In a single grim sentence, he explained that exercise helped keep your body and your head working, so you, in turn, could keep people away from you. I’d seen those people, bulging, pebble-eyed men, squirming with tats. A couple of them apparently “jumped up” for him—protected him—after he taught them to read. He was gabby only about that, the thrill of seeing the world open to people when they could read.
That was the one good thing. The rest of it at least was over.
We were still laughing, in bursts, when we walked out into the parking lot. The snow slacked off to a sprinkle, as it sometimes does toward evening, and spires of light pierced the clouds. The yellow eyes of the snowplows came prowling in convoys. Stefan saw the flyer under the windshield wiper before I did, but I noticed that there were no other, similar ones under the wipers of other cars. He grabbed the paper and turned to me, his eyes drained. It was a photo of us outside the prison, when Stefan put his hand on top of my head. Through it was drawn a slash, in thick red marker. Stefan said, “What?”
Suddenly I felt we were no longer in the parking lot of a pancake house on a darkening late winter afternoon, but instead in a blind dark alley where heavy footsteps scraped from corners we couldn’t see. I forgot that I wasn’t talking until Stefan prompted me, “Mom? Aren’t you going to say anything but, well, well, well…？”
Ever since Stefan went to prison, I had a recurring dream, not quite a nightmare but a grim fantasy of sorts. I was at his arraignment and the judge pointed at me and asked me to explain how all this had happened. I was willing to do that, but every time I tried to speak, I had to stop to remove handfuls of gravel from my mouth. I’d try again, only to find myself spewing little pebbles that chunked onto the table in front of me.
“Well,” I said. “Jill was there.”
He dropped the sheet of paper, hunched his shoulders and jerked, gazing behind him. “Where? Where is she?”
“Not here. She was at the prison, before you came out.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“It seemed like too much. I’m sorry.”
“Jill was at the prison and you didn’t tell me because it seemed like too much?” Stefan reached up and grabbed a handful of his hair.
“She left before you even came out!”
“What if she had a gun or something?”
“A gun? Jill?”
He picked up the sodden paper. “Well, who did this?”
“I have no idea. Who knew we were here, I mean, here at this diner?” We both scanned the edges of the parking lot then. Who was here just moments ago? Who was here now? With a camera? With maybe a gun? I scrabbled for the keys. “And who had access to a photo printer so quickly? Somebody took this, like with their phone, and then must have sent it to somebody else.”
“That’s pretty elaborate.”
You really have no idea, I thought. And he really did have no idea. I’d never told Stefan in any real detail about how persistent the protestors had been in front of our house. He watched television, I knew, but he’d never mentioned seeing any local coverage of SAY. I got the impression that the tastes in the prison common went more toward action movies and game shows than news from the small town where we lived, hundreds of miles away. How would he feel when he saw the protestors live on our doorstep?
As we got closer to Portland, the town where we lived, the snow was tapering off and Stefan was all but leaning out of the window like a golden retriever. I thought he would jump out and start to run. “Did Dad text? Did he get home?”
“I’m sure he’ll be there.”
Stefan was no fool. His dad’s visits and calls numbered two to my ten. But he must have wanted badly to assume that Jep’s lapses owed more to scheduling and his personal pain than anything larger. He longed for his father. If the relationship of fathers and sons is always turbid, how much more was theirs? Rightly or wrongly, though he loved him truly, Jep considered Stefan more “my” child, a mama’s baby, not the rough-and-ready little man’s man that he’d always dreamed a son would be. I would see Jep’s involuntary grimace when Stefan worked harder on his dance floor moves than his field moves, when Stefan nodded off in front of the TV during sacred Sunday Green Bay Packer games. Stefan was physically talented but lacked the interest. A man who could not take solace in athletic passion was an alien life-form to Jep. Unspoken was the vapor of a suggestion that none of this might have happened to a boy who had given himself fully to the integrated life of body and mind. When Jep said he was a simple man, he usually meant only to disarm. Sometimes, though, he meant to reproach. To be fair, he would have been surprised to learn that anybody thought that.