Chapter 8 - The Visit to the Fourth Ward
Three weeks later, the rain had turned into that hard, permanent Michigan sleet that crusts the gutters of Grand Rapids with gray ice and turns the sky into the color of an old zinc bucket.
I parked my twelve-year-old Honda Civic outside the Kent County Correctional Facility on Fuller Avenue.
The building was a three-story bunker of brown pre-cast concrete, surrounded by two tiers of chain-link fence topped with razor wire that vibrated with a low, metallic hum in the winter wind.
I was wearing my regular clothes: a dark green wool sweater, a pair of black corduroys, and the leather boots Daniel had resoled for me in the basement of our new apartment on Lyon Street.
The visiting room on the second floor smelled of industrial floor wax, cheap floor disinfectant, and the sour, stale sweat of two hundred people who had spent forty-eight hours realizing that the outside world was continuing without them.
I sat behind the thick, scratched acrylic partition at station number four.
The heavy steel door on the opposite side buzzed.
Margaret Stone walked through.
She had lost eight pounds in twenty-one days. The orange institutional jumper hung loose from her narrow collarbones, the coarse cotton fabric bunching awkwardly at her waist where a canvas belt had replaced her Valentino leather.
Her silver-blonde hair had not been colored; two inches of dark, mouse-brown roots showed along her central parting, pinned back with two plastic blue combs that the county commissary sold for eighty-five cents.
She sat down on the bolted metal stool.
She did not pick up the black plastic telephone receiver immediately.
She sat with her hands clasped between her knees, staring through the scratched acrylic at my face, her lips pressed together until they were white as lard.
I picked up my receiver.
I waited.
Ten seconds passed. Twenty.
Finally, with a jerky, spastic movement of her right arm, Margaret lifted the heavy phone to her ear.
"Are you happy now?" she hissed.
Her voice through the little perforated metal disc in the earpiece was thin, tinny, stripped of every ounce of the honeyed, melodic resonance she had used at the country club.
"I'm married, Margaret," I said. "And the foundation is open."
"You put your father in an eight-man dormitory with drug dealers from Division Street," she whispered, her fingers clawing at the black plastic of the handset. "He has an ulcer. He hasn't had his blood pressure medication in four days because the county physician is reviewing his private prescriptions. They made him strip naked in front of three guards, Emma. Your father."
"My father," I said, my voice as flat and unyielding as the concrete floor beneath our feet, "stole four million dollars from girls whose parents worked sixty hours a week in the furniture plants on the south side. If he has an ulcer, he can drink the county milk. It’s the same milk the children in those programs drank when you were buying Paige’s debutante gown."
"Paige is living with her mother-in-law in Holland," Margaret cried out, tears finally breaking through her red-rimmed eyelids, cutting clean, pale tracks through the gray institutional grime on her cheeks. "Her husband’s partners told him that if he doesn't file for divorce by the end of the month, they’re revoking his junior partnership. And Lauren... Lauren had to surrender the horses to the federal marshals on Tuesday. They took them out of the stables in Lexington in a commercial trailer like common livestock."
"They were common livestock, Margaret," I said. "They were just horses bought with other people's tuition."
"You are a monster," she whispered, her face pressing against the glass, her breath fogging the scratched surface in a small, greasy circle. "You were born cold. Even as a baby, you never cried when I put you in the crib. You just laid there and stared at me with those horrible, dead eyes. I knew from the day you were born that you were going to ruin this family."
I looked at the woman who had carried me.
I looked at the dark roots in her hair, the rough, dry skin of her hands, and the desperate, rotting vanity that was still trying to find someone to blame for the collapse of a house that had been built on sand and forged signatures.
I didn't feel rage.
I didn't feel triumph.
I felt only the immense, quiet lightness of an auditor who has finally reached the last line of the last page, verified the reconciliation, and closed the ledger for the year.
"You didn't have a family, Margaret," I said softly, the words dropping through the wire with the finality of iron weights. "You had a display cabinet. And when the glass broke, you found out that everything inside was made of plastic."
I set the black plastic receiver back into its metal cradle.
I stood up.
Through the glass, Margaret was screaming—her hands beating against the acrylic with a dull, muffled thump-thump-thump that didn't carry through the partition—her orange jumper shaking, her mouth wide, her teeth yellow under the fluorescent tubes.
A female guard stepped up behind her, placed one heavy hand on her shoulder, and twisted her away from the counter.
I turned my back on the station.
I walked down the long, gray corridor, through the heavy steel security turnstiles, and out through the glass doors into the freezing Michigan rain.
Daniel was waiting in the passenger seat of the truck, the engine running, the heater fan humming on high, blowing warm air over two paper cups of black coffee resting in the center console.
I climbed inside, pulled off my wet wool gloves, and held my hands out before the vent.
"How was she?" Daniel asked.
"She hasn't changed the denominator, Daniel," I said, leaning my head back against the vinyl seat as the windshield wipers cleared the sleet with a steady, rhythmic sweep.
He smiled—that slow, wide, completely clean smile that had never needed an invoice—and reached across the console to take my cold fingers in his warm, calloused palm.
"Then let's go home, Mrs. Kelly," he said. "Grandpa says the soup is boiling, and he wants to know if you brought the new tax forms for nineteen-eighty-five."
May you like
"I brought them," I said.
And as the truck pulled out into the gray traffic on Fuller Avenue, turning south toward the river and the quiet, solid brick of the carriage house, the weight that had sat behind my ribs for twenty-nine years finally dissolved into the clean, cold air of the valley, leaving behind nothing but the road, the rain, and the work that was waiting to be done.
