The Good Wife (21 page)

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Authors: Stewart O'Nan

BOOK: The Good Wife
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ALL WEEK SHE BUYS THINGS AND SETS THEM ASIDE SO PACKING THE night before will go easier: a red Nerf football with the Bills’ logo on it; mini cardboard salt and pepper shakers like you take to a picnic; a new shortie nightgown still in its nest of tissue paper. She follows the long list of dos and don’ts in the packet the coordinator sent. No glass bottles, no aerosol cans, no alcohol (and that includes mouthwash and perfume), no candles, no rope. Not all of it’s common sense: no newspapers from that day, no photo albums. She needs to be careful; she knows they’ll confiscate anything iffy. She calls to make sure she can bring a homemade lasagna.
The open bags distract her—all of them labeled with his name and ID number on masking tape. She can’t remember the last time she and Tommy took a trip, probably when they went camping and it rained. She sees them playing cards in the truck with the heater whirring, then stops herself with a quick shake of her head like she’s chasing a fly.
She’s sure she’s forgetting something. Brand-new underwear, two new bras, two pairs of shorts, her best pair of jeans, two tops, flip-flops …
Casey’s taking his own pillow and a box of his favorite cinnamon Pop-Tarts—a bribe she wishes she resisted. She’s bringing a deck of cards and some books for them to read. She’s still not sure
it’s a good idea, bringing him. When she asks him what’s the first thing he wants to do with Daddy, he doesn’t have an answer.
“The first thing I’m going to do is give him a big kiss and a hug,” she says.
Her mother’s offered to watch Casey, but they’re already signed up as a family. And they
are
a family. Patty’s not about to give that up now, when they’re almost together again.
Eileen kids Patty that she’d better double up on her pills, and while Patty goes along with the joke, she’s embarrassed—and feels bad for Eileen, since she and Cy have stopped trying. It makes Patty think how hard it is to keep anything secret. She and Tommy will find a way to be intimate again, she’s not worried, but that time should be theirs alone, not shared with the rest of the world. In a way, it’s already spoiled.
The crack about her pills opens an even deeper chasm. Because they’ve never had a chance to be together, she just expected that Casey would grow up an only child. Now they have to make a decision. Six years between siblings isn’t that much, or seven, considering. Patty’s always wanted a girl—three girls, ideally, a rerun of her childhood. That’s not going to happen, but one is a possibility. It’s another reason she envies Shannon, her bond with Kyra. It seems just more of Shannon’s luck, having one of each (and more of Eileen’s, having none). Patty thinks she’s too young to give up that part of her life. It feels wrong, like she’s closing off a whole future, one richer, more intricate than the one she can see.
She’s so close now, a day, then less. She can’t stop watching the clock, turning her wrist over to check, like she might miss it. At the P&C in Waverly she makes a ceremony of buying the fresh fruit Tommy requested. She doesn’t mind standing in line while the old lady in front of her fumbles with her coupons. Everything’s arranged: she’s off this weekend, there’s gas in the truck, she’s got
traveling money. At home, after dinner, she packs Casey’s bag, leaving his toothbrush holder on the sink for the morning. Once he’s down, she puts together a box in the kitchen, her mother offering to help and then watching from the table. Patty knows she’s going to say something, so why all the suspense?
“What time are you leaving?” she finally begins.
“I don’t know,” Patty says, “ten?” like she hasn’t planned it to the minute.
“It’s going to be lonely around here,” her mother says.
“Next time you can come with us.”
“No thanks,” her mother says, like it’s a joke.
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are.”
Patty wonders why they do this to each other. She doesn’t want her mother to come, even if by some miracle she’d consider it; she only said it to get her going, which is dumb.
In the morning, her mother comes outside to see them off, and Patty wants to apologize. It’s only as they’re hugging goodbye that Patty thanks her for everything, as if they’re moving, setting off for a new life.
“Well,” her mother says, “say hello for me.”
Casey’s waiting in the truck. Patty takes an extra minute to make sure the lasagna’s secure, then glides down the drive, one arm out the window, waving backwards.
The drive up is drenched in a clear summer light. The lake camps are busy, their turnarounds crammed with station wagons. She sees a family out water-skiing, glimpses their white wake between the speeding trees. She points them out to Casey, too late, but just laughs. Usually she has to put on an act for him; not today. For the first time since she’s made this drive—and she’s done it hundreds of times, she knows the names on the mailboxes, knows
the gardens and lawn ornaments, the junked cars outside the body shops—she’s not going to have to see it all again tonight.
She hangs on to the mood through downtown Auburn, across the tracks and along Wall Street, where there’s special Family Reunion parking along the wall. She’s left enough time to find the entrance so they don’t have to go wandering around with all their stuff.
Processing takes two hours (for no reason; there’s six of them and they’ve all been cleared in advance), and the cell of a waiting room is so air-conditioned it’s cold. It’s also non-smoking and doesn’t have any vending machines. Casey’s the only child. Of the other visitors, only one’s a regular, a short, Spanish-speaking woman who takes the bus from Albany; the others must be from downstate. Since it’s their first time, Patty has to show her marriage license. She and Casey have their pictures taken. Patty thinks it’s for an ID, but after she signs hers, the officer slides it into a file and she sits down empty-handed.
They’re all moved together, like a team. “Ladies,” the officer at the desk says, taking a key ring from a locked drawer, “please follow me, and for your own safety, stick close.”
She takes Casey’s hand and looks down at him to show it’s okay, this is just like a regular visit, and sees from his eyes that he doesn’t believe her. She bends to him, letting the others go ahead. “This is the worst part, right here,” she promises. “All we have to do is get through this, okay?”
“Okay,” he says, but unsure.
The guard has to call inside to have the door buzzed before he can open it with the key. He closes it after them, calls using a wall phone with no dial, and the bolts clack home. One at a time, they pass through a metal detector while a pair of guards root through their bags, stirring and jabbing their clothes with a steel rod. As
the guards are working over Patty’s red bag, one of them stops the other, reaches in and pulls out her brand-new nightgown and kneads the package with both hands. They handle Casey’s PJs the same way, squeezing them as if they might be hiding a gun.
She knows Tommy’s going through much worse, that before he can see them he’s strip-searched, told to open his mouth, to bend over.
For Patty, that’s the mystery at the heart of visitation. The way the system’s set up, it’s like a price they’re supposed to pay over and over until they give up and stop loving the people they’ve come to see, and stop coming. That’s why she has to submit, why, even as she hates everything about this place, she needs to be here. Maybe next time she’ll leave Casey at home.
Now that their bags are cleared, the guards look through their food. It’s crazy—Patty dropped her box off at the front desk when she first signed in and no one’s inspected it yet. The same two that searched her bags lift out her coffee and her new shampoo and set them aside, and then her deodorant.
“Alcohol,” the guard in charge explains, and when Patty protests, shows her where it’s listed in the ingredients. “When you boil it down it’s the same as Sterno.”
“There’s no alcohol in my coffee.”
“It’s a glass container.”
“It’s plastic,” Patty argues, because any idiot can see it’s plastic meant to
look like
glass. It makes no sense: the lasagna’s in a Pyrex dish and it’s fine.
“I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“What kind you drink?” the woman from Albany asks. “I’ll lend you some.”
“Thank you,” Patty says, still pissed off The coffee’s the least of it. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do with no shampoo
and no deodorant. Casey’s got a small bottle of baby shampoo. At least they didn’t take her lotion.
She commiserates when one of the women from downstate loses a can of cherry pie filling. They all lose something; it’s like the guards can’t let them get away clean. They get receipts for everything they have to leave behind. When they’re done, none of the guards helps them lug their stuff down the long gray tunnel of a concrete block hall. She has to use both hands, leaving Casey to tag along at her elbow. No one talks. At the end they stop for a closed door. There’s only a small window in it, the kind with chicken wire, but Patty can see it leads outside, a mesh of fence catching the sunlight. Her bag is slipping lower on her shoulder, and she has to shift, kneeing the box higher to get a better grip. The head guard calls on his walkie-talkie, and the lock rattles. When he opens the door, the heat pours in, muggy and suffocating. A couple steps and they’re outside, inside the prison, a high concrete wall rising to the sky like a castle.
The trailers are straight ahead, regular two-tone mobile homes like anywhere, and there are their men, Tommy the tallest of them, waving from behind a gate in a high cyclone fence that another guard is opening. The gate swings free and there’s nothing between them but a patch of crabgrass. Suddenly they’re all running, the guards forgotten, no longer in charge. Patty’s hands are full, but she’s running, and he’s running to meet her, to hold her and take the box and the bag from her. As he kneels to say hello to Casey, she keeps a hand on his shoulder, as if the two of them are magnetized. Casey’s slow to hug him and won’t give up his bag. She smiles at Tommy as if to say it’s okay, give him time, this is all new to him.
It’s new to her too, and a shock, after all of her daydreams, to have the guards lock the gate behind them and retreat into the tunnel, leaving them in a scrubby yard with a jungle gym and a
slide, a few weathered picnic tables and a single drooping basketball hoop. Like the other couples, they ignore this equipment and head for their designated trailer, but before Patty steps up and into it, she sees Casey looking out at the second fence, maybe a hundred feet away, that separates them from the rest of the prison.
Inside, it’s dim and musty, orange-and-brown-flowered curtains pulled over the windows. With every step Tommy takes, the whole thing sways. The ceiling’s too low, and he has to walk hunched over. When she was a kid, a couple of her friends lived in trailers, and this one looks about the same—the oven door opening into the hallway like an ironing board, the kitchen table like a booth in a diner—except this one’s deserted, blank as a motel room. Tommy sets the box down and turns on the light. “You’re down this way, pardner,” he tells Casey, and before he sets off after him, gives her a deep, breathtaking kiss.
“No fair,” she says, and starts setting up house.
The tap sputters, hissing air. The fridge isn’t cold. She checks that it’s plugged in and turns it up, lifts out the racks and ice trays and dumps them in the sink. She has to wipe down the counters and stovetop, give the table a good going-over. The formica’s a bright orange, the whole trailer done in a horrible sixties decor like a coffee shop, including a striped bathroom.
“Where’d they find this thing?” she asks Tommy. “It’s like no one else would buy it.”
She’s at the sink, rinsing the silverware. He comes up from behind and holds her, kisses her neck, a hand slipping under her shirt.
“Where’s Casey?” she asks, leaning back into him.
“In his room.”
“What’s he doing?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “Unpacking.”
“Does he need help?”
A footstep and they both turn. She twists out of his arms as Casey clumps up the hall, a hand on the wall like they’re in a submarine.
“It’s hot in here,” she says. “Why don’t you two go see if you can open some windows.”
Casey slides across the booth and pulls back the curtains. The windows are louvered slats of glass that crank up and out. Their view is of the trailer next door, and beyond it, the basketball hoop and the wall, straight lines wavering in the heat. The problem, Patty thinks, is that there aren’t any trees.
Tommy goes through the groceries like he’s opening presents. He holds up the lasagna like a prize, peels a banana, takes a bite and groans to show how good it is.
She makes them sandwiches and lemonade, letting the cold tap run. At home she eats her lunch out on the back porch, but she wants them to forget they’re in prison, so they stay inside, pretending they’re all alone. There’s barely a hint of a breeze. They sit at the booth, Tommy squeezing her thigh under the table. Casey takes advantage, pouring himself a second glass of lemonade, digging deep into the bag of Fritos. Patty wants Tommy to step in, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “Okay,” she finally says, “let’s save some for tomorrow.”

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