alike, wore some version of a dull gray or black dress-for-success business suit, the men with muted ties, the women in straight skirts and black pumps. She did not want to walk up to the podium in the spotlight wearing a quilted jacket. Damn. She should have checked with Charlie. But Charlie was in Denver at a Thunder basketball game, and until this moment, as she stood smiling at the middle-aged frump checking names off the guest list, Monica had been only too glad.

  The other attention grabber—and this one was equally disconcerting—was the sight of Senator Dennis Langley talking to someone in front of the gigantic End of the Trail sculpture framed inside the glass atrium on the far side of the entrance hall. Tall as the senator was, he and the man he was talking with were dwarfed to pygmy size by the gargantuan droopy Indian on his sad lank-necked horse. What was Langley doing here? This was not a legislative event but the Oklahoma Spirit/Devon Energy Business Excellence Awards Banquet, where Monica was to have the honor of presenting the prestigious Outstanding Oklahoma Woman Entrepreneur of the Year Award. She seriously doubted the lanky lawyer was being so honored. She paused to grab a glass of white wine off the wine table before heading over.

  “Hello, Senator. You’re looking rather perky this evening.” A subtle dig at his laconic slouch—he looked nearly as droopy as the giant Indian he stood under. “Thank you, ma’am,” he drawled. “I’ll say the same for you.” She turned her smile to the old gentleman standing next to him, silver haired, handsome; the face seemed vaguely fam
iliar. The man touched two fingers to his forehead as if touching a hat brim, and at once Monica remembered who he was—the old guy in the duster eating alone at the counter at Cattlemen’s. You’re costing me a helluva lot of money, lady. You don’t know what you’re messing with. Oh, good heavens, that rude man. “You know Buck Sherman, I guess,” Langley said.

  Oh no, Monica thought. Don’t tell me. “Why, yes, of course. How do you do, Mr. Sherman? Good to see you again.”

  The old man didn’t bother to grace her with a greeting, merely nodded, excused himself, and wandered over to the wine table.

  “Me and Buck go way back,” Langley said.

  Of course you do, Monica thought.

  “He’s set to receive the Private Capital Investors Award this evening. I’m here as a guest at his table.”

  “How nice.” She’d heard the name countless times, of course, just hadn’t had a face to go with it. Why hadn’t Charlie recognized him that night at the restaurant and told her who he was? Because, she thought, Charlie was too preoccupied with his damn porterhouse steak. Well, it could be amended; such little gaffes could always be amended. She would speak to him at some point this evening, think of something charming to say to smooth his old feathers. She took a discreet sip of wine and turned to survey the crowd. All those dress-for-success suits spilling down the long east corridor toward the banquet hall. She wanted to plunge in, start greeting people, shaking hands, but she abhorred walking around smiling at strangers without knowing what her hair looked like. She glanced around for a ladies’ room.

  “I guess congratulations are in order,” the senator said. “This has been a successful week for you, I understand.”

  “Well, some are saying that,” she demurred. I should say so, she thought. The final version of House Bill 1906 had passed by a good margin, even after the kerfuffle with the opposition trying to put in their watered-down twist. Her failure to recapture hadn’t mattered in the long run; the bill had passed undiluted, with just that little adjustment she’d had to make in the English Only provision to mollify the tribes. Charlie and Leadership were confident the governor would sign. Her new law would go into effect next fall, the first day of November—four days before the election. She’d be sitting pretty again, just like Charlie said, by the time her constituents went to the polls.

  “History moves fast, doesn’t it?” Langley said, apropos of nothing. “Hard to predict which side of it a person’s going to end up on.”

  Monica held her gritted smile. He was implying, of course, that she was going to end up on the wrong side of history. Look around, buddy, she thought. That person would be you, I believe.

  “Take Buck Sherman over there.” Langley bobbed his plastic drink glass toward the old guy, surrounded now by a clutch of balding middle-aged men. “Always been a successful rancher, big-time oil speculator and landowner, but I don’t believe I would have ever predicted, back when he started buying up all these natural gas leases from here to Pennsylvania, that he’d someday end up one of the wealthiest men in the country. No more than I might have predicted things would turn out like they did in Latimer County the other day.” Langley coughed a short laugh. “Old Tom Waters surely didn’t predict it. Never seen the guy so flummoxed. Of course, no smart D.A. goes into preliminary without knowing every word that’s going to be said, and Waters is one very smart D.A. But I don’t guess anybody could have seen that coming.”

  “You’re saying the district attorney didn’t expect that little boy to get up on the witness stand and lie?”

  “You think he was lying?”

  Hell, yes, he was lying. “Well,” she said neutrally, “it’s difficult to imagine a ten-year-old coming up with the idea to smuggle an illegal alien by himself.”

  Langley’s lazy drawl drenched her. “I suppose so, ma’am. If you believe that’s what happened. And then that federal judge handing down his injunction the same morning, now, wouldn’t that gripe you? Looks like a good chunk of that bill of yours is going to be on hold till these lawsuits make their way through the court system. That’s liable to take a few years. I don’t expect it’ll be much of a problem for you in November, though. People’s memories are short,” he said in that infuriatingly slow, musing tone. “Except when they’re long.”

  “I don’t foresee any problems, Senator.” She couldn’t keep the nastiness out of her voice. “But thank you for your concern.”

  “We may be on opposite sides of the aisle, ma’am . . .”

  . . . but we serve the same constituents, blah, blah, blah, Monica finished in silent unison. Oh, she had half a mind to follow Charlie’s advice and go after Langley’s senate seat next fall—just to wipe that smug smile off his face! There was no doubt she could trounce him. But her plans did not include four more years of Mason pie suppers and 4-H calf judging contests! Two additional years in the state legislature, she promised herself, and then the run for Congress. That was it. That was it. Washington, D.C., she thought, here I come.

  “Some folks were glad enough about that injunction. Buck Sherman sure was. Lot of folks from the Chamber. Others, though . . . probably not so much. Can I get you another drink, ma’am?”

  “No, thanks. If you’ll excuse me.” She walked away from Langley, away from the crowd, set her empty wineglass on a table and picked up a full one and continued along the empty west corridor in the opposite direction of the gathering, gliding smoothly past floor-to-ceiling portraits of John Wayne and Roy Rogers and Clint Eastwood toward the ladies’ room at the far, quiet end where she could tend to her hair and makeup and finish her drink in peace.

  Oh, she never should have stopped to talk to him! The man wasn’t capable of just pleasantly passing the time of day; he always had to throw in his little aw-shucks-ma’am digs. Well, who the hell could have predicted things would turn out like that? Who in their right mind would have ever dreamed it? The D.A. and that fool idiot sheriff—they were the problem! How unthinking could Tom Waters be, to load all three preliminaries on the same docket? Maybe he’d thought it would be his big fat day to shine, but look what a mess happened—all those rumors flying, all those unanswered questions, because somebody leaked it to the press that there was a problem with the search warrant, that Arvin Holloway had conducted the raid on Brown’s farm without a warrant in the first place, and then cobbled one together after the fact—and that cowardly D.A. dropped the harboring charges before the hearing even got started! All that Breaking News hysteria when the Mexican pastor was released. Monica hadn’t been there, of course—it was only supposed to be the freaking preliminary, not the end of the whole case!—but she’d seen enough news reports to feel like she’d been there: those endless clips of the rotund little pastor coming down the courthouse steps in a suit and tie, smiling and squinting, and the old grandfather in handcuffs being walked in a classic perp walk back across the alley to the jail. At least they’d held on to him. Although not for the reason he should have been held. Not for violating the provisions of her bill!

  Monica walked into the empty ladies’ room, went directly to the softly lit mirror covering the wall above the sinks. There’s such a thing as good confluence, she thought, and then there’s shitty confluence—and last Thursday was the worst of the worst. All those repeated news clips, plus the horrid courtroom sketches on every blooming channel: the tiny long-haired boy on the witness stand with the giant prosecutor rearing over him, and the hunched-over Mexican prisoner sitting at the defense table looking old and frail and confused—oh, why on earth would they allow a sketch artist in a preliminary hearing? Who ever heard of such a thing? And then that stupid federal injunction issued by that stupid activist federal judge the very same morning!

  Which was all for show, she told herself. Because the employer E-Verify provision would be upheld in federal court, regardless of what fat cat businessmen like Buck Sherman thought! The constitutionality of every provision of House Bill 1830 would b
e upheld, and the new provisions of her new law, too—English Only, asset seizure, the requirement for schools to report undocumented students—they would all be upheld! She didn’t give a snot how many lawsuits those smart-aleck ACLU lawyers filed! Or the State Chamber of Commerce, or the Oklahoma Restaurant Association, or the Oklahoma Hotel and Tourism—oh, it was infuriating! It was disgusting. It was unthinkable, actually, and she simply wasn’t going to think about it anymore.

  Monica took a long drink of wine, set her glass on the marble counter above the sink, frowned at her hair. No two ways about it. Kevin was punishing her. But why? He wouldn’t return her calls, hadn’t been home to her knock for almost a week now, even when his Jetta was parked in the drive. And when she called the shop, he was always busy—booked, booked, booked! the receptionist said, but she could fit Monica in with Ginger or Patrice, if that was okay? The fifth time that happened, Monica had shouted into the phone: “Tell that little fascist if he doesn’t schedule me an appointment I’m taking my tea-vat head elsewhere, and then blabbing to the whole world he did this to me!” And so he’d squeezed her in yesterday, adjusted her color, given her a fresh cut. You wouldn’t say it was a bad cut, there was nothing definitively wrong with it—it just didn’t have any, well, character.

  She wet her fingers, fluffed the top. The color was somewhere between plain yellow and flat gold, hardly what Kevin would have accomplished if he hadn’t been so busy flirting with that new stylist Javier he’d hired for the next chair . . . oh, the hell with Kevin! She didn’t want to think about that traitor. She had other more important things to think about. Her presentation in the banquet hall in a few minutes, for example—on the podium, in the spotlight, with giant sweeping western sunset canvases all around. She slipped out of her jacket, hung it on a stall door, turned to look at herself. Who cared about those business types? Her silk aquamarine dress was going to look lovely under the lights. Lovely. From her clutch bag Monica withdrew the small folded square of paper with her prepared remarks. She didn’t unfold the paper but held it between her beautifully lacquered nails, staring straight ahead. She felt herself washed suddenly in dark nameless dread.