Free The New Black by Richard Thomas Page A

that he had come all this way to hurt his mother, and his stomach was full from that egg sandwich, and that Browning 9mm was in his hand, and what if instead of killing her and just hurting her that one time, what if instead he did himself right there where she would have to come home and find him, and wouldn’t that be something she would have to live with, and go on living and living and living? And wouldn’t that be the way to hurt her again and again, the way she had hurt him and us by running off?
    So that’s what he did. He sat down in front of Kelly’s front door, and put the muzzle to his right temple, and turned his head so his left temple was to the door, and when Penny came home that night, what she found was the worst thing you can ever find, and when I heard about it, I couldn’t hate her the way I wanted to anymore.
    At the funeral, they sat us both on the front row, but far apart from each other, with a bunch of her brothers and other male relatives between us so I would know clear as daylight that I was meant to stay away from her. But before the service got started, the preacher came over and asked if there were things each of us needed to say to the deceased, and we both said yes, but for me it wasn’t because I had anything to say to Danny. He was dead and gone and wherever it is he ended up, and that was hard enough to bear without making a show of telling him something he wasn’t ever going to hear. It was Penny I wanted to say some things to, and I thought maybe up there next to Danny she might in that moment have ears to hear them.
    Her brothers didn’t leave the room when the preacher asked, but they did go stand in the back and give what they must have thought was a respectful distance. Me and Penny went and knelt beside the casket, her near his head and me near the middle, maybe three feet separating us. She bowed her head to pray silently, and I did, too, although I didn’t right then have any words to say, and then she said some things to Danny too personal for me to repeat, although I don’t think it would be wrong to say that the things she said, if they were true, moved me in a way I didn’t think I could be moved by her.
    When she was done, she looked over at me. It seemed like she was able to keep from crying all that time until she looked into my eyes, and I was reminded that it was our looking into each other’s eyes that was happening while we were about the business of getting him made in the first place, and maybe that’s what she saw that finally broke her down when she looked over at me. Maybe that, and all the years we had together, the three of us, and how there wasn’t anyone else in the world who knew what those years were, and how there wouldn’t ever be anyone else again.
    It was right then, though I didn’t say anything at the time because it didn’t seem like the right time, that I decided I couldn’t live in a world where Penny would go on being as unhappy as she had been made to be.
    First thing the next morning I went down to Lexington again and went to the place where we had taken Danny when he was six years old to get scanned. It was gone, boarded up, the part of town where it had been now all but forgotten by people in business to make money. The only place in the storefront where the lights were still on was the WIC food stamp place, and I went inside and was told where to go on the Loop, to a part of town I remembered as Lexington Green but which was now called Stonewall.
    The business had changed its name too, was now called Livelong, and occupied a building the size of a city block. The woman at the front desk said my number was A83, gave me a smartpad to fill in and told me to take a seat.
    By time they called my name I had run my fingerprint and verified all my information and watched the screen that said the scan we had got was old technology, and while the guarantee we had bought was still good,