Free Kind of Kin by Rilla Askew Page A

breakfast.”
    â€œDid Mr. Travers say it’s all right?” Mrs. Johnson wanted to know.
    â€œI’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