Do Not Pass Go (16 page)

“I saw Ronny for the first time the other day,” said Deet. “He was walking in the hallway and he stopped to knock on the window at Dad. He's got this big smile.”

Deet took the bag of potatoes Mom had bought and dumped them out of their bag into the bin he'd cleaned out for them. He looked to see if there were any bad ones.

“I wonder why no one ever came to visit Ronny,” he said.

Mom looked at him thoughtfully, then gave a little shrug. “I don't know.”

She took the eggs out of their carton and lined them up in their little wells in the refrigerator door.

“The other news is that they shipped Big Henry out, so we won't see him anymore.”

“Where to?”

“Dad didn't know. Some penitentiary where they keep guys who have a long time to serve. I'll miss seeing Big Henry. And his family! They just never stopped laughing. With all this hanging over their heads. Nobody to give haircuts now either.”

Mom shoved cans of soup in the cabinet over the sink with the canned fruit. It made Deet crazy to see her mess up his perfect system. He'd put them in the right places when he was cooking dinner. He spent a lot of time walking around behind Mom and P. J. and Jam, cleaning up their mess and disorder.

Mom slammed the last cupboard door and stuffed all the grocery bags into the garbage can. Deet pinched his lips together so he wouldn't remind her that he'd put a special bag in the pantry for the plastic grocery sacks, so they could be recycled. He was trying not to be a nag.

“Dad said he told Ronny to write to him and Ronny laughed and said that would never happen, because he wasn't any better at writing than he was at reading.”

“Ronny couldn't read or
write?
”

“Not much, I guess.”

“How could
that
happen?” Deet asked, horrified.

“That's what I asked Dad. He said Ronny had gone from one foster home to another, one school to another. It just never clicked with him. Dad said a lot of guys in there could hardly read.”

Deet stared at Mom. Not to be able to
read
. How
did people get by without being able to read? What could be worse?

When Deet sat down that night to do his homework, he looked for a quotation about someone who couldn't read. He found one that seemed pretty appropriate.

Better build schoolrooms for the boy than cells and gibbets for the man.

Dad says a lot of people in there can barely read. Schools shouldn't be allowed to let kids get out of school without being able to read, should they? That should be against the law, shouldn't it? It seems to me that maybe if you don't give people a good education, you can count on their getting into trouble. It's one of the saddest things I've found out about jail.

—ELIZA COOK

When Deet got his homework back at sixth period the next day, he read what Mr. Hodges had written at the top:

Did you know that the United States puts more
people in jail than any other industrial nation? And did you know that we also have the highest rate of illiteracy in a nation that's not “third world”? You're right about the connection between not being able to read and a life of trouble. Our country has a lot to be ashamed of.

And at the bottom of the page, Mr. Hodges had written:

Here's a quotation for you.

No evil so great but that some good comes of it.

When my mother had cancer, she went to a support group meeting—you know, a lot of people with cancer—and the guy who ran the support group asked them all to talk about the good things that cancer had done for them. They were all shocked to think that anyone could talk about good coming from a disease so horrible, one that could kill you.
That did kill my mother. But then my mom said they all started to think and talk about the good things. One woman said it brought her closer to her kids. And so on. Maybe you'd write something for me about that—the good things this jail experience has done for you, your dad, your family.

—PLATO

Deet thought about that for a long time, and so many things came to mind that he started to make a list.

He printed Plato's quotation neatly at the top of a clean page and began to write.

When you stop and think about it, maybe it was a good thing. Everyone sort of stopped what they were doing and said, maybe we're off course here! Maybe we need to do things differently. I think my dad thinks it was good to get stopped before he'd been taking drugs too long to quit. And he thinks about how he might have hurt someone, driving when he wasn't straight. I like it that my dad started to read, too.

I guess the really good things are what we
learned about people. Well, maybe my mom and dad knew most of it already, but I didn't. There are some people we've known all our lives—the guys Dad works with and our neighbor Sally, who turned out to be really good friends. I never thought about friends before. I thought it just meant people you hang out with. I never thought I had any friends, really.

There's Nelly, who rides the bus with me. I never thought much about Nelly, but he is a real friend. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but it's like he's guarding me. I never knew Nelly would care so much about somebody else's feelings. I'm glad I found that out about Nelly, because to tell you the truth, I never gave him much credit.

And other people, who you thought of as enemies, some of them turned out to be friends too. Like I thought prison guards were all guys who like to shove people around. But there's Mr. Tobolowsky. I don't know how he got to be a guard, but he's just this little skinny guy who sees inside
people. He sees things other people don't think about. Like he told this one woman, “It must be hard to work and take care of a baby and visit here all the time.” She just about melted, to think someone would notice. And he talks to me, and to Sheena. He told me what a nice guy my dad was, and I felt like someone had given me a present. Because even though my dad is in jail, someone noticed what he was like, he was a real person to Mr. Tobolowsky. And he asked Sheena how her brother was getting along. He told her he was worried because Billy, her brother, is very depressed. He notices things about people, and he worries about them.

So that's another good thing I learned, not to dislike someone before you know them.

And we met a lot of people we'd never have met it this hadn't happened, and we've heard a lot of stories. All the stories make us feel lucky. Like before, we never noticed how good we had it. Especially me. I never noticed what great parents I had.

It was late in the afternoon on Easter Sunday when Grandma called again.

“Deet, I have some little things for the girls for Easter. Ask your Mom if I can bring them over.”

He should have realized that Grandma wouldn't let a holiday go unnoticed. She was always big on Valentine's Day and Easter and birthdays, things like that, nothing last-minute like Mom. Grandma really put her whole heart into it.

“Mom had to work today, because they get so many people on Easter,” he said, “but sure, come on over.” Then he remembered that Grandma never drove the car if she didn't have to, especially after dark.

“Is Grandpa coming?” he asked, dreading the answer.

No,” she said brightly. “Just me.”

The girls were delighted to see Grandma. She brought chocolate bunnies and her special Easter pastries, huge Easter cards, the kind that cost a lot of money, and lots of packages tied with lavender and yellow ribbon. There was candy for Mom and a shirt for Deet, and each girl had a new outfit.

When the phone rang and P. J. yelled, “It's Dad!” Grandma looked shocked.

“He calls on the phone?”

“Almost every day,” Deet explained, “unless they have a lockdown. Then …” He stopped in midsentence because he had a feeling Grandma wouldn't want to know about prison routine.

P. J. was chattering away to Dad when Grandma suddenly walked to the phone and said to her, “May I talk to him, please?”

P. J. threw Deet a startled look, then handed the phone to Grandma, who turned her back to them before she began to speak.

“Charley, this is Mom. How are you, son?” Deet and the girls could tell from the sound of her voice that she was crying. She was listening to Dad and trying to get control of herself.

At last she handed the phone back to P. J. and carefully wiped the bottom lids of her eyes with the tip of her broad, wrinkled thumb.

She bustled about, picking up wrapping paper from the rug, not looking at Deet.

“Well,” she said, “he sounds all right. It was so noisy in there, just terrible. I could hardly hear him. But he sounds all right.”

She pinched her lips together and frowned at Deet.

“He's not the first person who ever got in trouble, you know, Deet.”

“Well, yeah, I know that, Grandma.”

“Well, your grandfather is a stubborn Finn,” she said. “He doesn't know that.”

Deet had never known Grandma to speak so firmly before. And he'd never known she had ideas before, never known that she would ever disagree with Grandpa.

She put her parka on. “Tell your mom I'll come again, Deet, and tell her to call on me if she needs any help. And tell her I'm sorry that Grandpa yelled at her.”

After she left, and the girls were asleep, Deet added a few more sentences to his list of good things.

My grandma, who was this sort of nonperson, just my grandpa's shadow, came out and kind of defied him. That was a really good thing. I never
knew she had that in her before. I think I used to make a lot of mistakes about people before this happened.

The next time Deet went to the jail, Andy sat next to him on the cold metal stools in the visiting room. They were waiting for the guard to let the prisoners in, when the guard on duty picked up the phone opposite Andy and said something to him.

Andy looked shocked. “What?” he said. “Are you sure?”

The guard nodded, looking sympathetic.

Andy turned to Deet. “She's refused to see me,” he said, wonderingly. “She told him to tell me she doesn't want to see me anymore.”

Andy stared at the wall for a few seconds, then got up and left. “See you,” he said.

The guard let in a woman prisoner with a big belly. Pregnant. She sat down opposite her visitor, a guy with a Spanish accent who didn't even say hello but began to argue furiously with her, as if he was continuing an argument from the day before. “You can't give this
baby away,” he said. The woman on the other side was angry, thrusting her chin out to make a point, her belly pushed against the metal counter. “
I'll
take care of him,” the man said. “Listen to me!”

Deet felt sad listening to the man who wanted to take care of his baby, felt sad thinking about the look on Andy's face when he left. The more he saw of people in this jail, the sadder he got about people altogether. And the luckier he felt.

On the day before Dad's trial,
Mom gave Deet a bag of clean clothes to take to the jail, because Dad could wear street clothes when he went in front of the judge the next morning. She wouldn't let Deet go to the trial with her. “Dad doesn't want you to go, and I don't either,” she said.

“Sheena went to her brother's trial,” said Deet. “She said it was awful, hearing people talk about her brother like he was … a criminal.” He and Mom smiled at each other, it sounded so funny. Could you believe they were finding something like this funny?

“God, she's brave,” said Mom. “I don't think I could have done that at her age.”

“Is Dad nervous?”

“He's a wreck,” said Mom.

“But remember what the lawyer told you. We know what's going to happen. It's not as if he was pleading not guilty and there was a jury and all. This is just cut and dried. That's what the lawyer said.”

“Yes, I know,” said Mom, “but what if the judge has had a bad day? What if he's feeling crabby?”

“It's not the trial you have to worry about,” said Deet. “It's the sentencing. That's what everyone says. This guy, Andy, was telling me. If you plead guilty there's nothing to the trial, really, but it's the sentencing where things can get crazy.”

Deet bent down to straighten up the boots and shoes, which were jumbled together by the door. With his back turned to her, he said, “Mom?”

“What?”

“When Dad went to his hearing, I saw him when they were bringing him back to the jail. He had handcuffs on. And chains on his ankles. He was chained at the ankles to this other guy. That's what they do when they're out of the jail. It's the worst thing I ever saw.” He turned to look at her. “You've got to get ready for that.”

Mom looked at Deet, horrified. “Oh, my god,” she murmured. Deet could see that she was trying to imagine it, but he knew that all the imagining in the world wouldn't show her what men looked like hobbled together, humiliated, chained.