Back Roads by Tawni O’Dell Read Free Book Online Page B

scrubbing them out, and setting them up in the showroom, and another three hours in their truck delivering washers and dryers and stoves with Ray, a guy who spent all his time bitching about his wife and kids.
    I was in another foul mood and I felt bad about it because I knew Jody was going to need me to spout a bunch of phony optimism after she saw Mom. That was usually Amber’s job; and I admitted—no matter how much I hated everything else Amber did—she was good at comforting Jody.
    Jody was standing by the school office window when I pulled up, wearing her backpack and carrying her pink spring coat that was too small for her this year. She had on a flowery dress, and tights with snags around the knees, and thesilver, little kid, army boots that Amber had got her for Christmas last year.
    A lot of the kids dressed up for their prison visits. Some of them were forced by an aunt or grandma, but some of them made the choice on their own like Jody did. They were easy to spot. They were always preoccupied with keeping themselves wrinkle-free.
    I didn’t understand the rationale behind it except to say to their moms, “Look at me. Look how cute and pathetic I am in my little dress. Look what you gave up.” It was probably the same kind of fanatic neediness that drove some of their moms over the edge in the first place.
    Jody spent most of the drive prattling on about the Easter Bunny coming soon, and some girl bringing in a platypus Beanie Baby with the tag on and telling everyone how her folks were going to sell it in a couple years for a million dollars, and how the cafeteria served corn dog on a stick for hot lunch. She had developed into a real chatterbox lately, and I was glad despite how annoying it could get.
    She didn’t talk for a long time after Mom shot Dad. She started wetting her bed and wouldn’t eat anything except red Jell-O jigglers. She had a different shrink than Betty. A guy with a beard who knew exactly nothing about everything. He wanted to put her away for observation. Amber freaked.
    For the next month, every time I came home after another futile day of scouring the county for a job, there would be Amber on the couch with Jody on her lap, not doing anything or saying anything, just holding her. Then one day I came home and they were playing dinosaurs and eating a bowl of popcorn, and everything’s been fine since.
    Through trial and error, I had discovered Fridays were the best time to go see Mom. Hardly anyone else showed up. Only an idiot wanted to start out his Friday night with a prison visit.
    Weekends were the worst. The visitor’s parking lot was anendless trickle of dressed-up little kids clutching homemade drawings and schoolwork.
    I bet a man’s prison didn’t get as many children. I bet they didn’t have special visitation rooms—called Hug Rooms—where they could go to touch their kids. I bet their cafeteria walls weren’t covered with stick figure families in front of crayon houses, and spelling tests with stars on them. (Jody said Mom said they used oatmeal to stick stuff to the walls since they weren’t allowed to have things like tape or tacks or string. She said the tapioca pudding worked too.)
    I imagined the visitors at a man’s prison to be mostly lawyers and whores.
    It would make sense. Prison was a reflection of real life, and it had always seemed to me that once a woman had a kid nothing else mattered about her. Being a dad might describe a man, but being a mom defined a woman.
    Jody didn’t stop talking until we approached our exit. The prison was easy to see from the interstate. It sat at the bottom of the kind of valley pictured in every local bank calendar except the calendar photos always had a big red barn in them instead of an enormous angular gray cement building that cast a stark shadow like a scar against the soft hills behind it. I was sure when the government built it they were just looking for an isolated area and weren’t trying to make a