“This is the only time we ever eat out,”
Caylie
says. “Sundays after church and before we go see Mama in jail.”
“
Shh
!”
Caylie’s
mamaw
says. “You don’t want all these people thinking we’re trash.”
We’re sitting at a booth in the
Hardee’s
at Morgan, so it’s not exactly a fancy restaurant. The people eating here are wearing NASCAR T-shirts and trucker caps and don’t look like they’d judge anybody as trashy.
“It’s okay,
Mamaw
,”
Caylie
says, dipping a
french
fry in a tiny paper cup of ketchup.
“I know, honey,”
Mamaw
says. “Going there just makes me nervous.”
“Well at least you’ll go see her,”
Caylie
says. “Papaw always stays home.”
“It’s too hard for him to see his daughter like that,”
Mamaw
says, holding her Styrofoam cup of coffee in both hands. “It’s hard for me too, but I can stand it. The Lord made women the weaker vessels in a lot of ways, but a woman can stand more pain than a man can.”
One look in
Caylie’s
mamaw’s
milky blue eyes, and I’m in her head.
This is not how I wanted it,
she thinks.
Sunday dinner at a hamburger stand on my way to see Lisa in jail. It should’ve been me cooking a big dinner after church and Lisa and a nice husband and her babies coming over, and Bob and his wife and babies coming over, and everybody praying and eating and talking and laughing. Not Lisa in jail and Bob off in Ohio and just coming home twice a year.
When I come back to myself, I notice I’ve reached across the table and taken
Caylie’s
mamaw’s
thin-skinned, bony hand. She looks a little surprised, but she smiles at me. “Thank you, Ruth,” she says. “Sometimes you just need somebody to hold on to. You’re a good girl.”
I say thank you even though my name’s not Ruth and I’m not even sure that I’m a good girl.
The Morgan County Jail is a big gray concrete box. We have to walk through a metal detector to get inside, and
Mamaw
Prater hands her wedding ring and watch to the guard before she walks through.
It’s hard to go into some buildings when you have the Sight. Hospitals are bad because my head fills with the pain and fear of the patients inside. But jail is even worse. As soon as we’re inside, I’m hit with a giant wrecking ball of emotions: anger, fear, frustration, loneliness, boredom, regret. I can’t see any of the prisoners yet, but I sure can feel them.
It must show on my face because
Caylie
asks, “Are you okay, Mir—Ruth?”
I’m glad she caught herself. “Yeah,” I say, but it comes out choked and breathless, like somebody trying to talk after being punched in the stomach. “I’ve never been in a jail before. I just got a panicky feeling there for a second.”
“I get that sometimes, too,”
Caylie
says. “The first time I came here I got sick.”
We follow
Caylie’s
mamaw
to a desk where a young police officer is sitting. She smiles and says, “Hello, Mrs. Prater. You know the drill. I just need to check your bags before you come in.”
Mamaw
Prater hands the police officer her purse and a plastic
Walmart
bag full of socks and underwear. “Nothing dangerous here,” she says. “But I’ll have to pat you ladies down just the same.”
I watch as
Mamaw
Prater and
Caylie
take turns standing still while the young officer touches them in places strangers don’t usually touch. Then it’s my turn.
“Are you a member of the family, too?” the officer asks as she feels around to make sure I’m not carrying drugs or a weapon.
“This is my friend Ruth,”
Caylie
says.
“Hi,” I say to the officer, thinking it’s weird to be greeting somebody who just touched me all over my body. I wonder if it’s a crime to impersonate somebody else while talking to a police officer. I figure it probably is. My stomach unclenches a little when she waves us through.
I had imagined the place where we’d visit
Caylie’s
mom would be like in the movies, where you talk to each other on phones across a glass screen. Instead, the visiting room looks like a plain, ugly school cafeteria with concrete block walls and long tables where prisoners in orange jumpsuits sit talking with friends and family members. One skinny, stringy-haired prisoner is holding a chubby baby on her lap. I wonder if it’s hers, and just like that, another weight of feelings crashes down on me, and I hear the thoughts of the inmates and their family members join together into the saddest song in the world.
I stagger over to a table with
Caylie
and her
mamaw
, sit down, and try to get control of my mind.
When a guard brings in
Caylie’s
mom, she is unrecognizable as the woman in the photograph on
Caylie’s
chest of drawers. Her cheeks are sunken, her eyes have pouches under them, and her blond hair is half brown from where the dye has grown out of it. The orange jumpsuit does nothing to improve her looks, but maybe that’s part of the punishment. She does smile when she sees
Caylie
, though, and I see a small glimmer of who she was in the photograph.
She and
Caylie
hug each other tight. Then she takes the
Walmart
bag from
Mamaw
Prater and looks inside. “Lord, Mama, you
brung
me more socks!” she says. “You done
brung
me so many already I could change them three times a day and still have clean ones left over.”
Mamaw
Prater can’t seem to smile. “I know. I just always feel like I ought to bring you something, and the list of what they let you bring is so small.”
“You could always make sock puppets,”
Caylie
says.
Her mother grins. “I could, couldn’t I? Then we could put on a prison puppet show.”
Mamaw
Prater’s mouth is a stern line. “Lisa, I don’t think you ought to be joking around like this.”
“I know you don’t,”
Caylie’s
mom says. “But I have to laugh to keep from crying.” For the first time, she looks at me. “Do I know you?”
“Mom, this is my friend Ruth,”
Caylie
says. “She came to see if she could help”—she looks over at her
mamaw
and I hear her think,
I can’t say why she’s really here in front of
Mamaw
— “if she could pray with us.”
“Oh,”
Caylie’s
mom says. She doesn’t sound too excited by the idea of a prayer circle. “Well, Ruth, I’m Lisa. This
ain’t
the way I like to look when I meet somebody. I’m making a real good first impression, huh?”
I don’t have to go inside her head to feel her embarrassment. I almost tell her not to worry, that she looks fine, but I figure I’m already lying enough by pretending to be somebody I’m not. Instead I say, “How you look doesn’t matter.”
“It’s the soul that matters,”
Mamaw
Prater says, “which is why we need to pray.” She leads us in a long prayer. I open my eyes for a second and see that Lisa is staring off into the distance, her jaw set, like a person waiting for an ordeal to be over.
After
Mamaw
finally says amen, Lisa’s expression relaxes, and she looks at her daughter. “So what’s up with you,
Caylie
June?”
“Not much,”
Caylie
says, looking down like she’s shy all of a sudden. “School. Church. More church.”
Lisa grins wide. “Welcome to my childhood.”
“We raised you good,”
Mamaw
Prater says. “I never dreamed you’d end up in a place like this.”
“Me neither, Mama. But I would’ve thought if I did end up in a place like this, you would’ve believed me when I said I was innocent.”
I look into Lisa’s sad blue eyes and fall into them like a deep well until I’m inside her mind. I swim around in images: a younger, happier Lisa at a bar laughing and dancing the two-step with a handsome dark-haired man in a cowboy hat. Lisa and the man, now in a John Deere cap, and a younger
Caylie
—ten? Eleven?—sitting around the dinner table in a tidy trailer laughing and eating spaghetti. Lisa in pajamas sitting in the living room, watching the clock and smoking a cigarette. The door opening, the man looking nervous and twitchy. An argument.
Sometimes if I concentrate really hard, I can go deeper into a person’s thoughts. I focus and try harder. The inside of the trailer isn’t tidy anymore. The man, who looks thinner and paler, sits on the couch. The coffee table in front of him is littered with beer cans, an overflowing ashtray, cigarette lighters, and some kind of white powder. He’s holding a small pipe which he offers to Lisa. Most of the scene unfolds like a silent movie, but I hear two words of Lisa’s:
no
and
poison
.
Now I’m so deep in her mind I can’t see my way out. I hope nobody on the outside is talking to me because I’m blind and deaf to everything outside of Lisa’s head. I see her talking with a man in a worker’s uniform who takes the lock off the trailer’s front door and puts in a new one. I see her packing cowboy shirts and jeans and men’s underwear into a cardboard box and leaving it in the trailer’s front yard. I sift
though
other memories: the man beating on the door, the man trying to talk to her at the grocery store where she works until the manager makes him leave. And then there’s the memory I’m after: the police searching the trailer and opening the trunk of her car to find what looks like a couple of soda bottles to me but must be something much worse because all these police officers are looking at them and talking about them, and then Lisa is in handcuffs, and
Caylie
is screaming, “No!”
“No,”
Caylie
says, bringing me back into my surroundings. “There’s no school chorus at Wilder Middle, but
Mamaw’s
got me singing in the youth choir at church.”
“Is that where
Caylie
met you, Ruth?” Lisa asks.
I hope this is the first question she’s asked me. “No, ma’am,” I say. “We met at school.” My voice sounds strange, shaky. I haven’t quite come back to myself, and somehow I feel hot and cold at the same time. I want to ask Lisa about all the things I saw in her head, but I can’t. Especially not with
Mamaw
Prater here.
On the way home,
Caylie
rides with me in the back seat of her
mamaw’s
battered old Chrysler. She touches my hand so I look at her. Her mouth forms the shape of the words “Did you see anything?” but no sound comes out.
I look to the front seat to make sure
Mamaw
Prater isn’t paying attention. Then I nod.
“So what was it like?” Adam asks as we settle at our cafeteria table. “I’ve never been in a jail.”
“You keep stealing those extra mustard packets from the lunch line, and that could change,” I say, watching him squeeze a disgusting amount of mustard on the ham sandwich he brought from home. “The jail was pretty grim,” I say, but then I see
Caylie
coming toward our table with a tray. “I’ll tell you about it later. I don’t want to tell you how bad it is in front of her.”
“Hey, Adam. Hey, Miranda,”
Caylie
says, settling down across from us. “I don’t want to be rude, but not knowing what you saw yesterday when we were with my mom is killing me. So talk.”
I set down my cheese sandwich. “Okay. Well, I saw your mom with a guy. Good looking, tall. Kind of a cowboy type.”
“Daryl,”
Caylie
says. “Mom’s ex-boyfriend. Ex-
fiance
, really. But things got ugly, and the wedding never happened.”
“I saw some of that,” I say. “I saw him using...I guess it was meth. Then I saw them fighting and her packing up his stuff and changing the locks on him.”
“That’s the way it went down,”
Caylie
says. “But when you were...seeing stuff, did you see her using?”