Page 98 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

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The gate opens at seven. It’s February, and still dark.

I’ve been in the lot since twenty past five because the drive is two hours and I wouldn’t have slept anyway. There are four other vehicles. A woman in a hatchback keeps the engine running for heat. A man sleeps in a van with a child’s booster seat behind him. Nobody talks to anybody in a lot like this. It’s like a hospital parking lot at four in the morning, everybody keeping to themselves.

The truck door still needs a shove. The wiper on the passenger side still judders. Marek comes out at ten past seven with a clear plastic bag in his hand.

He’s lost weight. His hair is shorter, with more gray than before. He’s wearing the coat he wore into that building in August of the year before last. It’s too big on him now. He walks across the beige lot in the dark toward a fifteen-year-old truck. For one second I can see every visit at once: glass between us, his hand flat on a table, mine on the other side. Then he’s outside. That’s enough that I have to remind myself to breathe.

I get out and stand by the door.

He puts the bag on the roof. Then he stands there looking at me across it for about four seconds. Eighteen months is a stupid amount of time to know exactly what somebody’s handwriting looks like and forget how much space he takes up standing three feet away. I keep my hands on my own side of the truck roof until he speaks.

Then he says, “You changed the mirror.”

“I did.”

“It was set wrong for two years.”

“It was set for me,” I say. “Get in the truck.” We sit in the lot with the engine running and the heater on. Neither of us moves to go anywhere.

He has coffee from the flask I brought. He holds it in both hands but doesn’t drink much. His hands are different. Not thinner, exactly. A callus crosses the right palm from eighteen months of laundry work he’s told me almost nothing about in eleven visits and forty-one letters.

“It was on the news last night,” he says. “The sentence.”

“Yeah.”

“How long?”

I find the article on my phone and pass it over. He puts on his glasses. They gave those back too, in the plastic bag with everything else. He reads the article all the way through, including the parts about him.

Nine years. Conspiracy. Wire fraud. A count on the container structure that I don’t understand and never will.

He reads it twice. Then he takes off the glasses, folds them, and puts them on the dash.

“She’ll be sixty-six,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“Roth got four.”

“He pled in November. It was in the paper for one day.” I take the phone back. “Fin’s been driving around with a newspaper on the passenger seat for three months like a man with a dog.”

Marek laughs. It’s a horrible noise, rusty from disuse. He puts a hand over the bottom of his face, gets it under control, and then loses it again.

He’s crying in a truck in a prison parking lot at half past seven in the morning. I don’t comment, reach over, or turn on the radio. I keep both hands on the wheel and look at the wire fence. The flagpole doesn’t have a flag up yet. I let him have it. His shoulders shake once, hard, then again. I’ve seen him hurt, furious, half-conscious, naked, afraid. I’ve never seen him cry. This doesn’t look like him breaking. It looks like relief.

“Right,” he says eventually.

“Right.”

“Is there a house?”

“There’s a house,” I say. “You’re not seeing it today because there’s no bed in it yet. Today you’re going to my place. You’re having a bath, eating an enormous amount, and going to sleep at four in the afternoon like an old man.”

“All right.” I pull out of the lot and onto the county road. He sits with the coffee going cold in his hands, watching eleven miles of nothing through the window. Bare trees. A feed store. A school bus stopped with its lights going. He says nothing for the first half hour. I leave the radio off. It’s the first silence we’ve shared that doesn’t feel like a negotiation. I don’t fill it. He doesn’t apologize for needing it. By the time the school bus turns off, his shoulders have dropped an inch.

Somewhere past the second town he says, “You’ll have to tell me when it’s too much.”