Cy says she should drive it. Sitting idle for so many months isn’t good for the engine; the seals dry out. Patty waits till Eileen gets home to run it around the backroads. It hasn’t been a week yet, but she doesn’t like to leave the phone unattended, in case.
She turns the radio up and the green hollows fly by, the dips and creeks and eroding stone bridges, the clumps of skunk cabbage and elephant-ears. The gearshift is familiar under her hand, and the bright asterisk of the crack in the windshield. She rumbles over railroad tracks, downshifts to climb the winding hills. Compared to the Dart, it’s got power, and she likes riding high and being able to see. It’s newer than her car—plus it’s his. It would be wrong to get rid of it, though she knows Tommy would tell her not to be stupid. She can hear her mother: she needs to think about Casey, not just herself.
But she can’t sell it until she hears from Tommy.
Little things are starting to get to her, things people say. Cy gives her shit about smoking O.Ps and Patty whips the unlit butt back at him. Eileen opens the fridge at breakfast and asks where the milk went, when all Patty had was the last little dribble in her coffee.
“Look,” Patty says, “I’ll buy you a whole gallon, all right?”
“That doesn’t do me any good now,” Eileen says.
When they’ve left and she’s alone with Casey, she coos to him, walking her fingers up his breastbone, tapping his nose: “Aunt Leenie is being an asshole, yes … she … is!”
And then she scrapes together some change and belts his carrier into the truck and races cross-country to Iron Kettle Farm—leaving the phone—to buy the goddamned milk, which Eileen doesn’t even say anything about until right before bed, a grudging thank-you that Patty knows Cy is behind.
Sometimes it’s not a fight with anyone, it’s just Patty being mad at herself. There doesn’t have to be a reason. With no warning, a needling feeling of frustration rises and takes control of her. She can be doing anything—washing dishes, changing Casey—and her hands clench. She wants to scream or hit something or both.
Some of it’s sex. It’s been seven months. She’s given in to her hands, pretending they’re his, but they only make her miss him more. She swears off touching herself, then surrenders and feels slutty, a vicious circle. It doesn’t help that she feels fat as well as unloved.
The weather helps, the heat and humidity building into thunderstorms that darken the house and shake the valley—wild and then spent, like her—rinsing everything clean. The road dries in patches, steam lifting off the asphalt. She takes Casey outside to feel the fresh air. She hopes Tommy has a window.
When she pictures him, he’s always alone, a silhouette in his cell, though she knows the real danger is when he’s with the others. Everywhere he goes, he’s surrounded by them—the guards and the prisoners.
She doesn’t even know if he has his own cell, or if he has to share a toilet with someone. She doesn’t think she could do that— only if she absolutely had to, and then she’d spread a newspaper or something in front of her. But he’s not shy like she is; he was always the first to skinny-dip. She used to jag him about just wanting to show off.
She worries about what he’s eating, and what his bed’s like. She used to bring him his cigarettes; now where’s he getting them from?
She could go crazy imagining things. It’s better to focus on what she can do, and so, Friday, a week after bringing the truck home, she cuts a panel from a cardboard box and neatly magic-markers a FOR SALE sign with Eileen’s number and sticks it on the dash of the Dart, wedging it against the rearview mirror. She pulls the car to the edge of the road, angled toward town so people will see it on their way home, then walks back inside and peers through the living room window at it, sure she’s just fucked up royally.
Eileen posts a flyer with a fringe of numbers at the laundromat. Now when the phone rings, it could be anyone. Patty’s asking fifteen hundred, but she’d take a thousand. She could pay her mother back, pay off the rest of the loan and still have a chunk left over. She’s going to start working again, she’s got to if she wants to have any kind of life.
Saturday, Eileen and Cy ask if she wants to come to the speedway with them, but she has to be home in case someone calls. When the phone finally rings, it’s her mother, confirming that they’re still coming for Sunday dinner. Patty doesn’t tell her she’s selling the Dart—she’ll find out tomorrow anyway.
“I don’t understand,” her mother says when Cy lets it slip over dessert. “I thought you were selling the truck.”
“It’s paid off,” Patty says. “This way we get rid of a bill.”
“But it’s so big,” her mother says. “I can’t imagine it gets any kind of gas mileage.”
“Twenty-five highway.” Patty lies. It’s what the Dart gets, or was supposed to when it was new. She’s memorized the owner’s manual, expecting the buyers will have questions.
“That can’t be,” her mother says, but doesn’t call her on it, just as she doesn’t ask how Tommy could afford to pay cash for the truck to begin with.
She’s only mentioned him once, as she was greeting them at the door. “Have you heard from Tommy yet?” she asked Patty, as if she’d been thinking about him all day—instead of the question being a preemptive strike, getting the bad news out of the way so it wouldn’t ruin dinner. It’s silly; he’s the whole reason they’re there—okay, and Casey. She can’t remember the last non-holiday her mother invited Eileen and Cy to the house.
But Patty has her own motives too. Cleaning up, while Eileen is down in the basement fetching some Tupperware, she tells her mother she’s thinking of going back to work.
“This would be to your old job?”
“I’d have to get someone to watch Casey during the day,” Patty says.
“Are you asking me?” her mother says.
“I want to hear what you think.”
“I think you’ve got to do something.”
Patty agrees.
“If you wanted to do something like that, I think it would be easier on both of us if you moved back here.”
Patty acts surprised, though she’s already thought of it. After fighting so long to be independent, it’s hard to surrender again.
“I’ve got nothing but room,” her mother says.
“That’s generous,” Patty says, and hears Eileen coming up the stairs. “I’ll think about it.”
“Do,” her mother says, and takes the gravy boat into the dining room, breaking off the conversation, keeping it their secret.
Back at Eileen’s, Patty spaces out while they watch TV—Rhoda and then Phyllis, plucky single women trying to pay the bills. She barely listens, dogged by her mother’s offer. She’s tired and stoned and wondering if it’s too early to go to sleep when the phone rings.
Her first thought is that it’s too late for Tommy, but maybe the state’s rules are different.
Eileen’s closest. She picks up and listens a second. “She’s right here.”
“I’m calling about the car for sale?” a man says—older, a withered voice.
It’s a solid car, she assures him, never been in an accident. The only thing wrong with it is the defroster, and a few small scratches. Patty wants to be honest but feels weird cataloguing its faults, as if she’s talking behind its back.
“Why are you selling?” the man asks.
“We bought a new truck, so now it’s extra.”
She makes sure Cy will be home before scheduling a time for the guy to come over. She hasn’t forgotten the voice in the middle of the night telling her how easy it would be.
But, Monday, when he pulls up in his battleship of a station wagon—ladders lashed to the roof, a primered door tied shut with clothesline—she sees he’s harmless, a backwoods handyman, someone’s grampa. He’s come from work and his face is misted with silver paint. He sticks his head under the front end, pops the hood and runs his hands across the engine like a doctor. “Okay if I take her for a spin?” he asks, and t
hey both go with him, Cy leaning between the seats to hear what they’re saying. The guy guns it, then lays on the brakes, taking his hands off the wheel to check the alignment. “Drives straight,” he says, then, back at the house, has Patty go through the lights and signals while he stands there conducting her.
“You were asking fifteen hundred?” he says, and takes out his checkbook.
“Yes,” Patty says, watching him write.
The man rips the check from the book and holds it up like money. “I’ll give you a thousand right now.”
She was wrong to try to do this without Tommy—or maybe she’s greedy. Just yesterday she would have been willing to take a thousand.
“Twelve-fifty,” she counters.
The man laughs like this is an insult, and lowers the check. He rubs the side of his jaw, watching her like a gunfighter. “’Leven hundred, take it or leave it.”
“It’s a deal.”
“Man,” he says to Cy, as if he’s behind all this, “the lady drives a hard bargain.”
But later, his check safe in her purse, she thinks he somehow tricked her. She came down four hundred while he only came up one hundred. Tommy would have told him to go blow.
The next day two people call, and two more on Wednesday. “If you don’t mind my asking,” one man says, “how much did it go for?” Patty decides to lie and then feels even more foolish.
Eileen’s taken the flyer down, but the calls don’t stop, the stragglers reaching into the weekend, each a reminder that Patty should have held out longer. Whenever she checks the balance of her bank account, she automatically adds the lost four hundred, then subtracts it again.
And still, each time the phone rings, it’s him. She dashes in from the other room or from outside, prepared to hear his voice. It’s not him. Cy’s friend Jeff sounds enough like Tommy that for a minute she thinks it’s him, then has to retreat to her room, wounded.
As the days go by, her imagination spins terrible, logical scenarios. The reason he hasn’t called is that he’s been killed. He’s in a coma in the prison infirmary after his cellmate attacked him. He’s in solitary for defending himself.
He’ll call. It’s just a matter of time. She has to stop staring at the phone because, after five straight days in the house with Casey, she’s literally going crazy. The TV is full of idiots. She wants to go out and do something normal like see a movie, but she can’t. She needs to be here when he calls.
And then, when it actually happens, she’s not the one who answers. When Tommy calls, she’s in her room, feeding Casey, her shirt hiked up. The phone rings in the living room, where Eileen is drinking beer and painting her toenails. Patty turns her head, waiting for someone to pick up, hoping, this once, that it isn’t him.
The ring that should be there isn’t, and now she listens, hearing the murmur of Eileen’s voice, and then Eileen’s moving, getting up, coming toward the door. “Patty, it’s Tommy!”
Patty doesn’t take her breast away from Casey, doesn’t bother running the cord under the door.
“Pats,” he shouts, because it’s noisy there—a wall of people jabbering so loudly in the background that she laughs.
“I miss you so much,” she shouts back, holding the phone close.
“I know, I miss you too. Listen, I’ve only got three minutes.”
But she has so many questions.
“Where are you?” she starts, almost hollering. “Are you okay?”
NEW
AUBURN IS SEVENTY MILES NORTH, AN OLD CANAL TOWN AT THE top of Owasco Lake. Patty starts off early so she’ll be there when the gates open. There’s no fast way, just the square grid of county roads; she has to go up and then across in steps. It’s Saturday so there’s no traffic except fishermen, and still it takes her two hours, cutting through Ithaca, curving along the shore of Cayuga Lake, past the leafy summer camps sloping down to docks holding white motorboats, families still asleep inside their cottages.
Beside her, Casey sleeps in his carrier, his head cushioned by folded diapers. Her mother bugged her about taking him, but Tommy said he wanted to see him. The three of them need to get through this together.
The counselor she talked to on the phone mailed her a sheet of instructions, and Patty’s studied it hard. The first line says: INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR MAY RESULT IN TERMINATION OF THE VISIT. It goes on to list conduct that won’t be tolerated, including “foul language,” “outbursts of temper,” “prolonged embracing,” and “straddling-type contact.” The dress code is all about sex. There are no tank or tube tops allowed, no plunging necklines, no tops that expose more than half of the back, nothing made of sheer material. No miniskirts, no short-shorts or hot pants (not that Patty would ever wear something like that, and definitely nowhere near a prison). And right after that, as if the one leads to the other, it says: CHILDREN MUST BE KEPT UNDER CONTROL AT ALL TIMES.
She’s dressed special for him, a summery sky-blue skirt and sleeveless top from Shannon that shows off her neck and arms, well inside the code. She’s brought a little ditty bag with makeup and some Jean Naté to spruce up in the parking lot before she goes in. She’s got Casey in her favorite hand-me-down from Randy, a sailor suit complete with a terrycloth hat like Popeye’s. They could be going to Sears for their family portrait.
Above the lake, eye-high corn lines both sides of the road; cows dot the hilly meadows. The instruction sheet doesn’t include directions, so she’s following a county map she bought at a gas mart. The country’s easy, just spotting route numbers at junctions, but when she gets into Auburn the streets are all one way, looping her around like a bypass. Before she’s completely lost she pulls over to check the map. Only then does she see the prison’s not on it.
The instructions don’t have a street address, just Auburn Correctional Facility, Auburn, New York, and the zip code—like she should know where it is (she should, she thinks; she should have checked before leaving, she should have asked the counselor over the phone). The sheet says the parking lot’s accessible from Garden Street. Patty searches the map with a finger. There’s an East Garden Street and a West Garden Street. Beside her, Casey’s waking up as if they’re there. The thought of asking someone on the sidewalk occurs to her—“Could you tell me how to get to the prison?”—and vanishes just as quickly.
East Garden Street is a major road. She goes right because it’s easier and looks for signs. After a half mile its name changes to Grant Street and she turns around in the parking lot of a closed Burger Chef. She heads west, past where she first turned on, until she’s driving alongside a pair of train tracks. Beyond them stands an old red-brick factory, and beyond that, between the factory and a big smokestack, a long unbroken wall topped with glassed-in guard towers.
The factory blocks her view and there’s traffic behind her so she can’t stop. The road angles off, following the tracks, taking her away from the prison. For a while there’s nowhere to turn. Finally she catches a right over the tracks and hits a dead-end, a fence with razor wire protecting a black canal that separates the wall from the sooty backs of factories. She has to lean forward and peer up through the windshield to see the nearest tower, a guard inside wearing a cop’s pointy hat looking down at her like she’s come to break someone out. She turns around and gooses it back over the tracks—too fast, the truck seesawing on its shocks—and tells herself to slow down. It’s not even time yet. She’s got a whole half hour.
She ends up circling the prison and coming around the other side on Wall Street, the towers looming right over her shoulder. NO PHOTOGRAPHY PERMITTED, the same yellow stencil says again and again. There are houses directly across the street with neat yards and garages.
Finally, a sign: VISITOR PARKING. She’s surprised the lot’s so big, and at the number of cars; it’s like a dealership, a field of windshields. There are no people, no mothers, no other wives shouldering babies. She snakes her way to the very farthest corner before creating her own spot, squeezing the truck in beside a dumpster, the bumper
nosing an overgrown border of daisies and weeds. She puts her face on in the rearview mirror, sprays the Jean Naté strategically. Her hips are stiff from driving, her lower back; she stretches before dealing with Casey, and then is careful to lock up. Walking between the motionless rows, Patty has the dreamlike feeling that she’s late. It’s a long way, and Casey’s heavy in his carrier. She has to stop and switch arms.
Across the tar-seamed street, the prison rises square and stone like her old high school, shut up for the summer. There’s no one hanging around outside, and she’s afraid it’s the wrong day. The front entrance is like a castle, two imposing stone turrets like chess pieces flanking a solid double door. Inside the spiked fence the flag hangs limp, the blue state flag just under it. Patty thinks her eyes are playing tricks, but no, standing on the very top of the main building with his arms at his sides like a diver is a statue of a Revolutionary War soldier. She looks both ways and crosses.
The riveted steel door’s unlocked but heavy. She has to wedge a shoulder in and then swing Casey through. As she does, a tall black woman looms close and reaches an arm across her.
“I got you,” she says, smelling of fruity perfume. Patty’s startled—she doesn’t see many black people in Owego—but thanks her and ducks into the dull fluorescent light.
This is where everyone is, a smoky, windowless waiting room like a bus station, rows of orange seats bolted to the floor, an aqua and white checkerboard wall of lockers. A majority of the women are black or brown, and she quickly picks out the few men—standing along the wall so others can sit. The squawling of babies and the babble of conversation wake up Casey. There’s nowhere to sit, so Patty stands there, just inside the door, trying to hush him.
The Good Wife Page 11