The Good Wife

by Stewart O'Nan

  She knows Tommy’s going through much worse, that before he can see them he’s strip-searched, told to open his mouth, to bend over.

  For Patty, that’s the mystery at the heart of visitation. The way the system’s set up, it’s like a price they’re supposed to pay over and over until they give up and stop loving the people they’ve come to see, and stop coming. That’s why she has to submit, why, even as she hates everything about this place, she needs to be here. Maybe next time she’ll leave Casey at home.

  Now that their bags are cleared, the guards look through their food. It’s crazy—Patty dropped her box off at the front desk when she first signed in and no one’s inspected it yet. The same two that searched her bags lift out her coffee and her new shampoo and set them aside, and then her deodorant.

  “Alcohol,” the guard in charge explains, and when Patty protests, shows her where it’s listed in the ingredients. “When you boil it down it’s the same as Sterno.”

  “There’s no alcohol in my coffee.”

  “It’s a glass container.”

  “It’s plastic,” Patty argues, because any idiot can see it’s plastic meant to look like glass. It makes no sense: the lasagna’s in a Pyrex dish and it’s fine.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  “What kind you drink?” the woman from Albany asks. “I’ll lend you some.”

  “Thank you,” Patty says, still pissed off The coffee’s the least of it. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do with no shampoo and no deodorant. Casey’s got a small bottle of baby shampoo. At least they didn’t take her lotion.

  She commiserates when one of the women from downstate loses a can of cherry pie filling. They all lose something; it’s like the guards can’t let them get away clean. They get receipts for everything they have to leave behind. When they’re done, none of the guards helps them lug their stuff down the long gray tunnel of a concrete block hall. She has to use both hands, leaving Casey to tag along at her elbow. No one talks. At the end they stop for a closed door. There’s only a small window in it, the kind with chicken wire, but Patty can see it leads outside, a mesh of fence catching the sunlight. Her bag is slipping lower on her shoulder, and she has to shift, kneeing the box higher to get a better grip. The head guard calls on his walkie-talkie, and the lock rattles. When he opens the door, the heat pours in, muggy and suffocating. A couple steps and they’re outside, inside the prison, a high concrete wall rising to the sky like a castle.

  The trailers are straight ahead, regular two-tone mobile homes like anywhere, and there are their men, Tommy the tallest of them, waving from behind a gate in a high cyclone fence that another guard is opening. The gate swings free and there’s nothing between them but a patch of crabgrass. Suddenly they’re all running, the guards forgotten, no longer in charge. Patty’s hands are full, but she’s running, and he’s running to meet her, to hold her and take the box and the bag from her. As he kneels to say hello to Casey, she keeps a hand on his shoulder, as if the two of them are magnetized. Casey’s slow to hug him and won’t give up his bag. She smiles at Tommy as if to say it’s okay, give him time, this is all new to him.

  It’s new to her too, and a shock, after all of her daydreams, to have the guards lock the gate behind them and retreat into the tunnel, leaving them in a scrubby yard with a jungle gym and a slide, a few weathered picnic tables and a single drooping basketball hoop. Like the other couples, they ignore this equipment and head for their designated trailer, but before Patty steps up and into it, she sees Casey looking out at the second fence, maybe a hundred feet away, that separates them from the rest of the prison.

  Inside, it’s dim and musty, orange-and-brown-flowered curtains pulled over the windows. With every step Tommy takes, the whole thing sways. The ceiling’s too low, and he has to walk hunched over. When she was a kid, a couple of her friends lived in trailers, and this one looks about the same—the oven door opening into the hallway like an ironing board, the kitchen table like a booth in a diner—except this one’s deserted, blank as a motel room. Tommy sets the box down and turns on the light. “You’re down this way, pardner,” he tells Casey, and before he sets off after him, gives her a deep, breathtaking kiss.

  “No fair,” she says, and starts setting up house.

  The tap sputters, hissing air. The fridge isn’t cold. She checks that it’s plugged in and turns it up, lifts out the racks and ice trays and dumps them in the sink. She has to wipe down the counters and stovetop, give the table a good going-over. The formica’s a bright orange, the whole trailer done in a horrible sixties decor like a coffee shop, including a striped bathroom.

  “Where’d they find this thing?” she asks Tommy. “It’s like no one else would buy it.”

  She’s at the sink, rinsing the silverware. He comes up from behind and holds her, kisses her neck, a hand slipping under her shirt.

  “Where’s Casey?” she asks, leaning back into him.

  “In his room.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Unpacking.”

  “Does he need help?”

  A footstep and they both turn. She twists out of his arms as Casey clumps up the hall, a hand on the wall like they’re in a submarine.

  “It’s hot in here,” she says. “Why don’t you two go see if you can open some windows.”

  Casey slides across the booth and pulls back the curtains. The windows are louvered slats of glass that crank up and out. Their view is of the trailer next door, and beyond it, the basketball hoop and the wall, straight lines wavering in the heat. The problem, Patty thinks, is that there aren’t any trees.

  Tommy goes through the groceries like he’s opening presents. He holds up the lasagna like a prize, peels a banana, takes a bite and groans to show how good it is.

  She makes them sandwiches and lemonade, letting the cold tap run. At home she eats her lunch out on the back porch, but she wants them to forget they’re in prison, so they stay inside, pretending they’re all alone. There’s barely a hint of a breeze. They sit at the booth, Tommy squeezing her thigh under the table. Casey takes advantage, pouring himself a second glass of lemonade, digging deep into the bag of Fritos. Patty wants Tommy to step in, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “Okay,” she finally says, “let’s save some for tomorrow.”

  There’s only room for one person to clean up. Tommy volunteers so she can get herself settled. Casey tags after her, stopping in the paneled living room, where there’s a TV with a cable box on top like at Eileen’s. Casey appeals to her, hopeful.

  “Okay, but it goes off when I say,” Patty says.

  On the far wall hangs the phone the coordinator warned her about—black and old-fashioned, a prop from the Cold War. When it rings, Tommy has to stop whatever he’s doing and go outside to be counted. The coordinator said it will ring around ten times during the visit, at predetermined intervals. For some reason she expected it would be in the master bedroom, but why should anything be designed for their convenience?

  The bay window in the bedroom faces the bay window of the next trailer, maybe twenty feet away. She supposes it’s better that they hear the neighbors than have Casey hear them. The bed is two unmade beds pushed together, a stack of sheets reeking of bleach, and for a moment, standing there with her bag, the cheapness—the ugliness of it—is too much for her. This is supposed to be their special time together, but the place feels like a cheap motel. Tommy hasn’t said anything about it yet, and she decides she won’t either.

  Once she gets the bed made, the room’s slightly more inviting. She’s still paranoid, checking the ceiling fixture for a camera. As she lays her clothes next to Tommy’s prison greens in the sheet metal dresser (mingling them, as if it’s forbidden), she imagines someone in a tower watching her on a flickering monitor. It seems impossible that they’d leave them alone.

  “Hey,” Tommy says, poking his head in, “you okay?”

  “Yeah,” she says, and it’s not a lie, because she ca
n open her arms and hold him against her, close her eyes and rest her head against his neck like they’re slow-dancing, and for a moment everything’s fine. The problem is letting him go.

  “Let’s just stay like this,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  “I mean forever.”

  “Okay.”

  From the other room come the synthesized blasts of intergalactic battle.

  “Star Wars,” Tommy says. “They’re showing both of them back to back.”

  “I don’t think Casey’s ever seen them.”

  “I have,” Tommy says, and reaches behind him to close the door.

  “No,” Patty says, stopping his arm. “We’ll have time tonight.”

  “What’s another six hours.”

  “Four. Come on, don’t make me feel bad about this.”

  They break with a kiss and join Casey on the couch, Patty sitting on Tommy’s lap, her arms wrapped around his.

  “You know what I could go for?” Tommy says.

  “What?” she asks, afraid she might have forgotten to bring whatever it is.

  “An ice-cold beer.”

  “I know.”

  On screen, Han Solo and Chewbacca are flying the Millennium Falcon through a slowly closing pair of hangar doors as lasers ricochet everywhere. They escape out into starry space where there’s just the soft rumble of their engines.

  “This is weird,” Tommy says, “watching TV without everyone shouting.”

  “It’s nice,” Patty says. Beside them, Casey’s intent on the set. She wants him and Tommy to spend time together, just the two of them; it’s one reason she brought the football. She should send them outside—it’s past four, the day’s almost gone—but when the first movie ends, Casey wants to watch the second, already coming on.

  “Please?” he lobbies.

  “Ask your father,” she says.

  Tommy checks with her first, like she’s the final authority.

  “Don’t look at me,” she says, and just then, as he’s about to say yes, the phone rings.

  “Sure,” Tommy says, as Patty climbs off to let him get it.

  “I’ll be back,” he tells her.

  “You better be.”

  The whole trailer lifts an inch when he steps down. She can hear the chained gate clinking over Yoda’s lines. She explained the count to Casey ahead of time so he wouldn’t be surprised; now she wishes he was more upset about it, instead of caught up in a galaxy far far away. At least he’s consistent, she thinks. It’s his way of dealing at home. Why should it be any different here?

  Tommy returns, apologizing. A minute later, someone knocks on the door, and he has to get up again.

  She tries not to eavesdrop, afraid something’s wrong. If the prison goes on lockdown, the visit’s over.

  “Pats!” he calls from the kitchen. “It’s for you.”

  It’s the woman from Albany with a cupful of freeze-dried crystals. Patty thinks she should invite her in, but the woman says she doesn’t want to interrupt. Patty makes her take some strawberries.

  “You didn’t tell me you got busted,” Tommy says.

  “They took my shampoo too. I hope I don’t gross you out.”

  “I’ll have to give you a bath.”

  She shushes him, with Casey right down the hall, but lets him feel her up. “Okay, that’s enough.” It’s like high school, wanting to give in but having to push him away. It’s crazy, and selfishly—not seriously—she thinks maybe she should have left Casey at home.

  “Just you wait,” she warns Tommy.

  “That’s what I’ve been doing.”

  They pinch and poke and push each other like little kids. It feels natural, the way they’ve always talked at home, clinching in the kitchen, roughhousing on the couch. They can be silly in a way they can’t in the visiting room; half the things they’re doing now would get them thrown out.

  Patty tries to provoke Casey with a finger in the ribs.

  “Mom,” he says, “quit it,” warding her off with one arm, his eyes never leaving the screen. Again, she feels like they’re wasting time, like they should be doing something together. They can watch TV at home—except they can’t, not like this.

  She needs to relax. As hard as it is for her to believe after waiting five years, there will be other visits. They’re here, that should be enough.

  Casey moves to the floor so he won’t be distracted. He sits cross-legged, hunched forward, as if the set is drawing him in.

  She and Tommy take over the couch, cuddling, sharing a sweating cup of lemonade and an ashtray. They stretch out the conversation of a regular visit, Tommy asking after her mother and Eileen and Cy, how Ruby Tuesday’s is going. They both know the answers—there’s nothing new, nothing urgent she needs to say to him. Tonight, maybe, she’ll tell him she’s been thinking about another baby—just thinking; she doesn’t want to alarm him.

  The station has padded the movie with commercials, but Casey never loses interest. Patty brought popcorn, but it’s too hot, and she’d planned on having it tomorrow night anyway—that was supposed to be movie night. As The Empire Strikes Back drags on, Tommy raids the refrigerator, sneaking folded-over pieces of salami until she has to cut him off, saying she’s going to start dinner pretty soon. By request they’re having curried chicken salad, and for dessert, no-bake cheesecake with a graham cracker crust. She’s been waiting for the day to cool down, but it’s getting late. When the phone rings for another count, Patty takes it as a sign.

  The burners are electric, and the galley heats up fast; she blots the sweat at her hairline with her wrist and worries that she’ll stink of boiled chicken. She’ll have to take a shower later. She knows Tommy will want in, but if they lock the bathroom door, will they still be able to hear Casey?

  Dinner turns out all right, considering how little she has to work with. There are no pickles because they come in real glass jars, no ice cream because it would have melted while they were waiting to be processed, no ice-cold beer. The cheesecake is still soupy in the middle because the fridge isn’t cold enough, so they wait on it, doing the dishes and then going outside to play three-way war at the picnic table.

  It’s cooler out now, and the wall’s dark. Another couple’s barbecuing at a built-in grill, something Patty didn’t know was allowed. The sun’s almost down, a bank of clouds above them tinted the pink of old postcards. Tommy searches the deepening sky like he’s expecting something.

  “We never get to see this,” he says.

  Patty wants to see the stars come out, but the spotlights pop on, bathing everything a harsh silver, throwing the net of the fence over them, and they retreat inside. By lamplight the trailer’s not as ugly. The cheesecake’s ready, or close enough. Casey doesn’t like it, and Tommy has to help him with his. After, Tommy does card tricks for them, making Casey laugh, and then it’s Casey’s bedtime, even though it’s not completely dark.

  Patty’s plan is to make the evening just like one at home, and runs a bath for him. The tub’s short, the rubber flower decals bleached white. She scrubs it with dish soap and scalding water before letting him get in, sits sweating on the closed toilet lid while Tommy stands in the doorway, as if he’s not allowed in—or is he embarrassed, because when it’s time for Casey to get out, Tommy’s gone, reappearing only when Casey’s got his PJs on.

  “Where’d you go?” she asks.

  “I put water on for coffee.”

  Like every night, Casey leans back into his pillow propped longways and reads his bedtime story aloud. By now he’s memorized all of his books. He flips the pages with confidence, but he seems to be going slower than usual, focusing, trying to get every word right. Tommy’s properly impressed, nodding at how good he is, but what’s even better is seeing Tommy kiss him good night for the very first time.

  There’s no night-light, so Patty promises they’ll leave the hall light on.

  “Go to sleep,” she orders, pulling the door halfway.

  In the kitchen,
as Tommy’s pouring coffee, she asks what time everyone wakes up around here. Before he can answer, the phone rings.

  “Seven,” he says, and searches for his shoes.

  She uses the time alone to open her new nightgown and lay it out on the bed. Next door the curtains are drawn, only a seam of light sneaking through. She closes their own curtains, then notices a mosquito bouncing against the ceiling fixture. There’s nothing to swat it with except the cardboard from her nightgown. The mosquito’s out of reach so she has to climb up on the bed and then duck down so she doesn’t bang her head on the ceiling. She can picture Tommy finding her like this; it’s enough incentive for her to nail the mosquito on her first try, leaving a bloody smear by the light. She rubs at it with the cardboard but it doesn’t come off and she gives up, hopping down and smoothing the covers before he can return.

  When she heads back to the kitchen, Casey’s coming up the hallway.

  “I heard a noise.”

  “That was just me,” she says, turning him around. She tells him about the mosquito as she guides him back to bed. “Everything’s fine,” she says, as Tommy returns, shaking the whole trailer. “We’re both right here and we’re not going anywhere, okay?”

  He says, “Okay,” but timidly, and she leaves the door three-quarters open for more light.

  “What’s up?” Tommy whispers.

  “He heard a noise.”

  “Does that happen a lot?”

  “Depends,” she says.

  “He’s getting big.”

  “Like his father.”

  They take their coffees into the living room and end up making out on the couch like teenagers, eyes closed, teeth clicking. She slips underneath him, he moves on top of her, and she feels the whole trailer shift. She struggles to the surface and holds him off with one hand, swallowing, shaking her head. “You know he’s going to be out here any second.”

  They leave their coffees.

  “Lock the door,” she tells him.