Читать книгу The Pink House - Trish MacEnulty - Страница 13

Wednesday, June 7

Sonya worked in the kitchen. It was hard work. She had never been much of a cook. She and Duke usually went out to eat or got pizza or take out Chinese. Or they went to her parents’ apartment and ate the pirogues and sausage that her mother, Dina, made. Dina was a fantastic cook. And still a glamorous woman. She liked to wear a fur stole over her perfectly matched suits. In Florida there wasn’t much opportunity to wear fur, but when they traveled north, the minks always came out of the storage closets.

“Dress like a million bucks, babee, and they will never suspect you of nothing,” Dina used to say. It was her mother’s idea that she should marry Duke who was older by a good ten years. He was not a pretty boy. He was not funny. But he was quick with his hands and with his wits. Not quick enough though. Not quick enough to save her when the old man they were robbing turned out to be a retired Seminole County sheriff. Oh, Florida. What a horrible place to be stuck in. She wanted to be on the road or back up in Montreal where it was cool. Mostly she wanted to be with little Tomas. She knew Duke and her mother were taking good care of him, and soon he would be learning the ways of their kind. Rule number one: “Never talk to strangers.” Yes, that meant something different for their children.

It was still dark as she walked to the kitchen, preparing for her workday. The only good thing about being in the kitchen was that your shift ended earlier than the other work shifts and you could sometimes take a shower in peace. She and Curly, a young Jewish girl from Miami, were on duty that morning, making grits and a huge pan of powdered eggs. Most of the other women got fat on this prison food, but the sight of it sickened Sonya to the point that she had lost probably ten pounds. Panther was making biscuits.

“I hate the weekends,” Sonya said as she stirred the bright yellow eggs. “Everybody has visitors but me.”

“I don’t have much in the way of visitors either,” Curly said. “They got us all the way up in the damn boondocks here. My people can’t come up here all the way from Miami every other weekend for the next twenty years.”

“They say they are going to change this into a men’s prison soon and then maybe you’ll get sent to Broward. That’s near Miami, right?”

“A lot closer than this. How come you don’t get any visitors?”

“My family,” Sonya said, glancing around, “they all have warrants on them. Except for my baby boy and that’s only ‘cause he’s too young.”

“Your whole family? Damn, you must have had a helluva upbringing,” Curly said with a laugh. “Hey, how’s your record here? Got any write ups?”

“No, not yet,” she said, thinking of the ambush by Magna and how that could have turned worse than it was if the C.O. had found them. Idiot Magna—willing to go to the box for a pack of smokes.

“You ought to sign up for this drama class. That way you won’t be moping around the dorm.” Curly poured the grits into the boiling water.

“I asked my classification office if I could take it. She said it’s too late to sign up. Who else is in it?”

“Lucille, of course. She’s such a smarty pants.”

Sonya laughed to hear such a quaint expression come from the Miami girl’s mouth.

“And Nicole. Another college girl. But you don’t have to be all that smart. I got in, and all I have is a GED. Indian is signed up, too.”

Sonya didn’t look up. She didn’t want to give her feelings away. She had never been in love with anyone before, certainly not with Duke. She wasn’t even sure if this was love. How could she be in love with a woman? What did women do together? Well not much, if they were in prison, because opportunities for privacy were rare. At least her ignorance in those matters would not be much of a problem. Then again, as far as she knew, Indian had no girlfriends. But she had been locked up so long. How could she not have given in at some point? Indian was an enigma and that’s probably what attracted Sonya.

“You know, there was some girl from A dorm signed up, but she just got transferred to work release. You should go find out if you can take her place.”

“Maybe I’ll check it out,” Sonya said. “What is drama? Acting? I can act. Boy, can I act.”

She thought back to the many hits they had made—she and Maria, her cousin. She was always the one to approach the victims. Some blue-haired old lady out clipping her roses. It was so easy to strike up a conversation with them. She never knew what she was going to say until suddenly there she was, looking into the old eyes, smiling and asking about the woman’s roses, her grandchildren, her late husband. And then Maria would ask if she could use the bathroom. And the mark would be so caught up in Sonya’s spell that she would hardly know what she had said, didn’t know she had given Maria permission to go inside her house and riffle through her belongings while Sonya kept her distracted.

Of course, it was even easier with the old men. Such lonely old talkers. Damn, you couldn’t get them to shut up. There was one who had cared for Sonya so much that he emptied out his bank account of twenty-seven grand to help her get a kidney operation, which she never needed and never got, but he was so happy when she came back a couple months later and said the surgeons had healed her. Sonya almost felt sorry for him, the old fool. The thing that made her good was that she got caught up in the game. She actually liked these people while she was talking to them, befriending them or whatever. She had enjoyed the old man—Roger, that was his name—she had enjoyed his company, and played checkers with him and imagined that he was her grandfather. Her real grandfather had been one of the toughest gangsters on the streets of Warsaw. Funny, what an accident of birth could do for you. The children of presidents became politicians. The children of movie stars were now movie stars, too. And the children of criminals, well, they became criminals. There was not one single legit person in the whole clan. She was like her mother and her grandmother. She was like her cousin and her sister-in-law. And when they needed somewhere to hide, there was always an aunt or uncle willing to spare a bedroom or a pull-out sofa.

She looked over at Curly. Curly’s father was not a criminal. He was a wealthy businessman, just the sort of person she would have loved to swindle, but more often than not the people who lost their money to the Yakowski clan were not wealthy, and they did not know how to keep their money from slipping from their fingers into the pockets of others.

The kitchen crew had to wait to feed the compound before they could eat. Sonya made coffee and Panther and Curly filled the bins. A very fat c.o. named Dawkins was their supervisor. She usually sat on a stool that her enormous buttocks draped over and ordered the women about. One of the male guards came in and strolled past the line, picking up a biscuit for himself. It was finally light outside. The buzzer rang and everyone from the kitchen crew got on the line to serve.

The doors opened and the first ones came in. It was always the same—the younger more aggressive ones race-walking in with the others stacked up behind them. Alice Jaybird was never in a hurry. She came loping in about halfway through the line.

“Hey, watch what you doin’,” a dark-eyed woman said to Sonya when a bit of egg fell off her tray.

“Oooh, Mariposa, don’t read the poor kitchen girls,” her friend said.

“I’m not reading them. Just ol’ clumsy fingers here,” the one called Mariposa said with an evil glance at Sonya. Sonya was taken aback. She didn’t know this woman. Why was she so nasty?

Mariposa had short black hair and a round face. She was muscular, and something about her looked like a little prize fighter. She moved on, shooting Sonya one last hard glance.

“Nevermind,” Panther said to her. “She ain’t shit, Gypsy.”

Sonya shrugged.

On the way back to the dorm, Panther walked beside her.

“You want to watch TV with me tonight in the dayroom?”

“I don’t like you like that,” Sonya said to Panther.

“Are you some kind of racist?”

Sonya didn’t answer her. It was true she had been brought up not to associate with Africans. But she wasn’t supposed to associate with Irish or Spanish either. Only Polish. She was getting more close exposure to people in prison than she had in her whole life.

“So that’s it, huh?” Panther said.

Sonya turned to her irritably.

“Can’t I just not like you? Leave me alone, girl.”

“I got your girl,” Panther muttered.

Sonya pushed her heavy hair behind her ears and strode into the dorm.