December 2009

***************

There were a lot of things I wanted to tell Jake Ford on that freezing, butt-biting Monday morning. In my head, I made a list of things I would rather say than what I had to say.

Like how the bus doesn't come anywhere near the Sallow Penitentiary, so I had to walk a mile to the prison gates. In flip-flops, no less.

Like how my boyfriend, Seb, didn't understand why I had to come out here in person. "Why can't you send a letter?" he'd said. "Why can't you just call?"

Like how Jake's orange jumpsuit had some kind of red stain on the front that may or may not have been blood. I didn't think they gave inmates ketchup. I watched Prison Break sometimes and I couldn't imagine Michael ever asking T-Bag to pass him the ketchup. So...the stain on Jake's jumpsuit was definitely not a condiment.

"Hey, Jacob," I began, a little too loudly. The prison guard looked at me, raising a bushy eyebrow.

Jake nodded at me in wordless greeting. His hands were on his lap, and I knew that, just like his ankles, they were handcuffed. A stainless steel table was between us, keeping us apart.

"To what do I owe this immense pleasure, Maya?" His voice was gravelly, like he didn't use it much, which was probably true. I didn't imagine that he spent his days talking to his fellow inmates about the concrete walls and barbed wire that kept them inside.

I cleared my throat, swallowing hard. God, this was so difficult. I should have been used to this kind of thing, but I really wasn't. I'd only finished my practical work that year and had been working at the nursing home for a few months.

"You look well," I offered lamely, and he quirked a brow at me, as if to call bullshit.

But really, he did. Look well, I mean. I hadn't seen him since his arrest, back when everyone was swearing up and down that he was as innocent as a newborn. The Phantoms, the motorcycle club he'd belonged to once upon a time, still stood by him to this day, despite Jake serving his five-year sentence for aggravated assault and battery. The two guys he'd sent to hospital had needed blood transfusions, but that was just the word on the street.

In any case, for someone who probably had to deal with trying to stay alive on a daily basis, he looked good.

He had the kind of rugged good looks that belonged to outdoorsy men, like woodcutters. Ninety-five-percent of his olive-skinned body was probably muscle. He made an orange jumpsuit look like it had been tailor-made for him. His blonde hair was overdue for a haircut, though, and it looked like it hadn't been washed since Thriller had come out. I wondered if conditioner was allowed in prison. Didn't seem likely.

"I, um, brought you some soap," I told him. "The guards have it."

He eyed me carefully. "Soap?"

"Yeah. Fifty bars. So that, you know, if you...drop one, you don't need to pick it up. Because you have forty-nine other bars." And it wasn't the cheap stuff, either. Not that I'd ever say that aloud.

Jake stared at me intently for what felt like a decade before saying, "You're actually being serious."

Everyone at the supermarket had looked at me the way Jake was looking at me now. As if it was so hard to believe that someone could go out and buy fifty bars of Dove soap bars at once. The woman at the till had advised me that cleansing the body from the inside, rather than scrubbing too hard with soap, was a great way to combat body odour. I'd told her that it was for a friend in prison. She hadn't replied, choosing to bag my stuff in silence.

"You came all this way to give me...soap?" Jake pressed, putting his hands flat on the table and leaning forward. "Are you for real?"

I was too busy staring at the silver cuffs around his wrists. They looked so tight, like cutting-off-his-blood-circulation tight. Didn't that hurt?

"No. You quickly get used to pain when you're someone like me," Jake muttered, making me realise that I'd actually voiced my question.

"I'm sorry," I whispered.

"There's nothing to be sorry about, Maya. I fucked up; I'm paying for it."

Silence stretched between us like a rope.

I tapped a nervous tune onto the table. "Does Baron visit sometimes?"

Jake leaned back in his chair, looking the epitome of relaxed. "Not since the trial."

"That's terrible. He's your brother."

He shrugged at that. "He's better off. Last I heard, he'd graduated from business school and got himself some fancy job all the way in France."

I'd heard about that. Baron Ford was one of the few people to successfully get himself out of the stagnant pond that was Sallow County, Florida, population 21, 302. With a pretentious name like Baron, it was inevitable. I just found it sad that he and his brother were incommunicado. If I had even just one minute to have Ella in my life again... I shook my head. I couldn't think about that right now. She was gone, and she only had herself to blame.

"I didn't come here just for the soap," I told Jake, clutching the fabric of my gypsy skirt and rubbing my thumb against it.

He was silent, watching me with eyes that seemed to see more than was humanly possible.

"As you may know, I work at Rose Haven now. It's a great place to work. I love old people. They're so sweet, even the ones with Alzheimer's, sometimes. Mrs. Geldhof screams when she's hungry. Maybe -"

"Get to the point."

I chewed on my lower lip. "OK. Your mother... She passed." I exhaled, feeling my chest tighten all over again. Sharon Ford had been like a mother to me over the course of the year and losing her was like losing the last of my family members.

A flicker of emotion shone in Jake's hazel eyes and disappeared just as quickly as it had come. "How?" he wanted to know.

"It was just her time," I said, feeding him the lame line we fed other patients' families whenever they had to deal with death. But Sharon had been so young compared to most of the other patients and I'd cared deeply for her. "We watched Modern Family together– her favourite character was Phil – and then she went to sleep. She didn't wake up yesterday."

Do not cry... Do not cry... Do not... Oh, fudge.

"Does Baron know?"

"They've tried his number several times today. It doesn't exist, or maybe we –"

"You know Ghost?"

I pursed my lips together, nodding slowly. Who didn't know Marlon "Ghost" Phillips, President of the Phantoms Motorcycle Club?

"Good. He'll know how to get a hold of my brother. Just tell him I sent you."

Seb was not going to be happy if I got in touch with a known dangerous criminal to get in touch with a former petty criminal.

"Okay," I conceded. My palms were sweaty. This was the longest conversation Jake and I had ever had – and the man had dated my cousin before she'd gotten it into her head that the pastures were greener elsewhere.

"You're crying," Jake said softly, "for my mother."

"I took care of Sharon. She was like a mother to me." I shook my head, remembering how, just the other day, she'd gone online to check my astrological compatibility with Seb. Sixty-six-years-old and an Alzheimer's patient – yet she could work an iPad like a teenager. The mind worked in mysterious ways. Or, rather, God did.

"Um, she wanted me to give this to you. In case anything ever happened," I said, suddenly remembering the letter that was in my sky-blue shoulder bag. I rooted around for a second, feeling something wet and remembering that a guard had searched my bag and spilled my hand cream. Thankfully, Sharon's letter was untouched. Well..." They opened the envelope. The guards. I haven't read it, I promise." I pushed it across the table, until he could easily take the paper out himself.

I caught a glance of Sharon's neat cursive and my heart instantly ached for the woman who never failed to recognise me, despite her disease. Sharon – with her red gel tips and big, poufy blonde hair as if she were on Broadway and not in an expensive nursing home her sons paid for. Sharon – with her loud laugh and even louder potty-mouth, who always had a smile despite being a crippled former dancer. Sharon – with her big, brown eyes and comical tales of being an Israeli Jew who married an Italian Catholic. Sometimes, she'd forget that she'd told me a certain story before, and end up telling it to me again, word for word. Or she'd forget a character in her story and I'd supply his or her name.

"How'd you know that, Maya?" she'd ask me each time, all wide-eyed and amazed. "You're like some kinda fuckin' medium, I swear. Can you tell my boys' futures for me? Will they marry nice, Jewish girls, or one of those racy Catholic girls – like that Katy Perry?"

I snapped back to reality and found that Jake was staring at me again. I didn't remember him being this intense. Stupidly, I wondered if maybe he wasn't used to seeing a female. It was just as possible that I'd had a dopey grin on my face reminiscing about the good times I had at a rest home. Truth was, I preferred cleaning dentures and changing adult diapers than...well, most other things people my age did. Crap, I was going to miss Sharon.

"I got to phone her every Tuesday," Jake was saying. "She always talked about you. Sometimes, she didn't know who the hell I was, but she'd go on and on about you. Maya this, Maya that." He pushed the letter back at me, his gaze unwavering. "Read it."

So I did. And then I read it a second time, because I didn't quite get the last part.

Jacob,

Let's not bullshit each other: You're a mess, just like your father. But unlike your father, you're not going to die in prison. You're not going to throw your life down the toilet by running with those punks on bicycles and whatnot. You're going to clean yourself up, get your shit together, and put on your grown-up panties. Why? Because I said so, Jacob. Because you're my eldest. And because, twenty-eight years ago, I spent a whole day pushing your big head out my cooch.

Maybe you think I've lost my marbles (and sometimes, I feel like I have. Marbles are so easy to misplace) so I won't know or care about the nonsense you pull, but let me tell you, boy, if I were alive right now, I'd wring your neck like a dishcloth and hang you out to dry. Get out of jail and do something worthwhile with your life, something that makes you happy.

And one more thing: I have a dying wish. Does it matter that you were incarcerated and therefore could not get to hear me speak my wish in your ear like they do in the movies? Anyway, I want you to take care of Maya Fenton. I was her last remaining relative and now she has no one but that dreadful Capricorn boy. If God had blessed me with a daughter, Maya would be her. This is all I ask of you, my eldest: Make sure she's OK. And also, give your brother a call one of these days!

Make me proud, Jacob. Give me something to brag to all the angels about.

Love,

Mom

I sucked in air, my eyes prickling all over again. She had loved me enough to ask her delinquent son to look out for me.

"You don't have to do this," I told Jake, carefully folding the piece of paper back into three. "It was sweet of her, but I'm going to be fine."

Jake's golden eyes were unblinking. "Need to do right by my ma," he murmured.

"Really, it's OK. I don't... I mean, I'm very independent. I'll be great."

"Thank you, Maya, for what you did for her." He finally blinked. "I owe you."

He looked almost manic. I quickly realised that this was his way of dealing, and I could understand that. "You really don't, Jacob. Sharon was the best. I cared about her, too, so –"

"I said, I owe you."

He had three more years of his sentence to go. With any luck, his mother's posthumous request would be forgotten by next week. I would never forget Jake, though – the son of a woman I'd cherished as my own mother, and the man who'd gotten my cousin, Ella, killed.