I put money on his books

My mother's got the bank on her phone. She checks it more than she checks the mail, and that's how she knows about the forty.

She asked me the first time in July. August. She's asked twice now.

I overdrafted Community Trust back in 2018 and never squared it up, so there's no bank around here that'll have me. My check from the truck stop goes into hers and I've got a card with my name on the front of it pulling off her money. Anything I spend shows on her phone about four seconds later.

So on the first it comes up MONEYGRAM and it comes up forty-six ninety-five. Forty of that goes on. The six ninety-five is theirs for handing it across a counter. There's a cheaper way to do it on a phone, but that wants a card in your own name, and I just told you about that.

Coffee's about six for a bag, which is robbery, but hell. Soups run forty-some cents if they've got them in, and they're out of the chili ones more than they've got them, and a man can eat a long while off a case of soups. You can put about anything in a soup if you've got a bag of chips to crush up in it. There's a cap on what you can draw in a week anyhow, so forty a month puts him about at normal instead of scraping the whole time.

I run the fryer at the truck stop off the parkway, second shift mostly. Fellow I graduated with got married in April at the Baptist church over in Combs and I worked that night. I sleep in my mother's back bedroom that used to be my grandmother's. That deal's never once been written down.

The burn up my right arm's not from that fryer. That's the Lee's in Jackson, 2016, a basket that come up wrong. People ask about it because it's the whole forearm and it went shiny.

I did twenty-two months at Little Sandy on a four. It was pills and they were mine.

Eleven of those months I was in a cell with a man named Creech, out of Harlan, twelve years older than me. He had the bottom bunk before I ever got there and he kept it.

Everybody tells you their date. It's the first thing out of a man's mouth, before his name half the time. Creech had eight years left on his. Nobody tells you their charge unless they want to, and he never wanted to, so I never asked him.

A write-up takes your good time. There's a class of them that'll take a whole goddamn year of it in one go, and what we were doing sits in that class. If a CO had come up on that door at the wrong minute it wouldn't have cost me much of anything, I was short by then, and it's his eight years that'd have took it. They write it on a form and read it out to you and you sign it or you don't, don't matter either way.

It started in February, or the end of January, and after that it was most weeks until I went home. I'd been with girls before that and never with a man.

Next morning he was up before the light the same as every other day and he had the hot pot going and he asked did I want coffee. Chow was at five and we went down for it the same as always.

Count's at four and you stand for it. Standing count you're on your feet at your bunk and you don't talk, and Creech never talked in one anyhow. There's men who'll run their mouth the whole damn way through a count and get the walk stood up an extra twenty minutes behind it.

They pulled four of my teeth in there. You put in a slip and wait on it five, six weeks, and pulling's about all they're going to do for you.

I went home the ninth of June. Tenth. Ninth. They hand you back whatever you come in with, and whatever's left sitting on your books they cut you a check for it, and mine come to eleven dollars and some change.

Creech was sat on his bunk with his shoes on when they come for me, which he didn't have to be, not that early. He put his hand out. Eleven months and that's the first time the two of us ever shook hands. They walk you down through property and my clothes come back in a paper sack and the jeans didn't fit me no more. My uncle was out at the gate and we stopped in Olive Hill for gas and he got a Mountain Dew.

First of July I drove over to Whitesburg to do it. There's a Walmart in Hazard. I know there is.

My name prints on it when it lands on his account. They put the sender. So he's known every month, and he's not wrote me and I've not wrote him. He could put me on his call list and I'd have to accept the charge on my end, and they cut you off at fifteen minutes whether you're through talking or not. Neither one of us has gone and done it.

There's a line in the paper my officer give me about associating with convicted felons. I see him the third Wednesday of the month and he mostly wants to know am I working.

She asked me the second time in the kitchen with the Wheel going in the other room. She said, you ain't back into anything, are you. She's never said the word out loud in this house in her life. Then she took hold of my wrist and turned both my arms over and looked at them, and the only thing on my arms is the Lee's.

She put my brother out of here in 2013 over that. He's in Ohio. I didn't tell her different.

First of this month the kiosk was down, screen froze up with the store's logo sitting on it, so I had to go stand at the money counter and do it with a person. She asked me the state and I said Kentucky. Then she asked me his number and I give it to her out of my head.

A number's on everything in there. It's on the card on the door and it's on every slip that comes back from canteen, and I had to think a second about what mine was and his come straight out. You see them I don't know how many times in a week.

She read it back to me and I said that's right. The card wouldn't take as debit so we run the whole thing again as credit, and there was a man behind me with a cart full of dog food waiting on it.

Receipt come out long, like a grocery receipt, for forty dollars. I put it in the ashtray of the truck with the others. The heater in that truck's stuck on hot and it was eighty-some degrees out, so I drove back with the window down.