“I asked my classification office if I could take it. She said it’s too late to sign up. Who else is in it?”
“Lucille, of course. She’s such a smarty pants.”
Sonya laughed to hear such a quaint expression come from the Miami girl’s mouth.
“And Nicole. Another college girl. But you don’t have to be all that smart. I got in, and all I have is a GED. Indian is signed up, too.”
Sonya didn’t look up. She didn’t want to give her feelings away. She had never been in love with anyone before, certainly not with Duke. She wasn’t even sure if this was love. How could she be in love with a woman? What did women do together? Well not much, if they were in prison, because opportunities for privacy were rare. At least her ignorance in those matters would not be much of a problem. Then again, as far as she knew, Indian had no girlfriends. But she had been locked up so long. How could she not have given in at some point? Indian was an enigma and that’s probably what attracted Sonya.
“You know, there was some girl from A dorm signed up, but she just got transferred to work release. You should go find out if you can take her place.”
“Maybe I’ll check it out,” Sonya said. “What is drama? Acting? I can act. Boy, can I act.”
She thought back to the many hits they had made—she and Maria, her cousin. She was always the one to approach the victims. Some blue-haired old lady out clipping her roses. It was so easy to strike up a conversation with them. She never knew what she was going to say until suddenly there she was, looking into the old eyes, smiling and asking about the woman’s roses, her grandchildren, her late husband. And then Maria would ask if she could use the bathroom. And the mark would be so caught up in Sonya’s spell that she would hardly know what she had said, didn’t know she had given Maria permission to go inside her house and riffle through her belongings while Sonya kept her distracted.
Of course, it was even easier with the old men. Such lonely old talkers. Damn, you couldn’t get them to shut up. There was one who had cared for Sonya so much that he emptied out his bank account of twenty-seven grand to help her get a kidney operation, which she never needed and never got, but he was so happy when she came back a couple months later and said the surgeons had healed her. Sonya almost felt sorry for him, the old fool. The thing that made her good was that she got caught up in the game. She actually liked these people while she was talking to them, befriending them or whatever. She had enjoyed the old man—Roger, that was his name—she had enjoyed his company, and played checkers with him and imagined that he was her grandfather. Her real grandfather had been one of the toughest gangsters on the streets of Warsaw. Funny, what an accident of birth could do for you. The children of presidents became politicians. The children of movie stars were now movie stars, too. And the children of criminals, well, they became criminals. There was not one single legit person in the whole clan. She was like her mother and her grandmother. She was like her cousin and her sister-in-law. And when they needed somewhere to hide, there was always an aunt or uncle willing to spare a bedroom or a pull-out sofa.
She looked over at Curly. Curly’s father was not a criminal. He was a wealthy businessman, just the sort of person she would have loved to swindle, but more often than not the people who lost their money to the Yakowski clan were not wealthy, and they did not know how to keep their money from slipping from their fingers into the pockets of others.
The kitchen crew had to wait to feed the compound before they could eat. Sonya made coffee and Panther and Curly filled the bins. A very fat c.o. named Dawkins was their supervisor. She usually sat on a stool that her enormous buttocks draped over and ordered the women about. One of the male guards came in and strolled past the line, picking up a biscuit for himself. It was finally light outside. The buzzer rang and everyone from the kitchen crew got on the line to serve.
The doors opened and the first ones came in. It was always the same—the younger more aggressive ones race-walking in with the others stacked up behind them. Alice Jaybird was never in a hurry. She came loping in about halfway through the line.
“Hey, watch what you doin’,” a dark-eyed woman said to Sonya when a bit of egg fell off her tray.
“Oooh, Mariposa, don’t read the poor kitchen girls,” her friend said.
“I’m not reading them. Just ol’ clumsy fingers here,” the one called Mariposa said with an evil glance at Sonya. Sonya was taken aback. She didn’t know this woman. Why was she so nasty?
Mariposa had short black hair and a round face. She was muscular, and something about her looked like a little prize fighter. She moved on, shooting Sonya one last hard glance.
“Nevermind,” Panther said to her. “She ain’t shit, Gypsy.”
Sonya shrugged.
On the way back to the dorm, Panther walked beside her.
“You want to watch TV with me tonight in the dayroom?”
“I don’t like you like that,” Sonya said to Panther.
“Are you some kind of racist?”
Sonya didn’t answer her. It was true she had been brought up not to associate with Africans. But she wasn’t supposed to associate with Irish or Spanish either. Only Polish. She was getting more close exposure to people in prison than she had in her whole life.
“So that’s it, huh?” Panther said.
Sonya turned to her irritably.
“Can’t I just not like you? Leave me alone, girl.”
“I got your girl,” Panther muttered.
Sonya pushed her heavy hair behind her ears and strode into the dorm.
Friday, June 9
The office Lolly shared with a woman named Sue was on the ninth floor of the Department of Education building. Sunshine poured into the room, and through the windows Lolly could see the tops of oak trees, their branches like green capillaries covering the city, and the black roads generally filled with cars. To her left she could see the towering Capitol Building where the budget-cutting trolls lived.
Sue came in the office, carrying a stack of papers to be filed. The two of them were in charge of various webpages for the department, and they also helped devise computer programs for distance learning. It was a good job. The pay was decent enough for a single person, but best of all, over the years the department had become a haven for a number of artsy types who needed work after a decade or so of college. The halls of the DOE building were filled with overqualified, underpaid people who were generally happy to have benefits and be able to wear their Birkenstocks on casual Fridays (and many other days of the week as well). Conversations around the break room tables were often about the latest art opening at Railroad Square or poetry reading at the Warehouse or the new independent film that you just had to see. Sometimes, especially this year, the conversation drifted toward politics. They were generally a liberal bunch, and many of them didn’t think it was an insult to be called a “tree-hugger.” They liked trees.
These were also people who had interests outside of the job. Sue owned a coffee shop with her husband. Others were artists or poets or short story writers. One man in the office next to her edited one of the most prestigious literary magazines in the southeast. Of course, he didn’t get paid for it. So most of them knew about Lolly’s work with the women prisoners. “Lolly’s women.” They had read the poetry the women wrote, and her supervisor turned a blind eye when she needed to use the copier to copy some materials for her women.
“Hey, are you going out for lunch?” Sue asked.
“No, I need to do some personal research on the computer,” Lolly said. “So I’m going to use my lunch hour.”
“Oh, okay. Can I bring you something back?”
“No, I’m not that hungry,” Lolly said. “I’ll get