The main reason I hadn’t seen Miss Ruby in the rec room since Independence Day was her work schedule. She had one of the cushy jobs, the phone reservation desk for the Passport chain of motels and rental cars. While most prison jobs ran from nine to three, the reservation lines had to be staffed twenty–four hours a day. She’d been on the noon–to–six shift, and I hadn’t known to look in the rec room for her in the mornings.
A day earlier I’d written a letter to Rapelec Electronics for a woman, explaining why she was not able to take part in her job–training program and requesting that an opening be kept for her in September. The woman paid me with a box of six local tomatoes, the best food I’d eaten since my arrest. I took two of them as an offering and went with the woman who’d brought the message from Miss Ruby; Jorjette had grown up with one of her granddaughters.
It took some doing to get the guards to let Jorjette and me into the rec room in the morning. CO Cornish, on duty that morning, worked closer to the rules than Rohde or Polsen did on the afternoon shift. Jail inmates didn’t have recreation privileges until 3:00 P.M.
“Vic going to show me her basketball shot,” Jorjette whined. “You know everyone say she the best, she beat Angie. And we got kitchen duty in one hour; we gotta go now if we’re going at all.”
“We could do it another time,” I said. “Although another time I probably won’t have any tomatoes. Do you grow them yourself, Cornish?”
I held one out for him to look at. He admitted that gardening was his hobby but that his tomatoes hadn’t ripened yet.
“You have one hour down there, girls,” he finally said, accepting the tomato as he signaled to the man behind the bulletproof glass to release the lock on the jail–wing door.
When we got to the rec room, a woman CO I didn’t know was on duty. She was watching Oprah with a handful of women on the couch. Miss Ruby sat in the middle of the group, her iron–gray hair freshly cut and curled, shell earrings three or four times regulation size in her ears.
Her eyes flicked at Jorjette and me when we came in and pulled up chairs nearby, but she gave no sign of noticing us until Jorjette approached her during a commercial break and asked nervously how Miss Ruby was doing today.
Miss Ruby inclined her head, said as well as anyone could in this heat, too hot to go outside, but she longed for a breath of fresh air. Jorjette said, well, it was pretty hard on everyone but she knew Miss Ruby’s joints suffered real bad in the heat. Maybe she’d like a nice fresh tomato, to remind her of the fresh outdoor air?
“Cream here brought it for you special.”
Miss Ruby accepted the tomato and jerked her head toward the far end of the deal table. The CO stayed on the couch watching Oprah, and the handful of other women left us alone: Miss Ruby wanted privacy, Miss Ruby got privacy.
“I can’t make up my mind about you, Cream,” she said when we were seated. “Are you a fighter or a Good Samaritan? First you beat up a couple of gangbangers, but now I hear you spend your spare time writing letters for the girls. Some of them think you’re an undercover cop.”
I blinked. Of course in a way that was the truth, but I didn’t know Miss Ruby and I couldn’t trust my secrets to a stranger, especially one who seemed to be plugged in to the gossip pipeline as thoroughly as Miss Ruby was.
“If I’d known my life history mattered here, I’d have written it up on the bathroom wall,” I said. “I was arrested same as everyone else.”
“And that would be for what crime, I wonder?”
“You know the sad old story about the man who leaves his wife for a cute young thing? And the first wife, who worked hard and put him through school and scrimped so he could build his business, she gets left with the shirt on her back and not much more? And he gets the kids, because how can she give the kids a decent home when she doesn’t have any money and she has to be out at work all day?”
“I heard a bunch of versions of that story in my time.” She kept her eyes straight ahead, talking in a prison mumble out of the corner of her mouth.
“My twist on it is I figure the guy for about the meanest bastard in Chicago. So I take the oldest child. A boy, who’s overweight and sensitive, and Daddy likes to beat on him, make him cry, then beat on him some more for crying like a girl. Daddy had me arrested for kidnapping.”
“Uh–hunh. And you couldn’t make bail. Everyone says you got a real lawyer, not a PD. Not to mention, of course, your fancy education that lets you write all those letters.”
“Guy’s got a lot of important friends. The judge set bail at a quarter of a million. If your friends ran a financial check on me they could tell you why I couldn’t pull together that much money overnight.”
“And how’d you learn to fight like you do, taking out two big women in the shower?” she demanded. “Not to mention Angie, which I watched you do.”