“Spaghetti. And acorn.” She pauses. “Some college students moved in across the street last week. They’ve been throwing parties every night, and it keeps me up.”
“Why don’t you call the cops?”
She makes a face, picks at a loose thread hanging off the bottom of her skirt.
“It’s not that bad,” she says. Of course, Jacky doesn’t know that someone broke into her home a few months ago, stole everything of value. Her TV, her phone, even her clock radio. And the paintings Jacky made in prison, the ones she brought home every week and piled up in the garage—most of those were gone too. She’d filed a police report, and two cops had come out, they’d laughed when they realized who she was, then left without taking any notes, without taking her seriously, and she knew she’d never see any of her stolen belongings again. “I’m sure the police are busy with much more important things than my silly complaints.”
This is how it is every Wednesday with Jacky—an hour of boring conversation about nothing at all. About the grocery shopping she did the day before, the TV shows they both watch. He tells her about the menu in the cafeteria for the week, and about the guy two cells down who’d had a heart attack the week before and still isn’t back from the hospital wing. It’s exactly how they’d be talking to each other if Jacky wasn’t in prison, the mundane conversation of marriage, one week’s worth of talk compacted into sixty minutes over two old rotary phones as they look at each other through a pane of bulletproof glass. It’s the only way Jacky can get visitors, because he’s considered dangerous; the guards think Jacky might hurt her if he got the chance, they treat him with special care.
She still wears her wedding band. Jacky can’t.
“Have you gone into any of the restaurants?” he asks. He asks this same thing every week, but she can understand. They were a big part of Jacky’s life for so long—owning and operating half a dozen successful restaurants was no small feat—so she usually tries to be gentle. She decides to ignore the question this time, acts like she hadn’t heard it at all. “Are they clean inside? Have the menus been changed?”
“Have you been painting?” she asks. Jacky blinks. He was always the talkative one in their relationship, the one who’d lead the conversation. Years before, they’d be out for dinner and they’d meet another couple, or some acquaintance, and Jacky would introduce his wife, and then Gloria would fade quietly into the background. But things have changed, and she’s the one steering the ship, jumping from one subject to another, asking questions, pushing Jacky to talk. He’s severely depressed, the prison doctor says. He has heart problems, weight problems. He’s on a cocktail of medications, they keep changing it up, and he’s sometimes blurry, faded. Confused. She has to take control during most visits, or he’d sit there like a lump, or end up repeating the same story. “Do they have a package for me at the front?”
“Yeah,” he says.
“How many did you do this week?”
“Four, I think.” Jacky pauses. “I need paint.”
“What colors?”
“Red, mostly.”
The artwork started as a kind of therapy, because Jacky needed something to do behind bars, and he wasn’t a reader, he’d never been much for exercise. So she’d brought charcoals and paper and paint and sponges—Jacky wasn’t allowed access to paintbrushes, they were too sharp and could be used as a weapon—and she’d thought it might be a complete failure but it was worth a shot, because Jacky wasn’t doing all that well, in fact, he wasn’t doing well at all. During his first six months at Sterling, Gloria had been in a terror that she’d get a call from the prison, telling her that Jacky had hanged himself, or that he’d managed to drown himself in the toilet. And maybe things would’ve been better that way, God knows there were plenty of people who would’ve danced in the streets and set off fireworks if Jacky Seever were dead, but he was her husband, and she loved him. She still worried about him, she still found herself in the men’s section at the department store, shopping for undershirts and socks, even though Jacky didn’t need them anymore, the prison supplied them. It was old habit, but that’s what every marriage is. Habit.
“Red? Black too?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“Okay.”