“Nope. None.” I went back to my stool, drained my water and grabbed a pitcher nearby to give myself a refill.
Lilly came out minutes later, cheeks flushed, makeup smeared in an attempt to wipe it off, and a dry uniform clinging to those beautiful curves.
She strolled right up to me, anger etched in every pore.
“I’ll save you the time and the effort since I highly doubt you want to be here any more than I want you here. I won’t fill out an application for any job your dad might want to hire me for, and you wouldn’t hire me if you knew why. So tell your dad, again… thanks, but no thanks. And please, stop coming in.”
“You’d rather stay here? Dealing with that shit?” Was she serious?
“That shit is what girls like me deal with on a daily basis and it’s none of your damn business.”
Girls like me… it ran through my head like a gong and my lip curled.
I knew girls like her. I’d grown up with them. Even if she wasn’t from some white, upper-class family she still didn’t deserve that shit. No woman did… like her or not.
She was alone. She was the most alone person on the planet. A family who turned their back on her. No friends. Here we were, offering her an easy way out and she was refusing.
Seemed stupid to me. What happened to beggars couldn’t be choosers? I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why in the hell it pissed me off she kept turning us down when I didn’t want her around anyway.
She made me feel shit I hadn’t felt since Melissa and my chest burned.
Feeling anything pissed me off.
She wanted to be stubborn and prideful and an idiot? I should let her. Dad should.
I stood from the stool and dropped down twenty bucks along with our card—for Dad, because I promised him I’d leave it again.
“Enjoy your shift,” I said. “But Dad will be back. He loves Judith’s pies.”
I turned, storming outside the falling apart diner and slammed the door to my car after I climbed in.
My knuckles ached by the time I got back to my loft. My jaw hurt worse. I spent an hour in my weight room and showered and chugged a beer and paced my home.
The whole time, I felt. For the first time in two years, I felt everything.
And I started hating her for that, too.
The next morning I went to Dad, told him she didn’t listen to me either and we’d done all we could.
He looked crestfallen and disappointed.
For that, I hated her even more.
6
Lilly
My life became a routine, set in place mostly by Ellen insisting that a routine would help reintegrate me into society.
I had despised her the first time I met her.
She came to me the day after I left Mitchellville Women’s Prison and showed up at the halfway house, filled with hard features, a stack of papers in her hands with rules and requirements, and an angry look on her face that said she hated me and what I’d done already.
I’d wasted too many years on too many people trying to explain the truth, so I didn’t bother.
Later, I started realizing she wasn’t all bad. We talked about my education, what I wanted now.
She enrolled me in my required Alcoholics Anonymous treatment I’d been doing since I was sent to Iowa. She helped me get my photo ID even though my license was suspended until my parole was over and I was officially free.
And she set me up with Nancy.
My counselor who I originally spoke with twice a week but had slowly stretched out to monthly appointments. Apparently, being imprisoned could create a type of PTSD when inmates were released. We spent so many hours every day being told what to do, not allowed to do, and looking over our shoulders in case we’d made enemies or someone else decided to make us one of theirs. It was a constant mindfuck, where you could never relax and every time you were treated like an animal a part of your humanity was chipped away.
The first time Ellen knew I needed a counselor was that first day I met her.
“What do you want to do now?” She watched me with narrowed eyes and a doubting tone. Everything about this meeting unnerved me down to this very question.
Panic squeezed my chest and made my vision blurry. How was I supposed to know? I’d only been told six days ago I was being paroled. I hadn’t had time to plan, time to dream. Hell, I hadn’t even finished college like I’d planned on and now I was sleeping in a room without bars on it, listening to my roommate snore herself to sleep at night while she held an eight-inch blade in her hand.
Now what did I do?
My chin trembled and I brushed away tears. God. For the first time in years, I was crying and that made everything worse. Was I that broken?
Inside, I’d learned to cope. Keep my head down, keep friends with the crew I formed. I turned my eyes away from those who broke rules and I never owed anyone a favor I wouldn’t be willing to pay back.
Now? What did I do now?
“I don’t know.” My voice wobbled and my heart thumped painfully inside my chest. I looked down and saw my clothes. Faded and torn and ratted and stained, I looked like I’d just come up from a three-day drug bender and felt even worse. I hadn’t slept since getting in that taxi.
I hadn’t eaten since last night and it was now dinnertime.
Ellen took one hard, long look at me, and frowned. “How about we go for a walk?”
And that right there, was when I started liking her.
Now, we met up once a month. I knew she kept track of me because she always mentioned my AA attendance and asked how Nancy was doing. Apparently she referred parolees to her whenever she could.
Tonight, I hurried down Ingersoll to the restaurant where she told me to meet her, and like I’d done every day since I was released, tried to remember how to act like I belonged.
Paranoia and survival habits weren’t easily kicked with the taste of clean air and the lack of bars or prison guards hovering close. It’d been almost ten months since my release and I still felt the looks and sneers from the guards when I asked them questions, as if I was a step up from gum on the bottom of someone’s shoe.
They treated me like I was nothing.
In there, I was.
Now, it was difficult on the best days to remember I was anything. On the worst days, when memories pelted me in my dreams and then turned into nightmares, I knew I was less than that.
The air was crisp, and I curled my cardigan with holes forming in the elbows tighter around my stomach. Des Moines was prettier than I imagined it would be, not that I’d done much thinking about it at all, but I heard some of the inmates from here talk about it. They said it was small and a nowhere city with nothing good to do, but I liked it.
Much smaller than Chicago, sure, but it had a cool vibe filled with growth like they were trying to keep young people instead of outpricing everything so they had to move away.
After my required minimum stay in the halfway house, Ellen helped me find my current home. Sure, it was roach-infested and probably about ready to collapse with the next powerful thunderstorm, but it was within walking distance to classes and pretty much anywhere else I wanted to go. Outside of having to take the bus to work and the grocery store, I could walk everywhere.
I found Teddy’s, the restaurant where I was meeting Ellen and felt a rush of warmth as soon as I opened the doors and entered. There were a few people waiting on benches and my back went straight as I passed them.