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  They drape my shoulders now, my locks, and a few of the more feisty ones race ahead toward the middle of my back. I find a shop not far from the factory that is full of chattering African women, and I give myself over to them. They flutter around me when I walk through the door, admiring my locks and commenting to themselves in a language that sounds angry and confrontational. Then one of them takes my hand and leads me over to the shampoo bowl.

  Fingernails scrub at my scalp and I moan loudly. I can almost convince myself that the hard rim of the sink is Denny’s thigh and the fingers running through my hair are hers—almost.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see something that catches my attention. Pointing like a child, I look up at the woman looming over me. She follows the direction of my finger and then grins down at me. She adjusts the water and rinses my locks until I can hear them squeak, pulls the corners of my eyes toward my ears as she wrings them out.

  “Cowry shells?”

  “Yeah,” I say. There is a jar full on a shelf across the room. “How much extra?”

  “I put a few in for you, no charge. They bring good luck.” Her face is serious as a heart attack. Makes me wonder if I still have the smell on me, if it really does rub off. “You need good luck, am I right?”

  I am speechless, suddenly snatched back in time.

  I tell Yo-Yo, for the third time: “Luck ain’t got shit to do with it. I told you I learned how to do this kind of stuff way back when, so that’s how I know what I’m talking about. Pay attention because we need to do this real quick and get the hell out of here.”

  We are using one of ten computers that the prison has for inmate use, and we are using it when we should be asleep. She won’t even consider doing what she is doing during daylight hours, which puzzles the hell out of me, but I go along with the secrecy that she thinks she has to have. I teach her how to read at night, using the books I am never without, and we write letters to her children when no one is around to see.

  She has written four of them so far, one for each of her kids, but she has no idea where to mail the last one. The oldest three are all in the same foster home and the foster parents are kind enough to send her pictures every now and again. Kind enough to realize that she might want to have the luxury of recognizing her kids if she ever passes them on the street. The youngest is twelve now, and Yo-Yo has no idea where she is. Somewhere in the state, we know that much, but exactly where is a mystery we are trying to solve.

  I surf the Internet until I locate a search engine that I built. I am a hacker, which is against the law, but I am already wearing shackles, so what more can they do to me? It makes me laugh to discover that passwords have never been changed and security is easily breachable. My fingers fly over the keyboard and I frown in concentration.

  “They want to adopt her,” Yo-Yo says as if she is talking to herself. “We can’t let that shit happen. They can’t do that shit without asking me, can they?”

  She wants me to tell her that they can’t, but all I can offer her is a clueless shrug. Computers are my thing, and social service goings-on are like hieroglyphics to me.

  “What’s that fucking case worker’s name anyway?”

  “Scagnomilio,” I remind her absently, still typing. “Call that bitch tomorrow.”

  “And tell her what?”

  I reach for the pencil I brought with me, slide a piece of paper in front of me and start scribbling. I finish copying the information the screen gives me illegally and pass it over my shoulder to her. “Tell her Fred and JoAnn Price, of sixty-two-eleven Crowder Street, can’t adopt your baby without asking you first.”

  Yo-Yo whoops at the top of her lungs and dances around the room like a fool, clutching the paper to her chest in a million wrinkles. She makes so much noise that I hop up and cover her mouth with my hand. “You trying to get us time in the hole?”

  “The food’s better,” she says, smiling. “And anyway, can’t nothing touch us tonight. Girl, you my lucky charm. That’s what I’m calling your ass from now on. Lucky Charm, like the cereal. ’Cept you ain’t green and shit.”

  “Please don’t,” I say, already hating the nickname. I shake my head and go back to the computer, back my way out of the website I have violated and then shut down the machine.

  “Too late.” Yo-Yo reads the words on the paper the way I taught her, sounding out each syllable slowly and then saying the whole word in one breath. “I owe you one, Lucky.”

  “You don’t owe me shit. And don’t call me Lucky.” The African woman taps me on my shoulder to get my attention. She is done shampooing my hair and needs me to sit up. I zoned out, and she is wondering if she should be concerned. “Sorry,” I mumble and let her lead me over to her chair.

  “I’m Anta,” she tells me as she clamps a hank of locks together and then reaches for a jar of beeswax. “What’s your name?”

  I open my mouth and out comes, “Lucky.”

  Anger management class reminds me of the drug education groups I attended when I was inside. A bunch of women sitting around in a circle, staring at each other and trying to look like they’re listening. It’s an hour and a half out of my life every week, for the next twelve weeks, but it is free. I can’t recall anything else that I have to do from six to seven-thirty on Thursday evenings.

  I frown when it is my turn to stand up and introduce myself, say why I am here and what I hope to learn. I want to say I am here because I have to be and I already know more than I ever wanted to know about anger and how to control it, but I don’t. I mumble complete bullshit about wanting to learn new tools for controlling anger and that completing the class means one less parole violation. Everyone laughs and one woman shakes her head like she knows what I am saying. I take my seat, glad to be out of the spotlight, and wait for the woman next to me to stand and start talking.

  I am totally unprepared for the facilitator’s question when it comes at me from out of left field. “Why don’t you tell us a little about some of the issues you’ve experienced with anger management, Helena?” Vivian is her name, and she has already told us that she is a clinical psychologist working on her PhD. She is short and heavy from the waist down, and she wears a beehive of elaborate-looking cornrows that are in need of a do-over. I don’t like the way she seems to be looking into my soul, and I want to tell her not to waste her time because I don’t have one.

  “I can’t honestly say I have had issues,” I lie.

  “So you’re only here because your parole officer is making you come?”

  “Exactly.”

  She holds my eyes and lets me see the wheels turning in her head. When they grind to a halt, she nods slowly and touches a finger to her lips. “I guess we’ll see about that, won’t we?”

  “I guess we will.” Bitch.

  Chapter Five

  “Do me a favor,” I say to Beige as I come in the kitchen. She is fishing around in the refrigerator, and I stop just shy of the door and hold up the half-empty jar of cocoa and shea butter cream that I brought with me. “When you want to borrow something that belongs to me, ask first, okay?”

  “I haven’t borrowed anything from you,” she says, careful not to look at me. She grabs a bag of grapes and bumps the door shut with an imaginary hip. I smell the unmistakable scent of incrimination in the air she stirs in her wake.

  “Yeah, you did, and you just about used it all up, too. You don’t want me touching you, but you want to touch the things I touch, things that belong to me. You don’t think that’s disrespectful?”

  “It’s just some cream,” she drawls, and I want to pull her hair. One after another, grapes disappear into her mouth and she chews them slowly, as if she wants the taste of them to last forever. It is an evasion tactic and it pisses me off no end. This is the same strategy she employed after dumping a whole bottle of expensive cologne on the carpet in my bedroom when she was four. My room smelled like a whorehouse for months. Back then it was crayons and an upside-down coloring book. Now it is grapes, but the pri
nciple is still the same.

  “What about the socks I suddenly can’t find, the red ones? And the earrings I’ve been looking for since last week?” I buy myself one thing out of every paycheck—things I once had but that are long gone, like socks in every color except white. I have worn white socks for so long that I need an indefinite break from them, so I buy socks in vibrant colors. The red pair is my favorite. The two-tone gold earrings I am missing were favorites of mine too. They can’t help but be, since they’re the only pair I own.

  She steals from me, but I know it’s not really about possession of my things. Vicky has done what she can to see that Beige is materialistic. Everything she wears has someone’s name stamped or sewed on it. She doesn’t need the things I find on clearance and buy for myself, but she steals them anyway. I am not really angry, just puzzled.

  “I don’t know anything about any earrings,” she says.

  “Beige.” My voice is soft and patient sounding. “You’re wearing them right now.” I give her five long seconds to come up with something to say and she doesn’t. Then I leave her sitting there, eating grapes that she doesn’t really want.

  I go to my room and become restless, decide to go out and come back into the kitchen ready to roll. She takes in the sneakers on my feet, the jacket I wear and the shades on my face. I grab my keys from the table and a few grapes for the road, and treat her like she treats me. I don’t even acknowledge her presence.

  “Where are you going?” This is the first time she asks me that question.

  “Out,” I say over my shoulder. “You coming?” I think I hear a stampede behind me, too much rustling and rushing for just one person, but when I turn and look back at her, she comes toward me like she has all the time in the world.

  It is chilly outside, not quite winter but too early for spring, and I can almost see my breath in front of my face. Beige zips her jacket all the way up to her neck, and I tug at the tab of my own zipper until I feel air poking at the skin on my neck and chest. I don’t feel the cold so much as I do the liberation of it. As much as I want, I can have. I grin like an idiot as a gust of wind slams into me and picks my locks up from my scalp, holds them suspended in the air behind me.

  We say nothing as we walk, cross streets, and walk some more. I know where I am going, but she has no idea. Twice I glance over at her and see confusion marked on her face. She wants to know but will not ask. Probably thinks I’m taking her to a place where all the funny people hang out. Wherever that is. She trails me across one last street, and then I turn into a doorway at the side of a brick building. Along the front of the building there are stores and small boutiques, but the doorway I choose is partially hidden, more suspect looking.

  A bell jingles as I push the door open and bring Beige into another world. She sucks in a deep breath and smiles like she is in heaven. The smell of warm sandalwood is heavy in the room and soft music fills every available space. I can’t decide what I want to look at first, there is so much to see. Shelves of fragrant body oils, bolts of patterned cloth and figures hand carved from rich woods. Every time I come, I find something different to capture my attention, and this time it is a wooden statue of an African woman, naked from the waist up and balancing a woven basket on the crown of her head. She is so intricate and realistic looking that I hold my breath and wait for her to walk right past me.

  “I didn’t know this place was here,” Beige moves close and whispers to me.

  “There’s a lot of things you don’t know.” I glance at a rack of handmade earrings and necklaces and then at her. “Don’t put anything in your pocket without paying for it.”

  “I don’t steal.” She is offended, and it shows on her face in the way she rolls her eyes to the ceiling when I narrow my eyes and contradict her. My earrings are still dangling from her earlobes.

  This is what it’s like to shop with my daughter, I think as Beige oohs and ahhs over everything she sees. I follow her around the shop, only looking away from her when I have to, to nod at the owner of the shop and her teenage son, who is too busy staring at Beige to notice me. I watch her smooth dabs of body oil on the backs of her hands and then breathe the scents deep into her nostrils. I notice that she fingers the dashikis we stop to look at and admires the soft material. I run my hands over the statues that she touches and agree with her when she says something smells good, even if I don’t think it does. The sound of her voice mesmerizes me.

  I buy more of the cream she likes and feel good about myself when our arms brush against each other’s and she doesn’t shrink away.

  “What time is it?” I ask as we leave the shop. She falls in step beside me on the sidewalk and glances at the expensive watch on her wrist.

  “Ten past four. How come you don’t wear a watch?”

  “Haven’t needed one,” I say and leave it at that. In prison there is no concept of time in terms of seconds and minutes. The only thing that matters is the day you go in and the day you come out. The in-between is a gray area of existence—untime.

  “You don’t talk much,” she points out.

  “Where I’ve been, the less you say, the better. One thing I’ve noticed since I’ve been home is that people on the outside talk too much. Everybody’s always chattering about something, who’s doing what, when, where and why. Makes my ears tired.”

  “You think I talk too much?”

  I shake my head. “You don’t talk enough.”

  “I don’t know what to say to you half the time.”

  “Say anything. Tell me you hate me, tell me to go to hell, whatever you want to tell me. Just say something.”

  She thinks about what I have said for long seconds. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Don’t ask me if I’m funny again.”

  “Are you?”

  “Should I be?”

  “I don’t know. You could be, I guess.”

  “I’m not,” I say a few seconds later. Secretly, I wonder if I am lying to her and to myself. “But you’re right, I could be. Is that what you wanted to ask me?”

  “No, I was going to ask you what it was like.”

  An elderly woman bumps my shoulder as she passes and I reach out to steady her. She carries too many bags for her arms, and I help her shuffle them around until she has a firmer grip on them. I turn around just in time to collide with another shoulder, a man, and I go still as a rod. I see a hand come my way and move out of its path like I am dodging a projectile. He shrugs and keeps walking, and I breathe a sigh of relief.

  “I’m not the same person I was before I went to prison,” I admit to my daughter. It doesn’t cost me anything to be honest. “It was like dying and still having to live.”

  Apparently what I give her is enough because she doesn’t ask me anything else. We walk in silence until dusk settles around us and we are four blocks from Vicky’s house. I am in no hurry to get there, in no hurry to camp out in my room until it is time for me to sleep and then leave for work, so I reduce my pace to a stroll and push my hands in my jacket pockets.

  Beige nudges me with her elbow. “You don’t want to go back, do you?”

  “I never want to go back.”

  Vicky is eleven and I am nine. We are both frozen with shock, sitting close together on my grandmother’s porch, whispering back and forth. We have somehow made both of our bodies fit into one corner of the porch and it is uncomfortable, but I refuse to scoot even an inch away from her, nor she me. We have to be close, have to stick together.

  We have been together so long it is first and not second nature. Where she goes, I go. What she does, I do. We experience everything together, suffer everything together. We don’t know how else to be.

  “Grandma came in the room and saw me,” Vicky confides to me. Her lips are pressed so close to my ear that I feel the moisture her warm breath leaves behind. “She didn’t say nothing.”

  “Did you cry?” I want to know.

  “When I got through. She told me to get some tissue and blow my nos
e and then go outside and play. She said we gone have homemade caramel after lunch. She’s making it now and I can’t wait until it’s done.”

  I can, I think.

  The memory wants to linger, but I open my eyes and look around my room in the darkness. Push Vicky’s phantom voice away from my ear and roll over in bed. I count to ten and then try to fall asleep again.

  The telephone is something I don’t use very often. Everyone I need to talk to is under the same roof as me, except for Isolde, and I can’t think of anything that I would need to discuss with her, beyond formalities. Apparently, she feels the same way because she has yet to call Vicky’s house to speak with me. I imagine it’s because I’m probably the easiest client she has on her caseload. I’m not in the business of making waves, especially when I am the one who would be dragged under with the tide.

  I am folding laundry, the jeans and loose-fitting shirts that I have grown accustomed to living in, when Vicky comes into my room and holds out the cordless phone for me to take. I stare at it like it is on fire and I am gasoline, wondering what the hell I am supposed to do with it.

  “It’s for you,” Vicky says, inspecting the stacks of clothes on my bed. She flips through a mountain of soft faded denim and frowns, tugging on a pair of jeans toward the bottom of the stack. “Are these my jeans?”

  “No, they’re mine.”

  “Oh . . . well, they’re cute. Can they be mine?”

  “I don’t think so.” I laugh. Then I remember the phone and my frown matches hers.

  “Who is it?”

  “Mama. She wants to talk to you.”

  This is news to me. I have been home for almost two months and this will be the first time my mother has come looking for me. I realize that I have been waiting to find out what her reaction to me will be, to find out if it has changed in the five years or so since we last saw each other. In the beginning, she came to the prison at least once a month to visit me, and then she said the visits took too much out of her. Said she was having a hard time looking at my face after what I did. I have been waiting to see if she would come to me or ask me to come to her.