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“They’ve been dropped.”
“What about my wife, my life?”
“I know nothing about your personal dealings, Mr. Oliver, only that you are to be released.”
I saw my face for the first time in months in the polished steel mirror next to the small shower where I cleaned up. Shaving revealed the vicious gaping scar down the right side of my face. They didn’t always offer stitches at Rikers.
When I got off the bus at the Port Authority on Forty-Second Street I stopped and looked around, realizing how hollow the word freedom really was.
2.
“Are you thinking about prison again, Daddy?”
She was standing at the door to my office. Five nine and black like the Spanish Madonna, she had my eyes. Though worried about my state of mind, she still smiled. Aja wasn’t a somber adolescent. She was an ex-cheerleader and science student, pretty enough not to need a regular boyfriend and helpful enough that other teenage girls with boyfriends knew she was the better catch.
Her black skirt was too short and the coral blouse too revealing, but I was so grateful to have her in my life again that I picked my battles with great care.
Monica, my ex-wife, spent years trying to keep us apart. She took me to court to try to get a judgment against my ever seeing Aja-Denise and then sued me for failing to pay child support when she had drained my accounts and I didn’t have two nickels to my name.
It wasn’t until she was fourteen that Aja forced her mother to let her stay with me on a regular basis. And now that she was seventeen she said that either she worked in my office or she’d tell any judge who would listen that Monica’s new husband, Coleman Tesserat, would walk in on her when she was in the shower.
“What?” I said to my child.
“When you look out the window like that you’re almost always thinking about jail.”
“They broke me in there, darling.”
“You don’t look broke to me.” It was something I said to her one morning when she was a little girl trying to get out of going to school.
“What’s that you got?” I asked, gesturing at the bundle in her hand.
“The mail.”
“I’ll get to it tomorrow.”
“No, you won’t. You never go through it until the bills are all late. I don’t know why you won’t let me put your bank account online so I could just pay them all myself.”
She was right; I kept thinking that some false evidence would come in the mail and send me back to that roach-infested cell.
“I have to go out on that Acres job,” I explained.
“Take it with you and go through it while you wait. You said that ninety-nine percent of the time you’re just sitting in your car with nothing to do.”
She held out the bundle and stared into my eyes. There was no mistaking that Aja-Denise had fought with her mother because she knew I needed her.
I reached out for the package and she grinned.
“Uncle Glad called,” she said when I was sifting through the bills, junk mail, and various requests from clients, courts, and, of course, my ex-wife. There was also a small pink envelope addressed by an ornate hand and postmarked in Minnesota.
“Oh?” I said. “What did Gladstone have to say?”
“Him an’ Lehman, War Man, and Mr. Lo, are playin’ cards down the street tonight.”
“That’s Jesse Warren,” I said, “not War Man.”
“He told me to call him that.”
I didn’t like Gladstone’s friends very much, but he kept them away from the office most of the time. And I owed Glad; he had saved my ass more than once since the arrest.
