The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  Her mother’s words were interrupted by the loud crash of glass. One of the senior citizens had lost his balance coming into the store and bumped a five-pound jar of garlic-stuffed olives. “Call Roberto and Pedro,” Deborah yelled across the aisles to Nancy. In a moment the empty store was filled with activity. The brothers cordoned the spill and swept broken glass, brine, and olives into a metal dustpan. Although no one had spoken to him, the man who’d broken the jar loudly protested having to pay for the jar of olives.

  Two dozen of the more mobile seniors crowded around the tasting bar, stabbing olives with toothpicks and asking repeatedly about the threat of a left behind pit. They were all from various retirement facilities across the central valley. The Indian casino up north sent buses down to pick them up a couple of times a week. Her mother offered the drivers vouchers for swinging by the Pit Stop on their way back south.

  “It would ruin my dentures,” said one particularly tall woman with liver-spotted hands.

  Her companion, a rounder woman, leaning on a cane, pulled out her partial and stuffed it into her purse. “Better not to take the chance,” she said.

  “Never once hit a pit,” said a trim man behind the women. He looked up at the counter toward Deborah. “You’re new here.”

  Deborah refilled the tray of pimento-stuffed olives and set out a new box of toothpicks. “Sort of.”

  “You’re prettier than the other girl who worked here,” he said.

  The tall woman rolled her eyes. “Watch out for this one, he thinks he’s a Lothario.”

  “Doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” he said, reaching for a parmesan-stuffed olive.

  Against her instincts, Deborah smiled. “Thank you.”

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “This is my mom’s place,” she said.

  His eyes widened. “Callie can’t be old enough to have a daughter your age. I mean the two of you could be sisters.”

  It didn’t surprise Deborah to learn that her mother didn’t speak about her. “I’ve been away awhile.”

  “Well, that’s what children do,” he said, moving to the end of the tasting bar.

  In thirty minutes, the store had emptied. Deborah sanitized the surfaces around the bar, helping herself to a few of the almond-stuffed olives, relishing the slight crunch they had. Nancy came over to help her tidy up. Deborah felt more at ease with the cashier than she did with her mother. “It’s nice to have you here,” Deborah said. “You’ve been good for Mom, I can tell.”

  “Your mom doesn’t like things that are good for her.” Nancy let out a long sigh and glanced around the empty store. “After all that, I only sold a handful of postcards, a couple jars of olives, and a bottle of oil,” Nancy said.

  “Is that why Mom’s so tense? Is it always this bad?” asked Deborah.

  Nancy shrugged her shoulders and leaned against the counter. “My guess is that most of them didn’t do so well at the casino. If they’ve gotten lucky, they like to buy gift baskets for all the relatives who never visit. Then I get to spend the afternoon applying shipping labels.”

  “Who used to work the tasting bar? You know, before I came back.”

  “Nobody. I’d just set the olives out and let people at ’em. You realize how greedy some folks are. I don’t know if it is from growing up without or just not ever really growing up. But from the register I’d see women dump an entire tray of olives in their purses.”

  “I get that,” Deborah said, thinking of the first few years she spent in Chowchilla.

  From the look on Nancy’s face, Deborah guessed her mother was headed their way. The older woman gave a slight nod, took a dust cloth from her apron pocket, and dusted her way back to the register.

  “Get what,” her mother asked, her voice slurry at the edges.

  “People who eat all our olives but don’t buy anything.”

  “It goes against human nature. Basic goodness. They ought to feel obligated to us, not entitled. This seminar I went to with your father, back when we first started the store. That’s what the expert said. That free was never free. It’s evolution, you know. The need not to have an obligation to another person. Look it up. Monkeys or apes in the Congo or some other dark place do this. They give trinkets—bits of grass and twigs or a rock, and they always get food in return.”

  From the way her mother jumped from one topic to another and the glassiness to her eyes, Deborah guessed that she’d taken more pain pills than she ought to have. She remembered this look from her childhood. When her father had been alive, he’d regulated how much she took and when. On days when she got like this, he’d send her home—blaming the weather for making her leg act up. Deborah had seen her share of drug addicts at Chowchilla. Her mother had more in common with them than she ever would have thought.

  “Didn’t you ever feel like the world owed you something? After the plane crash? After Daddy’s stroke? Even after what I did?”

  The edge to Deborah’s voice seemed to help her mother focus. “I don’t care how bad your life is, you’re not going to think taking a few more than your share of olives is going to fix having the world owe you something.”

  “It all adds up,” Deborah said.

  Callie pulled Deborah into an embrace. “Oh, you are still that little girl. You are still my little girl, and I know you think the world should be fair, should be balanced, but it can’t be. It simply can’t.”

  Deborah struggled to pull out of her mother’s hug. The tone of her voice was an echo of her childhood. The sound of being given less than her brothers and being told it was impossible to measure all the good and bad that happened to one person in one lifetime. “It also can’t be that I’m always the one to get shortchanged,” she said.

  Looking down at her leg, her mother frowned. “We all get shortchanged. That’s the lesson, sweetie.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Family

  After being home for about two weeks, Deborah confessed to Ms. Holt that she missed her prison family. “I’ve seen this before,” Ms. Holt said, rummaging through a messy stack of glossy papers. “They even printed up a pamphlet on it. Or maybe it was part of that larger booklet on reintegrating yourself into society.”

  “It’s not that I don’t love being around my daughter,” she said, accepting the booklet Ms. Holt thrust into her hands. “There’s just no way she understands—or really any of them—about what it’s like being in prison.”

  “Being understood? That’s what you’re after?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “How much do you understand about how your daughter felt when you shot her daddy?”

  Ms. Holt truly doesn’t pull her punches, thought Deborah. She flipped through the booklet and her eyes landed on a picture of a smiling woman wearing a blue work apron. “I just want them not to push me so hard. LaJavia got that, you know?”

  “Who’s this LaJavia?” Ms. Holt asked.

  Deborah ignored her. “Don’t they have sponsors or some sort of trained professional to talk to?”

  “This isn’t the Bay Area. We’re small time here, and nobody in Tehama County is going to pay for warm fuzzies. If you’re churched, I’m sure your pastor would lend an ear.”

  “Maybe I could talk to one of the girls who’s been out. Somebody I knew in Chowchilla.”

  Ms. Holt shook her head. “Nu-uh. Most every girl in there is a felon, and that’s one of the few ways I lose people. Catch them consorting with known felons. That and drugs.”

  “There’s nobody then,” Deborah said.

  After their appointment, she waited outside the small building adjacent to the sheriff’s office in Redding where Ms. Holt had her office. Erin and Anna had dropped her off while they went to Walmart to shop for baby items. She thought about what Ms. Holt had said and considered trying to find a church. Her mother had given up on church after her accident—insisting that she nearly died without ever seeing a white light. Bets and Anna attended services at Mount Olive Lutheran. The deaf pas
tor there was a compassionate listener but rarely gave advice beyond telling the troubled to trust in God. Anna’s entire theology revolved around that central tenet.

  Deborah wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about God. Before prison, she’d never given much thought to the existence of a deity. Being in prison, at least being with the girls who had served as her surrogate family, meant that she’d paid a lot of lip service to God. The wardens liked it, paid a little less attention to the believers—figuring they still had a reason to act right. The parole board liked it, too, all that stuff about finding God meant remorse for crimes.

  When she’d first arrived in prison, all the inmates had been expected to attend Sunday services. They’d worn dresses, put on hose and costume jewelry. That was when they still had access to hair spray and makeup—and you would have thought sitting on those metal folding chairs that they were in an actual sanctuary and not the rec room for Cell Block B. Those were the last good times at Chowchilla. That was how the old-timers talked about the years when there weren’t enough inmates to fill the beds and the wardens treated them more like coeds than criminals. It hadn’t lasted more than a few years, but while it did, Deborah held herself apart from the other prisoners, clinging to the hope that she’d be paroled before her thirtieth birthday and that whatever damage she’d done to her family could be repaired.

  By 1996, nearly a decade after she’d started her fifteen-to-life sentence, she’d been denied parole, orange jumpsuits replaced the dresses, and the farm-style chain-link fence was topped with razor wire. Each week, dozens of new prisoners filled Chowchilla, and each new body took away some of the space Deborah needed to keep pretending she was on the verge of freedom. The overcrowding began the year Erin finally started visiting. Seeing her daughter lifted her spirits, but the few hours of interaction never left her emotionally satisfied. In the days after the visits, she found herself looking around for someone she could mother, someone who would accept all that she couldn’t give Erin.

  For most of the years she spent in Chowchilla, Deborah lived in Cell Block B. There were eight rooms down each of the four wings of her building. They tried to mix the races up—but the numbers never worked out. The year LaJavia arrived in Deborah’s cell, she was bunking with two Hispanic girls, who spoke little English, and four black girls. By that point, she’d been in prison long enough she didn’t care about race. She was just glad it wasn’t a white girl, because the women who hadn’t grown up in urban neighborhoods cared too much who was what color.

  As it all turned out, it might have been better to have race problems. She and LaJavia became close. The relationships between many of the women at Chowchilla mimicked the familial relationships outside of prison. Deb and LaJavia filled the void in their lives by calling each other mother and daughter. It seemed simple until the outside, real families intruded.

  She didn’t like to think about the time she spent just before being paroled. It made her feel guilty, like when she averted her eyes from the mentally handicapped woman on the bus so she wouldn’t have to give up her seat. The day after the parole hearing, everyone had wanted to celebrate. The guard walked Deborah into her room, counted heads, and then left to do the rest of the hall. Her bunkies gathered around, hugging her and asking question after question about the parole hearing. There was something about the shape of LaJavia’s eyes that reminded her of Erin. LaJavia shushed them all and pulled out a bottle of sparkling apple cider she’d saved from New Year’s.

  “To the best mom I had,” LaJavia said, raising her plastic cup. “It’ll be lonely here without you.”

  They finished their cider and everyone else except LaJavia went to the mess hall for dinner.

  “You okay?” LaJavia asked and then after a pause, “We okay?”

  Deborah lay on her bottom bunk with her arm across her eyes. She knew that her bunkmate was asking about their own mother-daughter relationship. “Fine. It was hard seeing them. I feel older.”

  “Yeah,” LaJavia said, sitting down on the bunk opposite her. “I get that way when I get to see my own baby girl. She’s almost a teenager now. Time is sorta wonky in here. I dunno.”

  Those last weeks in prison, Deborah felt older than her mother, than her mother’s mother—older than Anna, who stood at the head of their family with a foot in either century. No one would believe her if she said this. She couldn’t begin to explain how spending twenty years confined to Chowchilla made her older than them all, but it did. She’d tried to explain it to LaJavia. “Scientists don’t know shit about time,” she said. She looked over at LaJavia. The girl was frowning, her eyes were wide. “They think a day is always twenty-four hours, an hour, always sixty minutes, you know. But they forget, I mean they don’t even try to explain how time works in the mind, for a living breathing human being.”

  “Yeah,” LaJavia said. “It’s messed up. Like my sister says, days is long, but years is short.”

  “I got it figured out,” Deborah said. “There’s something else at work with time, and sometimes if a human being’s life gets all packed up with experiences, time speeds up so that years felt like days and hours like minutes.”

  LaJavia nodded, but she didn’t understand. Not because she didn’t graduate high school, but because she hadn’t been in Chowchilla long enough. Deborah didn’t tell her that the last twenty years had been so empty, so devoid of the new, that an hour spent folding clothing in the prison was equivalent to a year. She’d read someplace about a guy who theorized that time was more like temperature. Degrees didn’t measure how hot the air was, but how fast it was moving. Deborah thought that for the last two decades, her life had been cold—with the molecules moving around only enough to stay alive. She wanted to explain this to LaJavia, but she was afraid that she had it all wrong. That she didn’t understand enough to teach someone else her theory. When LaJavia had more years in prison, and Deborah knew the girl would figure it out on her own as LaJavia’s own daughter grew up outside.

  If you had money and were on the right side of the wall—not stuck in solitary or processing—prison was as good as living in a Walmart. Deborah had been on the right side of the wall for two decades and there wasn’t anything she couldn’t get in Chowchilla. Except out. That had been her overriding thought those last weeks in prison. The morning after the sparkling apple cider, LaJavia woke full of conversation. “There’s so much to do before you go,” the girl said, putting her feet squarely down on the concrete floor of the cell. She scratched her scalp, and flakes of dead skin floated down to the wool blanket that had slipped off the bed. “I need my braids redone.”

  Her hair was a mess. Deborah could see all the broken strands that had slipped from the tight rows, and her scalp needed oiling. The girl had been in Chowchilla almost ten years. She got arrested on attempted murder charges after trying to run down the father of her daughter with her mother’s Grand Am. She made a plea bargain and would only need to serve twelve years. The boyfriend, Calvin, was in a wheelchair now.

  “Maybe Louisa will help,” Deborah said. It pained her to say this, but she knew LaJavia would need a new prison mother.

  “Naw. She’s mad at us for being nice to Nella. You didn’t notice she been giving our whole family the silent treatment the last few weeks?”

  Deborah didn’t answer. This conversation bored her.

  “Guess you wouldn’t have. About the only thing you notice these days is the mail. Can’t even get you to eat. Your mama isn’t even going to recognize you when she comes to pick you up.”

  “Won’t be my mama. I haven’t talked to my mother since I shot Carl,” Deborah said. “Get to meet my grandbaby, though.”

  “I sure was glad that my mama was there when I had my first one. Even with the medicine, you still want someone there to hold your hand. And not the baby’s father neither. He don’t belong nowhere near the hospital.”

  Deborah stopped listening to LaJavia’s yammering. She felt a vague tug of regret that she couldn’t listen to the girl, bu
t she’d not felt the same about her since seeing her flesh-and-blood daughter again. These prison families were just placeholders for the real thing. The women knew that; they realized that on visiting day the hugs they gave their blood mamas and grandmas would be deeper and more emotional than the affection they showed one another.

  Still, she’d never had an inmate that she got as close to as LaJavia. The girl understood what it was like to want the pain to stop so bad you were willing to kill to make it stop. They’d spent hours talking about how good it was that Calvin only ended up paralyzed after being dragged three hundred feet by LaJavia’s car. Deborah couldn’t look at the girl and not remember the night LaJavia had confessed her deepest secret—that she didn’t know she wanted Calvin alive until the paramedics got him breathing again with CPR. Deborah had cried that night. Great gasping sobs that left her achy and with a headache the next day. How different her life would have been if she’d stopped at one shot, or even two. But it took all six to kill the screaming in her head, the rage that had built up over the years—from the times he ignored her, or cheated on her, or just treated her less than what she felt she deserved. And with six bullets, she needed more than paramedics to save him.

  It was only six fifteen. The guards wouldn’t be around for another hour to let them out for breakfast and work release. God. How had she done this for so many days? Put one foot in front of the other and acted out a routine that never altered. Hoped to God that one of the guards would get her hair done so they’d have something new to talk about. Engineered drama between the families to have some distraction.

  “You ’kay?” LaJavia asked. She was standing, peering into the top bunk. “You not even out a bed yet.”

  “We got time,” Deborah said, and for a moment the old tenderness between them returned. She stretched out her hand and fingered the box braids that she and Nella had spent hours laying into LaJavia’s thick, curly hair. She closed her eyes and for a moment imagined that she was touching Erin’s head, running her thumb over her daughter’s straight, coarse hair.