Free We Five by Mark Dunn Page A

royal couch. He stumbled toward the front of the shop, blinking his eyes against the bright sunshine flooding in through the window and combing his fingers through his matted hair. Glancing at a clock on the wall—an antique Victorian clock diminished in value by its cracked glass cover—he declared, “It’s getting on for six thirty and you’re still here.”
    â€œThat’s right, Lyle, we’re still here,” replied Jane in a dull voice.
    â€œThen you’ve missed your bus by my guess, and should have plenty of time to put on a pot of coffee.”
    â€œThere’s no coffee, Lyle,” said Jane, still without any show of exasperation. “There was none at the market. We are apparently in the middle of a coffee shortage.”
    â€œTea, then.”
    Ruth eyed her friend, wondering how she would respond.
    â€œI’m rather engaged, Lyle. Be a love and make tea for all three of us if you would.”
    The novelty of this idea struck Jane’s brother as something quite intriguing. “I could certainly do that. But you’ll have to direct me to the proper cupboard.”
    â€œShall I tell you first where you’ll find the kitchen?”
    â€œHow can you be such a bloody lark so early in the morning?” he grumbled.
    Ruth and Jane waited until he had left the room to collapse into hysterics.

Chapter Five
Bellevenue, Mississippi, February 1997
(from Five Came Running, by Mark Dunn)
    Ruth heard a knock at the trailer door. She had been watching Katie Couric talking to a woman Ruth didn’t recognize. There was no sound coming out of the television because the volume knob had fallen off when she hit the set with the closet door. It was an old Sylvania portable black-and-white the Mobrys had given her when she moved into the trailer.
    Ruth had been living with the now-retired minister and his younger sister since she was fourteen. Before this, she’d been housed in two different orphanages and then parked with six different foster families. The Mobrys, Ruth’s very last foster guardians (they couldn’t be called foster parents because they weren’t husband and wife), had been very kind to her, as had the congregation of the small non-denominational church the Reverend had shepherded. The Church of the Generous Spirit was unique among the Protestant churches of northern Mississippi. Not only had it been racially integrated from its inception—this in a part of the country in which integration, while the law of the land, wasn’t always the law of the heart—the church had an unusual take on Christ himself. For Reverend Mobry’s flock, Jesus was an unabashed, unapologetic liberal. Kind of like Hubert Humphrey, if Humphrey had been the son of God.
    It was a small congregation, but a well-knit one, and in it Ruth had found the loving extended family she’d always wanted. She knew nothing of her blood family—only that her mother, a migrant worker thought to be from Appalachian Kentucky, had died in an automobile accident. The near-term baby she’d been carrying at the time was pulled from her corpse and saved, but circumstances—Ruth’s mother had no traceable relatives—required that Ruth make her entrance into the world as a ward of the state.
    Ruth had now reached the age at which she was no longer a ward of the state.
    And she was no longer the responsibility of the Mobrys. And though she was very fond of the brother and sister who had taken such good care of her for the last seven years, Ruth was ready to spread her wings. She’d been the first of We Five to notice the ad placed in the local paper by Lucky Aces Casino, which was about to open up in Tunica County, right on the Mississippi River. (The Mississippi state legislature was very specific in crafting the 1990 law that permitted gambling in the state: its casinos had to be docked either along the Mississippi River or on the Gulf of Mexico.)