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  I am staring at the thin gold hoop in her ear, seeing her profile around the edges of my focus, when I say, “I missed you. Thought about you every day, all day.”

  “My friend Jerica, she said she has an aunt who was in prison for a couple of years, and when she came out she was funny.” Her burger lands on half a bun and then on a plate. She flicks the eye off and turns to look me in the eye. The aroma of cooked flesh assaults my nostrils, but the reason I take two steps back has more to do with the expression on her face. I don’t see my little girl anywhere in her face.

  “Funny?” I know what she means, but I want to make her say it to me, want to see if she has the nerve to say it to me. My eyebrows climb my forehead as I wait.

  “You know . . . funny.”

  I want to slap the smug look off of her face, and I think about doing it—stepping to her and filling the room with the sound of my palm meeting her cheek. Then I think about the irony of the situation. The first touch of my daughter’s skin that I am allowed in over eight years should be that of a slap? I don’t think so. I decide to let her have her say, even if what she is saying is inappropriate.

  “Your friend is wrong,” I say. “Prison doesn’t make you funny, as you say, unless you want to be. Or you already were. Is that the only thing you want to know? There’s nothing else you want to ask me?”

  We sit across from each other at the table, a glass monstrosity balanced on a hunk of off-white granite. I stare at her and feel something like anger fall around my shoulders like a cloak of fog. This is not what I expected. We should be falling all over each other, hugging and kissing everywhere our lips can reach. We should be making up for lost time, talking and laughing the way we used to. She should want to touch me and I should be touching her, tracing the lines of her face and smoothing my palm over her hair. I should be breathing in a scent that I never forgot.

  I shouldn’t be looking into the eyes of a stranger. “Didn’t you miss me at all, Beige?”

  “You don’t look the same,” she says, chewing a mouthful of bread and meat.

  “Eight years is a long time.”

  “I forgot what you looked like.”

  “I didn’t forget what you looked like. Couldn’t even if I wanted to.”

  “How come you never tried to see me?”

  “Was I supposed to break out of prison? It’s not that simple, Beige. And besides that, I didn’t want you to see me like that.”

  Her face goes from smug to cynical, wraps itself around anger and holds on tight. “You just didn’t want to see me.”

  I open my mouth to respond, thinking that this moment in time is the maker or breaker. I will tell her how much I love her and how much I regret everything that’s happened. How much I want the two of us to begin building a relationship. How my arms want to hug her so badly that they almost fly apart from my body and attach themselves to hers. She has no idea how I have craved her very essence, and I struggle with finding the words to tell her.

  Keys jingle in the lock and then the front door opens and closes. Seconds later, Vicky floats into the kitchen like a dream. She is wearing pale pink scrubs and shoes so white they are blinding. A stethoscope hugs her neck, and the watch on her wrist is large enough that she has no trouble keeping track of the second hand. She is everything I am not—pure looking, reassuring and soft around the edges. A natural caregiver with all the answers.

  She has been my daughter’s caregiver for longer than I have. I guess this is the reason Beige’s eyes light up as she enters the kitchen, a smile curves her lips, and her anger washes away on a tide.

  “Hey, Mom,” Beige says.

  Vicky darts a quick glance at me and whispers “hey” back to her, touches the top of her head on her way to the refrigerator. It’s like I am watching a television show, something so perfectly practiced it seems unreal. I feel my skin begin to peel away from my bones, hear my blood rush to my ears, and know that I am the odd man out. If I didn’t know my place before, I do now.

  I wonder if either of them notice me leaving the kitchen. Then I wonder what their quiet voices are saying in my wake, as I tip down the basement steps. For the first time I understand how a woman can be released from prison, enjoy one or two precious days of freedom and then find herself right back where she started—in prison. They call it institutionalization, the act of not being able to function in society and the desire to return to a controlled environment.

  I call it not being able to cope with rejection.

  Chapter Four

  The goddamn jury doesn’t even deliberate for a respectable amount of time. They hide in a room for two hours and twenty-two minutes and then emerge with the fate of my life in their hands. I rise along with everyone else in the courtroom and crumble to the floor minutes later.

  “We find the defendant guilty of involuntary manslaughter,” the foreman announces. He is a round man, short and balding. He combs the hair on one side of his head over the gleaming dome in the center, to connect with the hair on the other side. I have spent the better part of my trial staring at him, asking myself why he doesn’t just go out and buy himself a toupee.

  I wonder if he knows how silly he looks.

  But the last laugh is on me. I am the one who will be going to the state correctional facility for women, and he will be the one looking silly, all the way home.

  The buzzing noise in my ears is so loud that I don’t hear the judge’s words. I don’t hear my attorney’s response or the prosecutor’s comeback. My head swivels around on my shoulders as I watch their lips move, and tears fill my eyes. I have yet to think about a future outside of the courtroom. I haven’t stopped to think about prison.

  I am sentenced to five years. Hands grasp at me, pulling my arms behind my back, and handcuffs appear from thin air. I hear a loud cry from somewhere in the back of the courtroom, and I turn to meet Vicky’s eyes across time and space. She is dissolving right before me, like the wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz. She reaches out to me, but I can’t reach back.

  I let a single tear race down my face and swallow the others. “Get Beige,” I call out just before I am hustled across the room and through a doorway. I know where I am going—to a tiny cell in the bowels of the courthouse. From there, I am going away for a long time.

  “Vicky!” I scream, hoping she can hear me. “Get Beige! Take care of my baby!” She knows what I am saying to her. We have talked about this, about how she will take Beige in and keep her safe until I can get everything straightened out. Get myself out of the mess I have gotten into.

  But not once did we talk about Beige calling her Mom.

  The old man from the print shop doesn’t call. Neither does the woman from the daycare center or the one from the restaurant. After two weeks of unemployment and knowing looks from Isolde, I find the list of temporary staffing agencies that she gave me, and I make appointments with three of them. Only one of them is accustomed to placing convicted felons, and their specialty is factory work.

  It doesn’t matter that I have a master’s degree or that I can take a computer apart and put it back together before I have my morning coffee. I am assigned to a baked goods company, where I am put on the graveyard shift to fight with a giant machine that squirts creamy white goo into the center of second-rate Twinkie and Ding-Dong wannabes. I learn from experience that you get what you pay for, and I swear my allegiance to Hostess after only three nights on the job.

  The pay is decent, and the job is supposed to last at least six months, which gives me some time to scout around for other job possibilities without feeling the heat of empty pockets and wasted time. I don’t completely relax, but I do allow myself to shift from second gear into neutral. A steady job makes everything else I need to do seem like cake.

  We are allowed two fifteen-minute breaks and an hour for lunch, but most of the regular employees do whatever the hell they want to do. It’s all about the numbers, and as long as quotas are met, no one really cares how many smoke breaks you take or for
how long. Right away I notice how much working in the factory is like being on the inside. White women stick together, black women join forces, and the ones fortunate enough not to belong to either group manage to get along just fine. The men find other things to define their allegiances, like bitchy wives and girlfriends, sports teams and sex talk. Skin color doesn’t seem to matter to them as long as you can talk the talk.

  The women compete for attention. Who has the best-looking hair or body? Who dresses the best, or whose significant other bought them what? I stay on the fringes of it all, pretending that I belong to a group that has yet to be defined, and take it all in. Wild mixtures of over-priced cologne always hang in the air and make my stomach turn. I concentrate on giving each pseudo Twinkie, Cupcake and Ding-Dong just the right amount of creamy white goo and tune them out. I’m so far beyond their day to day bullshit that I don’t even recognize the language they speak.

  It takes them exactly five nights of my presence among them to decide that I am strange. I do not smoke and, even though the temperature inside the factory often soars past seventy-five degrees, I do not step outside to catch a breath of fresh air like the other non-smokers. After my first night on the job, I don’t go into the employee lounge when others are in there. I wait outside the restroom door until I am sure it is empty before going inside, no matter how badly I need to pee. Outdoors, there is too much space, too much room to move around in, and inside places like the lounge or the bathroom, there is not enough. Four times, the shift supervisor has to remind me that I can take a break and that I am entitled time to eat. Until then, I stay at my station, doing what I am told to do.

  The one time I do go into the employee lounge while others are there, I find myself moved to violence that I am barely able to restrain. Sophia, another temp worker, steps up behind me at the soda machine, moves in close to drop her money in the slot and breathes in my ear. I have her face pressed against the machine’s colorful shell and her arm wrenched up between her shoulder blades before I can think straight. I let her go and apologize like I really mean the words coming out of my mouth, but she sees that my eyes are wild.

  I try, once, to walk into the ladies room as if the task is nothing, but I cannot make myself undress, even partially, knowing women surround me. They are too close, and I smell their scents, hear the elimination of their bowels and bladders, and feel myself drifting into a coma-like state. I have been in the sole company of women, against my will, for so many years that now I can barely stand to look at myself in the mirror, let alone suffer through another woman violating my personal space.

  I am crippled and I know it. I think I do a decent job of covering my missteps and blending in as much as possible, until the night Stella sidles up to me as I squirt goo. I swipe sweat from my forehead and slide her a look. She looks around to make sure no one can hear us and leans in.

  “How long you been out?” she asks.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. How long you been out?”

  We stare, both looking at one and the same. She is older than I am by at least two decades, but our eyes still lock around the recognition simmering in the air between us. I wonder what she did, when, and if it was as bad as what I did. “Been out of what?” I say, just to make sure we are talking about the same thing. Beige thinks I should be funny, and Stella might too.

  “You can play dumb if you want to, but you can’t fool me. Like recognizes like.” I keep squirting and she takes on the job of flipping the phony Twinkies onto their bellies on the baking sheet, which is the second part of my job description. We go on like this for several minutes, and then she speaks again. “They got seventeen years out of me before they finally decided they couldn’t get no more. Took all my best years from me and then they put me out on the street. You, though, you still got some good years left in you.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I know so,” she insists, backhanding her own sweat and catching my eyes. “It gets easier.” I don’t answer, but I do listen.

  I try to take what she says with me on the bus, try to pick a seat next to someone instead of three seats away. Try to fight the need to stand, gripping the pole and swaying back and forth as the bus moves, even though there is a perfectly good seat a few feet away. If it is wedged between two people, I will not sit down. I cannot. Easy is a word that I don’t remember.

  I tell myself a joke: What do you get when you combine a fool, a jackass, and a lost cause? Me. But I don’t laugh.

  Beige circles around me like Sugar Ray Leonard, careful not to say too much, afraid of actually winding up in a conversation with me. She’s always in my peripheral vision, so that I look up and she is part of the scenery. Beyond the pleasantries I force from her lips, she doesn’t say much, but her eyes follow my every move. I feel privileged to have even that.

  She crinkles her nose in distaste at the food I buy for myself and cook when the kitchen is finally clear. A meal without meat is inconceivable to her, and she sits across the table from me, pretending to do her homework, watching me crunch vegetable after vegetable. I watch her watch me and follow her lead, saying nothing. It is enough that she wants to be around me—though I probably couldn’t pay her to admit it.

  Beige struggles in math, and though Vicky is a nurse practitioner, she isn’t much help when it comes to algebraic equations. Twice she warned me against the dangers of douching, and three times she has advised me on which painkillers are most effective for the migraines that sneak up on me. But, when Beige presents her with her math book for clarification, she looks cross-eyed.

  She will eat her own foot before she asks me for help. Not once does she turn to me and ask if I know how to work out an equation. She has asked if I am funny, but she doesn’t ask if I know anything about algebra. More than once, Vicky catches my eyes across the kitchen table, silently pleading for intervention, but I look away. I know the shit backward and forward, but I will eat my own foot before I tread where I’m not wanted.

  This is my new freedom resolution: Beige will have to meet me halfway.

  Vicky is an instigator though. Always has been, now that I think about it. “Leenie, do you remember what the hell pi is?” she says as if she doesn’t have a clue. As if there isn’t a formula key at the top of the page.

  I take a soy burger out of the oven and slide it onto a waiting bun. Look at her like, duh. “Three point one four.”

  “How many damn exponents can one number have?” she complains another evening. I abandon the salad I am scarfing down and lean over her shoulder. I accidentally brush against Beige’s arm, and she steps back so I don’t have to touch her again.

  I pretend I don’t notice. Vicky has scribbled all over a sheet of scrap paper, and I can’t make out anything she’s written. “Give me the damn book, Vicky,” I snap, irritated because she is mangling numbers beyond recognition. I work six problems before I realize that Vicky has disappeared and only Beige is leaning over my shoulder. Speechless, I hand her the book and the sample problems and go back to my salad, a little hurt that she flinches when my fingers touch hers.

  The last straw is when Vicky drifts into the kitchen on a cloud of dreamy smiles and breezy breaths, and hands me what she calls presents. She found them in her papers, she says, and she thinks I should have them. Again. They belong to me, she tells me.

  She waits to see what my reaction will be, but she is waiting in vain. I stare first at my bachelor’s degree as if I don’t recognize the name stamped on the paper, and then at my master’s degree like it is capable of rolling itself into a snake and biting me. My face is blank, unable to twist itself into any particular expression. I wonder why I didn’t think to ask where my diplomas were before now.

  “What are they?” Beige wants to know. I feel her breath on the back of my neck as she curls her body around my shoulder to see for herself. She reads the words out loud, not knowing that each one is like a drop of cold water down the back of my shirt.

  “Your mom’s c
ollege degrees,” Vicky says.

  I don’t say anything. And then I say, “I taught you how to read when you were four. You helped me study for this one.” I hold up the master’s degree and without thinking, touch her hand where it is wrapped around the back of my chair. “I wrote out test questions and had you read them to me while I made dinner or did laundry.” I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that she jumps away from my touch, looks at her hand as if it might be contaminated, but I make myself keep talking. “You might’ve been the only four-year-old in the city who knew what a motherboard was. It was . . .”

  I trail off, suddenly tired of the sound of my own voice. She isn’t really listening, and I am talking just to hear myself talk. Vicky pities me; I can see it in her face, and I don’t want her pity. I just want my daughter back.

  I swallow and stare at Beige until she has no choice but to give me her eyes. My eyes. “It doesn’t rub off,” I tell her. “It’s not contagious.” She looks doubtful.

  Denny is the one who plants the concept of locking my hair into my mind. After what happens happens, I wear a short afro day after day and month after month, and discover that natural slips into my soul like butter on warm bread. I like the way my hair is a little bit curly and a little bit frizzy, but I don’t like the way I have to wrestle it into a circle every day, after I sleep it into a square.

  She sits me between her thighs and takes forever twisting carefully parted sections. I feel the warmth of her hands on my scalp and I fall asleep with my face pressed into her thigh. She shakes me awake and tells me to look at what she’s done and I fall in love.

  “They’ll lock up if you don’t comb ’em out,” she warns me when I come to her straight from the shower, for her to tighten them up. This is not the first time I have come, wanting her fingers on my scalp and ready to doze off in bliss.

  I settle myself on the floor between her thighs and lay my head back.