What You Don't Know(31)

And besides, Denver was her home. She’d been born there, lived her whole life there. She hadn’t realized that a place could be a part of someone until she was in California, where everything seemed a smidge off, the brick in the wall that wouldn’t quite line up with the rest, and it was enough to make her miserable.

And she still wanted to be close to Jacky.

So she moved back. Bought a house in the Whittier neighborhood, where she was able to stretch the inheritance her mother had left her further. It was an area where the neighbors were less likely to care who you were as long as you didn’t cause trouble, where people still knew how to mind their own business. It wasn’t all that far from one of their diners, the original one her father had opened, although it wasn’t theirs anymore, or even hers, but had been sold off long before to pay for lawyers and fees and whatever else the courts had cooked up. She doesn’t leave the house all that often, and she tries not to drive past any of the diners if she can help it. She doesn’t want to see something that used to be hers and never will be again. So she stays home and watches the peach tree fighting for life in the cold.

*

She visits Jacky once a week. Visiting is allowed for only a brief window on Wednesday mornings, so she wakes up early to make it to Sterling on time. It’s a long drive. For a while she tried listening to audiobooks as she drove, but she’d found her mind wandering, and she’d realize that half the book was gone and she had no idea what’d happened. She started listening to music, any kind, and then to nothing at all, it never mattered, only the howling of the wind as her car sliced along the interstate ever reached her.

“How can you still care about him?” a girlfriend asked, not long after Jacky was arrested. She’d lived with her mother for a while after the house was torn down in the tiny apartment her mother had rented since her father had died. “You don’t have to deal with him anymore. File for divorce.”

“I don’t want to talk about this,” Gloria had said. She was tired of these phone calls, sick of being told what to do by women who barely knew her. She’d gone to church with them, had gone shopping and traded recipes and gossiped, but they didn’t know her, and they certainly didn’t understand her marriage.

“He’s a monster, Gloria. He could’ve murdered you in your sleep. Have you ever thought of that?”

She carefully replaced the phone in the cradle. When it rang again, she ignored it. She’d turned the voicemail off, so there was never an answer, and sooner or later whoever was calling would get tired of the endless rings and hang up.

“I’d like some tea,” her mother had said, from the armchair she hardly ever left. Almost a year later Gloria would find her in that chair, her head canted strangely to one side and her mouth twisted into a cruel maw, dead from a stroke during the night. Her mother had never said a word about Jacky since his arrest, never asked questions or tried to talk about it, and Gloria thought that it might’ve been because her mother understood. Her parents had been married for fifty-two years when her father passed, and she thought her mother had a good idea of what she was going through because her father was difficult; he could be terribly mean, but when you were married you made things work, that was your job, you dealt with what was handed out, you made the best of what you got. It was like that old country song. Stand by your man, that’s how it went, and it wasn’t that way anymore, people bailed and filed for divorce at the first sign of trouble, but she hadn’t been raised that way, she’d made a promise and she was going to keep it.

*

“There’s a good sale on squash right now,” Gloria says. “I have to go back tomorrow, pick up some more before it goes off.”

“What kind of squash?”

“Spaghetti. And acorn.” She pauses. “Some college students moved in across the street last week. They’ve been throwing parties every night, and it keeps me up.”

“Why don’t you call the cops?”

She makes a face, picks at a loose thread hanging off the bottom of her skirt.

“It’s not that bad,” she says. Of course, Jacky doesn’t know that someone broke into her home a few months ago, stole everything of value. Her TV, her phone, even her clock radio. And the paintings Jacky made in prison, the ones she brought home every week and piled up in the garage—most of those were gone too. She’d filed a police report, and two cops had come out, they’d laughed when they realized who she was, then left without taking any notes, without taking her seriously, and she knew she’d never see any of her stolen belongings again. “I’m sure the police are busy with much more important things than my silly complaints.”

This is how it is every Wednesday with Jacky—an hour of boring conversation about nothing at all. About the grocery shopping she did the day before, the TV shows they both watch. He tells her about the menu in the cafeteria for the week, and about the guy two cells down who’d had a heart attack the week before and still isn’t back from the hospital wing. It’s exactly how they’d be talking to each other if Jacky wasn’t in prison, the mundane conversation of marriage, one week’s worth of talk compacted into sixty minutes over two old rotary phones as they look at each other through a pane of bulletproof glass. It’s the only way Jacky can get visitors, because he’s considered dangerous; the guards think Jacky might hurt her if he got the chance, they treat him with special care.