by Roger Bray
“Sorry, I’m sorry I didn’t mean to startle you.”
She tried to smile, but pretty much failed, her lips moved but it didn’t touch the rest of her face.
“That’s fine, I’m sorry. I was miles away, I wasn’t being rude. Sorry.” she repeated.
He held his smile and she could see how, unlike her feeble attempt, his smile did touch his whole face, it lit up his blue eyes which had small creases to the outside edges, which Alice thought meant that he smiled a lot, and the evidence was marked there. She had a vague memory of when she used to smile like that, but it hadn’t been for a while, even before Alex’s trial she struggled to remember when she had smiled a smile as open and as wide as that.
“Hey, that’s OK, I was only wondering,” he asked, “if I could grab a couple of sugars.”
He indicated toward the miniature milk churn on the table holding white and brown sugar in slender paper tubes along with some diet substitute which everyone seemed to avoid.
“Of course,” she said.
He pulled a couple of the tubes of brown sugar from the little churn and was about to turn around and leave her in peace when he stopped and instead asked her.
“Actually, the place is packed, do you mind if I sit down here?”
He indicated the second chair at Alice’s table.
Alice didn’t want any company, she had purposefully placed herself at the back of the café away from people and she was about to protest but, looking into his blue eyes, she found herself shaking her head instead.
“No, not at all please,” she stammered, and waved her free hand vaguely at the empty chair opposite her.
He sat down and placed the courier bag that he was carrying over his shoulder onto the floor, ripping open the two sugars together he dumped them into the cup of black coffee that he had placed on the table. He gave the cup a rigorous stir before drinking most of it in a single gulp, with a soft satisfied sigh.
In spite of herself and her perpetually depressed mood, Alice found herself laughing if only for a moment.
“I don’t know why you bothered to sit down, you’ll have that coffee finished in a minute.”
He looked down at his cup and laughed.
“I suppose I will, but I had been so needing that, actually,” he emptied his cup with another swallow.
“I might get another; can I leave my bag here?” he stood up and lifted the courier bag from the floor and placed in on his chair.
“Could you watch it for me?”
Alice was about to refuse and tell him that she was about to leave when again something stopped her and she took a hurried gulp of her coffee which was now almost cold, before hurriedly saying, “No, that’s OK. I’ll watch it.”
He smiled his big happy smile again, winked at her and took a few short steps to the counter; Alice felt herself blush slightly and wondered how soon after he came back she could gracefully get up and leave without causing any offense to him.
He was back in a moment with an owl shaped numbered card on a stick which he ceremoniously placed in the center of the table.
“I took the liberty while I was up there, to order you another coffee as well. I hope that you don’t mind.”
“How did you know what I’m drinking?”
“I asked the barista, any good server will know what their customers are drinking. Flat white eh, and how’s that?”
Alice shrugged her shoulders and looked down at her now empty cup.
She laughed, “Well, to be honest, like a cappuccino, but less froth and no sprinkles on top.”
He was about to comment when their coffees arrived and, while Alice opened the first sachet of sugar and poured it into her cup, followed by the second once she knew the first had melted; he repeated his previous procedure and ripped the ends off two sachets and dumped the contents straight into his cup.
They both took a sip as they looked over their cup rims at each other.
He beat Alice in putting his cup down and held out his hand.
“Steven Banks,” he introduced himself, “Steve if you prefer.”
Alice was unsure how to respond, she was most definitely not in the mood for any sort of social chitchat and was now starting to regret staying, she should have, as she had intended, made her excuses and left when he asked her to look after his bag. But it would be churlish and rude to ignore him now so, she reached out and took his offered hand, shaking it once before releasing it and returning her hand back to her coffee cup.
“Alice …” she started before stumbling, she had almost given her married name instead of her own name that she had reverted to once the divorce had come through. “Alice Reed. Which do you prefer?”
“What, sorry?”
“Steven or Steve?”
“I don’t care. My mom called me Steven when she was angry with me and my dad called me Steve or Stevie, everyone else, any of those.”
“And your girlfriend?”
He smiled at her and took a drink of his coffee before holding his free hand up and waving an extended index finger at her.
“Good try, but no, no girlfriend, no wife, no ex or anything in between.”
She couldn’t help but smile at his infectious grin and waggling finger. Alice couldn’t believe it that she was actually having a conversation with someone, someone who wasn’t her brother or a lawyer or, anyone else in some way connected with her brother's case. Even the thin sort of conversations that she had had with Brian didn’t exist anymore once the divorce was finalized. No children, they’d sold the house and split everything amicably. On the once or twice that she had seen him since, any talk had been brief and non-committal. They hadn’t parted as friends, but still, they hadn’t parted as enemies either.
In hindsight, their marriage had been one that had never got out of second gear even at its height in the best of times and it was inevitably destined to slowly, but definitely, head toward the divorce court. Sooner than it had if either one of them had had the courage to admit it. Alex’s case and the divide it had caused were merely the means which pushed their relationship to its obvious and inevitable conclusion. But, for the preceding four years Alice’s circle of friends had got smaller and smaller and, working from home, she now rarely actually spoke to anyone.
Maybe coming into the coffee shop was her way of forcing herself to have some sort of interaction, even if it were only with the staff and if she had not mistimed her run today and come in during the lunch time rush, that would have been all it would have been, as usual.
She nodded idly wondering why a good-looking guy like this had no girlfriend and why he was talking to her.
He must be gay then, she had silently concluded, when he asked, “And you?”
She looked at him over the rim of her cup and considered that the conversation had reached a quite personal level quickly, a level that she wasn’t sure she wanted but then, she had raised the subject first and it would definitely be rude not to answer, briefly, without confiding too much.
“Husband, boyfriend?” Steve pushed.
“Oh, husband, well actually ex-husband.”
“Divorced?”
She nodded again.
He nodded slowly, “Well it’s a pleasure to meet you, Alice Reed.”
She smiled sadly at him and raised her cup in thanks; she drained it in a gulp and gathered her papers.
“Thank you for the coffee, but I must be going.”
“Back to work?”
“No, there are a few things I need to do.”
The truth of which actually entailed going back to her house, eating a sparse meal before sitting in the corner still wondering how she would face her brother in the morning. Whiskey and tears would most probably feature as well into the early evening before she staggered to bed, she was pretty sure of that.
“But it was nice to meet you,” she allowed as she picked up the six-inch-thick folder which contained her brother's latest appeal and the disappointing result on three thin pages pinned t
o the inside front cover.
“Maybe we'll meet up again?”
“Maybe,” she said, not prepared to commit to anything.
She grabbed her bag and stood, turning toward the door; but before she could take a step she was barged by a rather overweight woman determined to reach the chair that Alice had vacated, and before she could react the folder was knocked out from under her arm and, hitting the edge of the table as it fell, it flopped open and dumped its contents onto floor.
The large woman, ignoring any blame for her destructive intrusion pushed past and lowered herself onto the chair, waving her hand for service.
Alice tried to stop the paper work from falling but encumbered by her handbag she only had one hand which, rather than stopping the fall, batted the folder into the table compounding the problem. She watched as the folder finished its journey on the floor and knelt down dejectedly, scrambling around to gather up the documents.
The largest parcel was tied up with a double turn of red ribbon, but the rest of the documents were loose and had managed to spread themselves across the floor around the table.
Seeing the folder falling Steve had reached out to try to catch it as well but was as inept as Alice as the bounce of the table edge and Alice’s flailing hand beat him as well and he watched as helplessly as Alice did as the papers fluttered down onto the ground.
He joined Alice on the floor and tried to scoop up as many of the papers as he could, catching his fingers and gaining a few thick splinters from the recycled rustic flooring as he did.
After a moment, all the documents were back with Alice and she was busily stuffing them back into the folder, she could sort them back into some sort of order later, once she had got home. She stood and glared at the woman now in her chair, who ignored her completely while huffing and sweating and looking around for the coffee which she had ordered a moment before.
“Did you get them all?” Steve asked, grimacing as he pulled a big splinter from the tip of one of his fingers.
Alice nodded and muttered something, not wanting to look at him when she made a beeline for the door, desperate to get away from him and the café before he could ask any awkward questions about what were obviously, at least to her, legal documents.
Steve stood, sucking on the end of his finger where the splinter had been, and watched Alice leave. She was flustered and upset about something, he could see that, and he considered for a moment that maybe he should chase after her but, he realized, they had known each other for all of fifteen minutes and she would probably not appreciate any inference from him. So, instead, he smiled and watched as she disappeared, he picked up his courier bag from the floor where it was leaning against a table leg, he swung it over his shoulder and walked from the coffee shop.
Chapter Three
Alice always tried to get up early on visiting days, she liked to be ready and able to leave her house by 6.00 a.m., so that she could beat the morning traffic, be at the prison a few minutes early, and get in on time for the 7.15 a.m. opening of the morning visiting session.
She never knew how Alex was going to be, upbeat or depressed; these were relative terms, of course, for nowadays he was always depressed, it was different degrees of his depression rather than actually periods when he wasn’t.
If he was resigned to what was happening and was having one of his more upbeat days, they could chat for the three hours about anything and everything, she would ask him for advice on a programming glitch that she was stuck on. He would only be able to see her notes and he could make notes of his own on the legal notepads that she brought in with her. If he could get into a less restrictive regime prison, he might be able to use a laptop and work on programming the way they had in the past.
Since high school, they had both been computer fanatics, inspired by the local success story of Bröderbund and the software it had developed. They had worked on differing projects together. Once they had each returned from college, with a computing qualification to stick on their CVs and framed on their walls, they had worked together in one way or another. Alex was the one with the ideas and a rough idea of the code and what he wanted it to do, while Alice understood the structure of the code that was required, in her mind’s eye, before a keystroke was made. She had the precise touch that organized Alex’s shotgun coding approach, cleaned it up and rewrote it, rationalized and edited it to a tighter more practical structure.
With the advent of applications for smart cell phones they had been making a nice living for themselves making and selling applications for the main brands of operating system.
The applications they had written for the first smart phones had always sold well and continued to do so, ticking along nicely, bringing them a good income and, even when Alex had been arrested and through all the legalities, Alice had only had to update the app to fit in with any new updates to the operating system or fix any bugs that might be found, though there were very few given her pedantic approach to coding, which sought out errors before release. Once or twice, a major upgrade had caused a major rewrite, but all the apps were still selling well enough to take any financial pressure from her, even with the money pit that was Alex’s defense.
They also wrote applications for local business who wanted to get in on the smart phone revolution, and they had picked up work from quite a few other clients as well who were generally impressed by the feedback their own apps had received. Business people understood the power of public satisfaction if not the function and form of the app itself. Either way, the contracted discussions, coding, and ongoing maintenance of the apps added nicely to their income alongside website design and maintenance, which was where they had started out before going to college. They still had clients from the early days and although those early web designs had changed since then, they had been able to keep up with the changes and master any innovation and integration with an ease that meant their work always felt new and cutting edge.
On the occasions when Alice arrived for the visit and Alex was in a black pit of depression, once the normal pleasantries were out of the way, they would have little to talk about. At first, three years ago, Alice had tried everything to help him to get out of the pit, but, more often than not, he would be unreachable. She found that she couldn’t make her excuses and cut the visit short, she would see the visit out sitting talking to him about anything that she could think of while he sat opposite her at the stainless-steel table, sometimes trying to smile, but mostly blankly nodding at her comments. These visits nearly always finished with Alice sitting in her car for the hour trip back to Eugene crying the tears that she couldn’t cry in front of him, that she wouldn’t let him see, but were always there, a careless comment away.
She wouldn’t get up and leave early because if she did she would be abandoning him to his pretend life in that place. As everyone else had. And she wouldn’t do that, she would never do that.
So, they would sit there; she would try to get a conversation going, sometimes they would sit in silence holding hands across the stark table until the guard told them that the visiting time was coming to an end and she would get ready to leave when it did at 10.15 a.m.
Alice always preferred the early visiting times, she was habitually an early riser anyway and even more so now when she didn’t sleep too well and, once she got out of the prison and back onto the highway she’d be back in Eugene well before lunch. She could spend the afternoons working on their businesses undisturbed. The other reason she always tried to avoid the afternoon visits, and the weekends were the children. There tended to be not too many, if any, at the early morning times, more so in the afternoon and many more on the weekend. She didn’t begrudge the families bringing the children in for visiting but, to Alice, there was something deeply depressing about seeing them in that place, mostly uncomprehending where they were or why their parent couldn’t come home with them. There was heartbreak in every visit and heartbreak and false bravado at the end of the session and the forced parting and separatio
n.
Tears, red faces, and snotty sniffs, the prisoners once again forced to face the reality of this situation of their own making and the children who suffered, unknowing but through no fault of their own.
Alex’s mood had been somewhere in between the pit and a not too depressed normalcy, he would have known to expect news from Alice, and he would have guessed that the outcome wasn’t great news, so his mood had ebbed and flowed a little during the visit.
The appeal?
Not a great surprise. They had known that it was a long shot at best and that there was no new evidence, however slim, to hang the forlorn hope of another trial on.
But now where?
They both knew the answer to that; they hadn’t even had to ask the question.
Now where? There was nowhere, nowhere left to go at all. She knew it, and Alex knew it as well.
“This was it; this was Alex’s life,” she thought as she looked around the visiting area, “for the next twenty-five years, at least.”
She had purposely left the folder on the dining table for a week after she had come back from the prison, she’d left it out “in case” but it stayed there while she went back to OSP and saw Alex again. His mood was slightly improved, and they had discussed an app idea that she had had, he was enthusiastic and told her to leave him to think about it, to consider it and any improvements to the functions he could think of as he usually did. His mood when they parted was more upbeat than she had seen in a while and she was encouraged and determined to keep visiting and try to keep him occupied, with software, with ideas, with whatever she could think of that didn’t involve lawyers or appeals.
But when she had arrived home, the folder was still there in the middle of the dining table and she stood looking at it for a few minutes before she picked it up and packed it away in the filing cabinet in her study and slid the drawer closed. The complete drawer, and a half of the one below, were for Alex and his trial and appeals. Trial documents, statements, copies of copies of copies, most of the documents appeared again and again, copied and placed in the new appeal documents, not different, no change but bearing a hope that this time it might be different, but of course it wasn’t. It never was, and the paperwork piled up pointlessly.
