Free My Sunshine Away by M. O. Walsh

the Landry boy? The specific truth is impossible to mine for you here, except for what I know the large man said.
    “You boys see a dog running around out there?”
    “Don’t you think I’d tell you if I did?” Jason said.
    “Don’t be smart,” Mr. Landry said.
    Jason held up his palms like an innocent. “What?” he said. “We didn’t see anything, did we?”
    Mr. Landry looked at me.
    “No, sir,” I said.
    Jason led me into the garage and, as soon as we got out of sight, he did a little dance of joy. He gave me a high five. He had just won a round of some oedipal game he’d created, I imagine, and he shot his father the bird with both fists.
Fuck you,
he mouthed.
Fuck you!
    We entered his house through the back door, and the place was as dark and quiet as if nobody was home. We then walked to the kitchen to see his mother sitting silently at the dim breakfast table, cigarette smoke lifting from her hand without drama. To the left of her sat the foster girl Tin Tin, a sickly thin child of mixed origin. She was quiet, unresponsive, and did not last long at the Landrys’. When she heard us enter the room, she stared in our general direction like the blind might. This was one of the few times I ever saw her.
    Jason’s mother, Louise Landry, was not an attractive woman, although she may have been, had everything in her life been different. But in the world in which I knew her, she wore her hair in a tight braid pulled over her shoulder and to the front. She had deep wrinkles near her eyes, spoke in a rasp, and picked at the gray-and-yellow ends of her braid while she smoked.
    She was from a large Pentecostal family in rural Mississippi, if you can believe what my memory tells me, and she’d left both that brood and that religion when she married her husband. As such a strange pair, the giant and his country wife, the neighborhood often speculated about the Landrys’ courtship. It was rumored that he was once her psychiatrist who stepped over the line, or that he had kidnapped her off her farm in Tupelo, or that she was sold to him by some righteous cult.
    At large, we were afraid of them. We didn’t bother to ask.
    Back then, our only evidence to the character of Louise Landry was that she rarely ventured outdoors. Whenever we saw her, she was toting an obligatory plate of deviled eggs to a party in the neighborhood. Then she was sitting out on the back porch, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in her long denim skirt as the rest of us swam. She kept little company, and she and her husband showed no public affection that I ever saw, neither to each other nor to Jason, nor toany of the other children they currently held in strange hospice. So, if you didn’t know, you would be hard pressed to guess that they were a family. The only time they spoke at these functions was after Mr. Landry had too much to drink and began blustering about local politicians, or making inappropriate comments to the women and children.
    To Artsy Julie once, she told me, at a Fourth of July party when she was twelve:
    Come over here, girl. Let me get a whiff of you.
    But we will deal with him later.
    As far as Louise goes, my mother claims that she tried to befriend her for years, all to no avail, especially in the days that followed the fights we’d hear on our back porch. She’d invite her to luncheons, to play tennis, to go shopping, anything she could think of to get her out of her husband’s earshot. But every attempt at friendship was met with the same response, my mother said, delivered to her in Louise’s Mississippi hill-country accent, when she’d furrow her brow and say, “Now, Kathryn. Don’t be silly.”
    Kathryn, my mother’s name. After all these years, it’s still strange for me to think of her as a person. An adult. Separate from me in the world.
    Yet there was no doubt as to the distance, the separation, between the Landry household and my own. It was not just the darkness, the foster kids, the history;