Free At the End of the Road by Grant Jerkins Page B

pressure cooker groaning, the glass jars rattling inside it.
    They made their way back to the bathroom. Kyle decided that the first step would be to wash the smoke smell off of them. He soaped them both down quick as he could and wiped it off with a damp rag. The rag turned brown, but it was hard to tell if it was from dirt or soot. He looked Grace over. He dabbed some alcohol on the mosquito bites on her forehead—in his mind they were mosquito bites, they had always been mosquito bites. (Kyle already instinctively understood that the key to successful lying was to truly believe your own lies.)
    He inspected himself in the mirror. Other than his chicken pox chest and the burned place on top of his foot, he was clear. He shoved their clothes into the hamper. The clothes would hold more of the smoke smell than their skin would. Kyle thought of the fire spreading outside, the world in flames. How long before his mother took notice? He had to hurry, but he took the time to find them both some clothes that came as close as possible to matching what they had put on that morning. If Mama noticed they had changed clothes, that was it. That was all it would take. She was a smart woman.
    Kyle opened the bedroom closet and pulled out the Popsicle stick fort that, as he built up stocks of Popsicle sticks, he’d been constructing off and on that summer. He scattered a handful of the flat wood sticks around it on the floor. Kyle took the bottle of Elmer’s School Glue and emptied it quick in the toilet. Then he took some toilet paper (it had yellow and blue daisies on it) and swabbed out the inside of the glue bottle as far down as his fingers could reach. He flushed the whole mess away.
    Kyle sat Grace down on the floor in her bedroom and shoved a coloring book and a box of crayons in front of her.
    “Stay here. Don’t come out. No matter what. No matter what.”
    “I won’t, Kyle.”
    “Nothing happened. Do you understand that?”
    “You mean the fire?” she whispered.
    “It didn’t happen. We didn’t have nothin’ to do with it.”
    “Okay.”
    “Nothin’.”
    She nodded, glad her part in this was finished. She had already started coloring a picture of Deputy Dawg before Kyle left the room. God bless her. She had already started to believe that nothing had happened.
    Kyle made his way down the hall to the kitchen, composing himself. The attic fan rumbled above him, and he thought he could smell smoke it was already pulling into the house. He had to establish himself to Mama. He had to put himself, his normal self, in front of her. Set himself in her mind as something that existed outside the world of fire. Like the kitchen clock, the ceramic rooster on the counter, the paring knife in her hand—he wanted to put himself in her mind as one of those things that surrounded her right now, right this second, that had no association with the fire.

LOUISE EDWARDS LOOKED AT HER BONY
    fingers as she rinsed her hands in the kitchen sink. She had lost thirty pounds since December, when she had finally made up her mind once and for all that she was going to leave Boyd. There was no way she could strike out on her own and raise four children, so she had decided that she would leave Jason and Wade with their father. They were older now and didn’t need a mother as much. But Grace and Kyle would come with her. They were only seven and ten, and needed a mother.
    Louise had been putting up string beans all afternoon, and she looked at the rows of jars that she had completed. She looked at the bushel of okra she had for pickling, sighed, and placed empty jars in the pressure cooker for scalding. She reached overhead and pulled down her tin of alum. This would just kill Boyd. He just wouldn’t be able to understand. They were living like old folks. All he ever wanted to do was read his books or his newspaper or mess around in the basement by himself. And after the kids got to bed, he didn’t even want the TV on. It got so quiet that