The Pink House. Trish MacEnulty

on the show were and how the ho’s didn’t act like any ho’s she had ever known. Daffy’s comments were more entertaining than the show. Back home Sonya hadn’t watched much TV. Duke always had it turned to some sports channel, so she spent her time lounging in her king-size bed reading magazines or playing with the baby. Tomas was the baby’s name, named after her grandfather from Warsaw. Little Tomas. Even now she could remember exactly what his chubby little hands felt like in hers. It was so easy to make him smile. He was just beginning to pull himself to a standing position when she had stupidly let herself be taken away from him. Stupid. She had actually wanted to go back to work, had missed it, missed the thrill, that excitement when some chump fell for one of her scams, and it was true that Maria was no good without her. So she had left the baby with Dina, and gone off to do what she did so well, little knowing that she would never hold her baby again. He won’t even know me, she thought, next time I see him. He’ll be at least four years old, and he won’t know his own mommy.

      It was time for the last count before lights off. Sonya stood up with the buzzer but she stayed as close to Daffy and her crowd as she could. She didn’t want to see Magna, but there was the big woman scowling at her just outside the door. Sonya turned her head away. She noticed a sign on the bulletin board by the CO’s office. “All Inmates Signed up for Drama Class must attend every Saturday through September.”

      She stared at the sign. Saturdays. That would be good. She needed to be out of this dorm as much as possible. It was probably too late, but she’d go to her classification officer on Monday and see what she could do.

      Saturday, June 3

      Lolly went outside to inspect her carpet roses in the evening light. She wasn’t one for the big fat cultivated roses. She liked lantana, bougainvillea, azaleas, lilies and irises. She liked long, stalky flowers and bunchy flowers like hydrangeas and she loved flowers that came from trees like the voluptuous magnolias and the delicate crepe myrtles. The wisteria were her favorite, but they were mostly faded and gone. She walked through her garden, admiring the blooms. Spring was over, but the summer blossoms were throwing their arms open and letting loose. She stopped to replenish the bird feeder from a sack of seed she carried with her. A couple of cardinals had a nest in the chinaberry tree just outside her bedroom window.

      Sometimes she’d see thrushes, finches, sparrows, or blue jays out here. And of course mockingbirds. When she was young, she had loved that book To Kill a Mockingbird. But the father character, Atticus Finch (a good bird name), was wrong about mockingbirds. They weren’t harmless innocents, those birds. They were as pugilistic a bird as she’d ever seen. She would laugh out loud when she saw a mockingbird chasing down a crow twice its size. She’d even seen one go after a hawk. And they thought nothing, for that matter, about swooping down and dive bombing a dog or a person who came too close to their nests. They were protective, those birds, unlike so many human parents. Oh well, Mama had tried to protect her. But no one can really do it, can they?. Life comes at you in a fury and takes whatever the hell it wants. Just be grateful with whatever it leaves you.

      She climbed the steps up to her porch. Her stump was hurting, chafed from wearing her prosthetic all day. She sat down on the swing on the front porch and thought back to her trip to the prison. She had wanted to go the first time without Jen, to meet the new group. Several of them had taken her poetry workshops, but she had some new ones, too. They were so excited they were going to work with a real actress. It looked like a good group. She wondered what Jen would make of them, and what they would make of her.

      A tan pickup truck pulled into her driveway. Aunt Jewel got out. With her curly white hair and soft pretty skin, Aunt Jewel looked so much like Lolly’s momma had looked before she’d died of a heart attack eight years earlier.

      “Hey, darlin’,” Aunt Jewel said, coming up the steps of the porch, holding a pie plate. “I brought you some lemon chess pie. I just had an urge to make pie today and thought you might want some.”

      “Yum, thank you,” Lolly said. “Come in and take a load off.”

      Aunt Jewel plopped down in one of the Adirondack chairs with a heavy sigh.

      “It’s going to be a long, hot summer when it gets here,” she said.

      “Mmmm,” Lolly said. “I’m sure it will be hot for you.”

      “Election years tend to be hot.” Aunt Jewel sighed again. “Hot and dirty. Where you been today, sugar?”

      “Out at the women’s prison.”

      “Oh, you doing that again?” Aunt Jewel asked.

      “Yeah, and guess what? Jen’s going to come work with me,” Lolly said.

      “What? Miss High and Mighty is gonna do something for someone else? Well, shut my mouth,” Aunt Jewel said. Lolly giggled.

      “Oh, I’m paying her or else there’s no way in hell she’d come.”

      “Not out of your own pocket?” Aunt Jewel looked aghast.

      “No. The Department of Corrections got a grant, and the woman who wrote the grant really wanted me to try giving a drama program, so I hired Jen.”

      “I’m surprised they let you in there at all to help those women,” Aunt Jewel said, stretching her hands out and examining them. “Especially with a Republican in the governor’s mansion.”

      Lolly stood up and plucked dead leaves off one of the hanging ferns.

      “We don’t exactly advertise what we’re doing. The corrections people love these kinds of programs. It helps with both security and recidivism, and they’ve got the stats to prove it. But they don’t tell the public that they’re doing anything that could be construed as coddling.”

      “That’s right,” Aunt Jewel said, “’cause we want to make sure those people are just as messed up when they come out as they were when they went in. The mentality of people astonishes me. And they call themselves Christians, which is the funniest part of all. You know I got in a big fight with some of those busybodies at church the other day.”

      “Why?” Lolly turned toward her Aunt, who now had a mischievous grin on her face.

      “Oh, they were going on and on about homosexuals and how they had no business in church. I said, ‘Look, Jesus never mentioned homosexuals so therefore he either didn’t know about it or didn’t care about it. Or he was one.’ I think they wanted to burn me at the stake.”

      “Aunt Jewel, you are so scandalous,” Lolly said with a laugh. Aunt Jewel’s expression turned peevish.

      “Jesus said, ‘love thy neighbor as thyself and don’t judge others.’ What’s so damn difficult about that?”

      “I don’t know, Aunt Jewel. I don’t know. People are just scared, I guess.”

      “Well, I’m going to head home. Come see me soon. I need you to help me put up a new bird feeder. The squirrels tore my last one to pieces.”

      Aunt Jewel stood up and Lolly kissed her on the cheek.

      “Thanks for the pie,” Lolly said as Aunt Jewel strode back to her pickup truck.

      Lolly picked up the pie from the round metal table where Aunt Jewel had left it and turned to go inside. Sue, a friend from work, had invited her to the movies, but she didn’t really feel up to it so she called and canceled. Saturday night and all she wanted to do was to eat some left over Thai food and read a book.

      After her dinner she decided to take a bath. Her bathroom was small and covered in green tile. She’d need to redecorate in here, she thought. Maybe make a mosaic. She lit a vanilla-scented candle and undressed, drawing a hot bath. As she eased herself into the water on her one leg, she looked down at her body. How long had it been since a man had touched her? More than a year. Damn it, she thought. She used to see a guy named Sean. He was a French horn player, and what he could do with his lips was pretty spectacular. But then he got a symphony job in California and moved away. She missed him. Most men were afraid of her. Was it because of the leg? Or just because