People got out in strange ways. No stranger, I suppose, than the ways they got in. One year an American military helicopter flew too low over an Italian ski village, killing two families headed up the lift. A woman at Hillcrest had Italian citizenship and, like that, release became a reparation. Just like that it could happen. “The ski-lift option,” my mother called it. “Who knew?” 

When a woman went free her friends and not-friends could watch from the north side of the mess hall to see her descent. But watching her was like watching that joke where a person stands behind a couch and pretends to walk down stairs that aren’t there by crouching lower and lower, then falling over. The women up top could watch the one woman descend and be gone, but she wasn’t gone, she was only on those parts of the hill that the women couldn’t see, the parts of the hill my grandfather and I walked up and down each weekend.

“A good hill,” my grandfather said to pause from climbing. Signal for us to stop, turn around, and look out. Far away someone sneezed and the sound landed right beside us. Women walking, talking to each other, men shouting to women, men shouting to one another—all this we could hear and not see. That great gatherings of women had been brought to live life on the hill I took as the natural order. That women defected from this order was part of the order and that we would never defect was also part of the order. “A good hill,” my grandfather said, gazing out. The nod he gave as we continued our ascent was the nod of agreeing to fate. 

The Bureau of Prisons claimed to be in the business of custody, not punishment, but by all appearances they were in the business of construction. The year I turned eight was the year the prison built the hospital and the gun tower and raised the fences around the hill another three feet. It was the year the prison grew up. Also down: a cemetery. And to round things out, the nursery. In one year the hill became a place to be born or buried, a place you could stay all your life. 

Any woman who grew too ill or lonely to get visits, anyone who went from being a person I saw in Visiting to a person I did not see anywhere, was something like dead to me. So it happened that the dead came back. A woman I thought deceased or released turned out only to have gone many months without a visit. Confronted with her return I might remark, “She’s here?” And my mother, who believed every woman deserved a name, would kneel beside me to say, “Gloria?” or “You mean Beez?” or “Who’s here?” Then, always, “Don’t point.” Everyone deserving their own name and deserving not to be pointed at, so that over the years I came to comment as little on these surprise returns as on the preceding disappearances. 

What’s done is done and can never be undone, my grandmother found frequent occasion to say, but at the prison there were women I saw for years and years, and if one week they were not there, another woman was, in the same clothes in the same seat saying some version of the same thing when my mother walked me by to say the same hello. Week after week, year after year, women replaced each other, and this may be why departure as a fact of life did not bother me until my eighth year. 

In addition to my mother there were twelve women set to stay hilltop forever. But that year new research, evidence that held up in court, showed you could shake a baby not meaning, not wanting, for death to come, and still it came. So murder became manslaughter and two nannies and one mother made their way down the hill. A famous actress began to visit the prison and by year’s end the woman she’d visited left to flashing cameras and acclaim. In these ways what forever meant appeared to change, and women I thought I’d spend forever with made swift and stunned descents.

The top of the hill was a flat space for its tiny town, but the new hospital created the sense of a peak. And what was lost: medical tests, checkups, dentist appointments. Even the well had received one ride a year in the medical van, one chance a year to leave the hill. Now for the unreleased there were no more descents. The dentist, too, huffed up to do his work hilltop. 

Instead it was the babies who began to descend, each carried out by a nun three months after birth. “The thing about babies in prison,” Sister Maureen said to me once, “is they don’t know they’re in prison but they know when we force them to leave.” Even the trees left the hill in the course of that year’s construction. One week we arrived and where there’d been roots there now were holes. Normally we hunched over on the hill because the climb was steep and my grandfather was old and I had learned my body language from the old but when we saw the holes we stood up straight. “Look at that,” my grandfather said at the edge of a hole running deep and dark into the earth.  

For eight years my grandfather and I ascended and descended the hill together and throughout these years he insisted on giving me and my mother privacy, a privacy that began before the visit. In line he handed me a plastic bag of quarters and smiled if our eyes crossed paths, but that was it. When the time came he knelt down to remove my jacket, my shoes, pulled out my pockets to show they were empty, busied himself while the officer waved the wand, then buttoned me up, tucked in my pockets. All this he did with the tender distance of a tailor, and once I’d been stamped complete he did the routine again for himself. We must have looked far less familiar with each other than we were and this may explain why the visitors with Bibles often mistook him for a church volunteer. Inside Visiting he went to his table, I went to the Children’s Center. We knew how to play stranger to each other and did this for the rest of the day. Between him and my mother a vow of silence had been taken, as binding as the vow of absence my grandmother had sworn—one so strict that she refused to use roads that veered anywhere close to the hill.

“That place,” my grandmother called the prison. “That place,” she called other places, too: a bank outside the city and a spot not far from the bank, where my mother capped off her brief and strikingly unsuccessful career as a getaway driver by crashing into the steel security gate at the foot of Waywood Manor, a large property that belonged to, of all people, Ronald Reagan’s niece. This crash, which did little more to the gate than dimple six bars and topple the bronze-plated double-o scrollwork, thus concluded the elaborately planned and dismally executed expropriation of funds for the purpose of revolutionary struggle that began and went so grievously awry at Catskill Hudson Bank. Wayward Manor, it must have appeared without the o’s. A fateful journey, to say the least, containing as it did the fates of many people. If my grandmother spoke poorly of these places, it was because she did not want this fate. 

The year I turned eight, smoking was still allowed inside Visiting, people huffing and puffing, smoke wafting up and up until the fluorescent lights looked like moons behind clouds and the whole room appeared set on fire. Appeared more like a boat set on fire, as in pictures I’d seen of boats in battle giving in to sea and smoke. Because the officer’s station sat on an elevated platform at the front of the room and, at the far end, the Children’s Center dipped a step lower than the main room, walking into the Center could feel like walking onto the sinking end of a sinking ship. To captain this drowned vessel: the nun at the game cabinet, who was deaf, and the nun at the craft table, who was mute. Plus the nun at the door, who played it a little bit blind. “The gang’s all here,” my mother liked to say when at last she arrived, but those early mornings waiting in the Center could feel like underwhelming affairs.

My mother never asked about my time spent waiting for her. If she had, I could have told her that the mute nun pulled from the hems of her sleeves one thread after another as if perpetually distractedly mid–magic trick. Another way to pass the time was to do what the deaf nun did, which was nothing. And then there was the nun at the door, whose days were filled with boisterous accusation and reprieve. Her job was to stop children entering the room and make us sign our mother’s names in a book so old and thick it could have been the very Book of Judgment. Poor positioning for a nearsighted nun. At a moment when no one had entered or exited she said with surprising stringency, “Come back here, you!” Then peace settled over her and she said to no one, “All right then, you can go.”

Twenty minutes, thirty minutes, an hour, two hours. I laid my head on the craft table, pretending to sleep, and eventually hands came down that were my mother’s hands, saying, “Wake up, little Suzie, wake up.” For my mother I made a big show of waking up, as if from a very deep sleep, as if I did not know where I was or what was happening. Each time I performed this my mother looked thrilled. She wanted to be the one to welcome me back to life. Then this could be the distance we acknowledged crossing when we returned to each other—nothing more extraordinary than anyone seeing anyone after sleep has set them apart.

To leave required far fewer steps than entering and to counter this ease my grandfather extended the stretch of time between the hill and home. He invented errands for us and when he could think of nowhere else to go we pulled off the road and I climbed into the trunk and pretended to be locked in. My grandfather did not actually lock the top but pressed it down and I lay very still while he leaned against the car and pretended to forget where I was. I knew where he was because of the dark spot of his back against the thin line of light and because I could hear him say, “Now where did she go? Wasn’t she just here?” and “Oh, Suzanna, why won’t you come to me?” This used up a fair amount of our time together: simulations of my disappearance and reappearance, of his concern and great relief. His voice distorted through the metal, sounding much farther off than he could be. My grandfather called for me, sounding so sincere that it seemed he had forgotten where I was or else that I wasn’t where I thought I was. As soon as this thought went through my head I banged my feet and fists against the trunk and my grandfather looked thrilled and relieved to find me there. I imagine he looked thrilled and relieved. When the roof of the trunk rose up his face was dark and the light of the world shone in around him. 

On the day my grandfather departed from the hill we pulled over on our way to the prison to move a dead deer off the road. From the cavern of the trunk my grandfather removed gloves, a small gardening shovel, and a blanket in which he rolled up the deer, then dragged the body into the weeds. He did not bury it, I know, because he was back in a moment, without the blanket, shovel, gloves. Off we went. In the car we did not speak. Our silence was in honor of the deer, who was still with us. This was clear to me and clear as well to the cats at the prison that had, until that morning, steadily ignored us week by week, year by year. 

As soon as my grandfather stepped out of the car, the cats approached—first one, two, then seven, eight. All with ears up, hesitant but intent. The death of the deer had brought the cats to life. They followed my grandfather as he crossed the lot, circled his legs as he walked, circled him when he stopped—he had to stop, so many cats circled—then stood on their hind legs to smell his hands and thighs. Sniffing, mewing, their attention on him but also on one another, until one cat jumped up, dug its claws into my grandfather’s thigh, and three, four, five cats followed. 

A great tumult, then, of scratching, howling, my grandfather swinging his legs and arms. Cats ripped through his pants, slashing and screeching, and my grandfather like a man aflame, making no sound. The smallest cat bit into my grandfather’s belt and hung from there. Then one cat wrenched away and another followed, cat after cat began to run, and in their wake my grandfather lifted his face, which showed no hurt or fear but what may have been embarrassment. 

Inside Processing, the officers commenced a great debate concerning the prison’s rule against shorts. True that the tears on my grandfather’s pants, particularly his right leg, were extensive. Throughout the officers’ back-and-forth my grandfather continued to bleed, and it was, I believe, to get him out of sight that an older officer waved us through one gate, another, and we at last approached the hill. 

Like a man in a myth sentenced to do a hard thing a hard way, my grandfather, bloody and weary, looked up. Despite the shredded pants or because of them he appeared to me as dashing. Dashing and daunted. A slash across the palm gave him a touch of the stigmata. And in a scene from another myth, my own, a child stepped forth to say, “You stay, I’ll go alone.” As brave a phrase as I had yet in my life spoken. 

When I think of the hill as it looked on my first lone ascent it has the stranded quality of being the highest peak around, the steam from Laundry giving the impression of a cloud-scraping height. Above me the gun tower rose like a lighthouse, four armed men where the light would have been, and in the new structure’s shadow my path looked sleek and certain. Up I went. 

From above me came the women’s voices. And the higher I climbed the more my spirits lifted. A special feeling, it turned out, triumphant even, mounting the hill on one’s own. Likely my enthusiasm for this climb—my sense that some reward or restitution awaited me above—resulted from the Children’s Center library, consisting as it did entirely of Bibles, including one for children who needed lessons still in picture form. I had seen the happy planting Noah undertook after the Flood, the earth a smooth green hill glistening from the now-departed waters. At the peak of this fresh earth Noah stood, stalk of wheat in hand, dove pecking at his shoulder, while above him a rainbow proclaimed, “Upon the hill, new life.” At the top of my own hill there waved the flag for fallen guards, always at half-mast, and beside it a chunk of stone meant to be, I believe, their shared grave. All around me were women saving up for other lives, but I’d been saved for this life. Up I climbed. 

At the prison considerable fanfare attended departure, but to not depart appeared to me then as great a feat as any. To stay by choice, not by curse. However heralded the leavers, I would become, I knew then, a great stayer, my every descent twinned with an ascent, a life of perpetual return. Even my grandfather had been so easily swayed. But me—already I’d outlasted the trees.

At the hill’s crest I straightened and strengthened, and standing there between the flag and grave I took the vow that seemed the greatest vow I knew: to stay right where I was, to stay no matter what. Barbs glinting, flag smacking. A squirrel ran down the flagpole to offer me applause. Inside I showed my stamp and then, like a bride, I made my way down Visiting’s long aisle. 

When I returned to my grandfather at the end of the visit—car door open, newspaper spread across his lap—everything he did seemed an effort: turning the car on, backing out from the lot. Say it was to spare him this effort that I said, “From now on, just drop me off and I’ll go up alone.” A declaration of independence that did what such declarations must be designed to do: kill our parents. Or, in this case, my grandparent. A strip of pants leg bandaged the hand that held the wheel. “I understand,” he said. Then my grandfather did something he’d not done before. He drove us straight home. 

And if my mother told this story she might say that one day her father disappeared. He left and did not come back. On the first day without him there, she did not ask where he had gone—not on that visit or the next. When at last she did ask, I told her he was waiting for me at the bottom of the hill. All day? All day. And that was that.

But it wasn’t. She looked for him. When our games brought us to the Children’s Center door she looked down the aisle. When we knelt down to do our crafts she looked behind her. This continued throughout the day as if at any moment my grandfather might reappear. And on those days another visitor was assigned my grandfather’s table, my mother looked closer, longer, as if the person might, if she looked hard enough, still turn out to be her father. On afternoons inside the Center my mother kept a part of her body on my body at all times—a hand, a foot, the side of her arm. I felt her eyes on me and how looking at me did not satisfy her need to look at me.

“Shackles.” My grandmother stuck out her tongue, leaned her head to the side. “At her wrists and ankles at her father’s funeral. Can you imagine? Who would I be if I had allowed that? Who would we be?” She said this to the women gathered in our living room, who murmured their agreement. Until after a moment Norma said, “A daughter does deserve to see her father one last time. Make her amends. You have to admit that.” Another murmur of agreement. But my grandmother was never one to murmur or agree.

“Did your daughter come to Mannie’s funeral? Did she ever make amends? I mean really, Norma. Too little, too late could be the gravestone of your whole family.”

These were not the grandmothers who stand around offering juice, pour a little, wait, offer more. They stayed seated, I brought drinks. The women flashed their hands, a V for vodka, a C for gin, and the number of fingers they waved was the number of shots to include. 

What they discussed: life and death. The mass scale of it—twenty-six million Soviets killed in the war, who still talked about that?—and un-massed as well, the way their own men kept going off. What they’d said, what they’d been doing, deaths told and retold like riddles, rooms gone quiet with thought. 

“Wanting his lunch,” Norma said of her husband. “Complaining already, aggrieved already, then bam, the floor. Said something from down there, who could hear?”

The winter my grandfather died my grandmother gave me, for each of Hanukkah’s eight holy nights, a figurine of a warrior. A Hun, a Gurkha, a samurai. “You’re eight now,” she said. “You should understand this is a holiday about war.” The figurines were not parts of a set. The Chinese battle monk was fourteen inches tall, the Amazonian warrior girl the size of my hand, her axe and bow the width of fingernails. The Maasai’s poison spear was no more a threat than a toothpick. “Don’t be fooled,” my grandmother said. “He’d get you before you even knew to turn around.” Even the loincloths were executed in great detail—real leather, real beads, copper weapons. Their bodies were frozen in all manner of attack and the ones with painted eyes looked right at me while I slept. 

But we didn’t sleep that winter. Late at night my grandmother liked to raise the question of freedom, the desire for freedom. Her desire, specifically, to free me of my mother. 

“You think I’m driving you to that prison? I’m never driving you to any prison.” 

Where had she been, my grandmother, that’s what I wondered some nights lying beside her. When she let me crack her knuckles, when she let me oil them up, the little skulls of her joints—heavy clear cream turning her fingers and palms shiny and stiff, held above us like claws—I couldn’t imagine a life before this one, a person besides this one. Her knuckles were big, her skin was loose, and the thick green veins were something else, they moved but not much. From the edge of the shelf teeth watched me rub. I didn’t look there or where they could have been, the pouch of a mouth cinched shut in her new face. 

Justice, my grandmother called it, her refusal to go to the prison. Freedom or justice, depending on her mood. “We’re free,” she announced on Saturday mornings. Then, to close out our day at home, “That’s what she gets.” 

“But when will we go?” 

A question my grandmother ignored or answered. 

“She killed your grandfather”—one answer. 

“You’re killing me”—another. 

When I asked her questions, when I came to her bed: “You’re killing me, Suzanna,” lifting the covers, shaking her head. 

But it was like dying, like dying would be if you had to know life went on without you. Now my grandfather was not the only one dead at the prison but me, too. 

Would I be there next week, my mother asked each week on the phone. 

My grandmother’s bad driving had been enough, initially, to explain my absence. A series of snowstorms hit the region, and the next week came the ice. Not the ice my mother could see, which came and went quickly, but the ice my grandmother could see, underneath the road, inside the pavement. And the week after that my grandmother’s fingers were, I explained, too stiff to steer.

The snow and ice made sense to my mother. “That makes sense,” she said on the phone. The next week, “Her fingers?” Then, deciding or remembering something, “That makes sense. But next week?” 

I can say now that what my mother did in these weeks was make conversation, and can note the perseverance with which she carried the weight of my poor collaboration. At the time, though, I was struck more by the periods of silence on the phone. Moments when all she could come up with were variations on single-word enthusiasms—“Great,” “Cool,” an assortment of good-natured sighs. Finally, in her own doomed attempt to value my freedom, my mother made a strategic miscalculation: she began to ask, “Do you want to talk now?” So in addition to the end of our visits, our calls underwent dramatic compression. 

“Put my mother on the phone,” my mother said one night in a new voice. Then, revving up, “Just put her on.” In this way my mother commenced or continued a battle of wills that my grandmother—taking the phone from my hand and placing it straight on the cradle—very quickly won.

“The man who died,” my grandmother called the guard killed in my mother’s robbery. As when one of her friends suggested the time had come to bring me to my mother: “Tell it to the man who died.” 

“But I have to see her someday,” I announced one Sunday night. 

“According to who?” My grandmother gave me her other hand to rub. “You don’t even have to go to school.”

“But I want to go to school.” 

“But you don’t have to.” 

So this was another way to take leave of your life, to not do what it turns out you do not have to do.

Monday morning I stayed in bed and when the teacher said my name I did not answer. The students waited. The teacher said it again, everyone alert in the silence, then she marked what she marked, said the next name, the next name said, “Here,” and like that I was gone from school, too. 

My grandmother called to my bedroom, “Without school we can do whatever we want.”

Most of me was still under the covers, still seeing the kids in my class raise their hands. “I want to go to the prison.”

Sudden—my grandmother’s presence in my doorway. 

“Get your checks.” She moved the battle monk forward on my shelf. “Get out every check you have.”

We were on roads I knew, then we weren’t. I told myself we were on a drive in the country but this was only because I thought everywhere outside the city was country. The landscape around us wasn’t rural but made up, so far as I could see, of outdoor shopping malls selling videos, sandwiches, haircuts. Slips of paper presented in a stooped, guilty manner by one milky-eyed person or another were not offerings I’d ever much appreciated, but over the years I’d folded them up, I’d said my thanks. Now here they were, the whole bunch, on my lap. The longer we drove the more I focused on the far distance rather than what was closer to us and thus endangered by my grandmother’s steering. This staring off seemed very mature to me, proof of a newfound sophistication. Perhaps the oldest I’ve ever felt was when I was quite young riding in the car with my grandmother.

The car she’d bought to replace my grandfather’s had a glass square in the roof and sun slicing through the glass made me squint and my grandmother squint. In any light, especially winter light, my grandmother was a harsh-looking woman but I was proud of the way she looked because I thought she looked like an aristocrat—at least as rich as some of the prison volunteers. Rounding a curve, my grandmother swatted at her face as if light were something one could swat away and through all this she looked rich but tattered—an aristocrat gone to shambles. Her skin moved as the car moved but the flesh beneath her wrinkles was bloated, unmoving. Eyebrows drawn in pencil, not particularly well. Eventually we pulled into a parking lot.

“You have your checks?” She cut the engine. I handed over the pile. Not long passed before I knew I had done something wrong. 

“These are what you’ve saved?”

I nodded. 

“And you think you can deposit these?”

I did not nod at this because I had no idea what could happen with these pieces of paper. There were dozens of them, some quite old and crumpled, and I took the oldest ones and began to iron them against my leg.

“These people are dead. More than half these people are dead.”

I agreed.

“We’re going to go in there and you’re going to deposit a series of five-dollar checks from people who’ve been dead for years?”

I held up a check from a woman who’d been alive until recently.

“What will you do with that?” My grandmother seemed curious now, amused even. “You’re going to deposit Arlene’s check and she’ll still have money waiting just for you, no matter that Arlene drowned herself in October and went broke long before that?” 

I knew Arlene was dead but not that she’d drowned—she had, in fact, taught me how to swim—and I said, less to my grandmother and more to Arlene, “I’m sorry.” 

“Sorry for what?” My grandmother imitated the shrug I gave then, making it clownish. “How many checks do you have from living people?”

I made up a number. Not high enough. My grandmother leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes. “You know how long your mother waited here?” 

Before us stood a brick one-story building, green curtains in the windows. “Waited here?” 

“Long enough to change her mind. Just like that. Drive away, pick you up. Then Joe wouldn’t be dead and I wouldn’t have had to retire. And sometimes we’d have dinner with our friends and sometimes they’d come to see us.”

“We see your friends.” I picked up the checks, lifted them: See, your friends. 

But my grandmother’s eyes were still closed. “And maybe they’d drink too much and have to sleep in the study but what’s so bad about that? Nothing.”

“What’s the study?”

“Where you sleep. If she’d changed her mind, Joe would be alive and we’d still have a study.”

“But where would I sleep?”

My grandmother opened her eyes. “Wherever. She’d have gotten a regular job like everyone and we’d see you when she was too busy to pick you up. Just once in a while when she was busy or tired.”

“What job?”

“Any job. I’d help her get any job, she knew that. All the time I said, ‘You have a baby now, no more fucking around, no more revolution. How will you eat? How will you afford a doctor? What about piano lessons?’ You were only a baby, but still, one day you wouldn’t be a baby. You’d be you and then what?” 

“Then what?”

“Then what would she do?”

I looked out my window to see it: my mother with a job, a woman who did things besides play games and ignore the nuns as politely as possible. She would work with children or animals or plants, I decided, though I had never seen her with a plant or an animal. “She’d be a teacher,” I said.

“A teacher,” my grandmother said.

And it felt then like something real had been agreed between us. “But I wouldn’t have my room?”

“People stayed there when they stayed over.” My grandmother closed her eyes to see the room I couldn’t see.

It didn’t seem possible. My room was bright yellow with a yellow-flowered bedspread, matching chair, matching pillows. Even the ceiling was yellow. “Was it yellow?”

“Of course not. Your grandfather painted it for you.”

What else had been different?

“Everything.” 

“Everything?”

“The kitchen and dining room were the same.”

“Could I keep clothes at your place and sometimes sleep over?”

“We’d have dinner. Then you’d leave.” I could see my grandmother seeing it: the door closing behind me, my grandfather locking it and turning back to my grandmother, walking to the study beside her. If he said something to her I would hear it from the hall—not the words but the sound of my grandfather’s voice. “You could come on the weekends. One weekend a month.” Generous now, making a deal. Of all the ways of being lonely, hearing that life could have been otherwise is one and hearing the person beside you wish that it were is another. 

“But I live with you.” And when that did nothing: “I want to live with you.”

“Then you’re wishing a man dead and you’re as bad as your mother.”

Outside the door of the bank a young man appeared in uniform.  

“You see that boy?” My grandmother pointed her finger at the guard. “Your mother killed him.” 

Then she tweaked it. “Your mother sat right where I’m sitting and waited while people killed him. Waited.” My grandmother repeated the word as if waiting were the real sin. “You understand what she did?”

“She waited.” 

“Exactly.”

That the young guard looked entirely alive contributed to the confusion of this moment. 

“We never have to go to the prison, Suzanna. That’s what I’m saying.” 

I had no idea that was what she was saying. “But I have to go.”

Head tilted, hand visored, the guard peered our way. 

“You don’t have to go and I don’t have to take you.”

“But I want to go.” 

“Then how will you get there?” She shifted her whole body around so she could face me. 

“I’ll take the train to the bus, then I’ll walk.” 

My grandmother did not like hearing answers from me. “Get out.” She turned back in her seat. Our weekend was over, she was dropping me off. “There’s a photo inside of the man and his family. Go and see.”

“Do I have to?”

“You have to.”

“Then I can come back?”

My grandmother pressed the button that locked the doors, then the one that unlocked them. 

“Then I can come back?” I asked again. 

“The dead can’t come back. When you understand that, you can come back.”

The cold sped up what came next—the run past the guard. After the first door, another door, and between the doors a small area I knew to be a vestibule. From inside the bank came the sounds of people greeting each other, departing from each other. Moving money sounded, it turned out, like people coming and going and the particular sound of people who don’t come and go, who have to stay all day. Another sound, too, one I knew well. “You’re a smug little lord,” my grandmother said at night to her cat, strumming his throat. Such was the feline hum I heard now, and there it was in the vestibule corner, squinting at the world. Like any cat it recognized me and couldn’t care less. 

Nearby, a car pulled in, a door opened. The woman who emerged didn’t look happy; she kept her head down, holding closed her suit jacket. Though the guard was the only person in an actual uniform, I experienced most people’s clothes as types of uniform, the clothes a person had to wear to do the things they had to do. But the hat and mittens the guard had on struck me as being out of uniform. He greeted the suited woman, as I then greeted her, but it was the cat the woman most heartily greeted. After the confusion of me, the relief of the cat. Away she went through the door behind me.

“You’re in trouble,” my grandmother said as often in our years together as she said hello. Going into the bank was required if I aimed to avoid, as I did aim to avoid, my next round of trouble. But I didn’t want to go inside that bank. 

What I don’t want could fill this lot, the cat purred behind me. Every day it fills this lot.

To mimic the disappearance of going in, I crouched low beneath the vestibule window. Sky and brick reflected off my grandmother’s windshield but I could tell she’d leaned her seat back horizontal. Most likely her eyes were still closed. But my grandmother could see even with—especially with—her eyes closed. I crouched lower. The guard stood nearby. If not for the window between us, we would have been able to speak without raising our voices. He kept his watch, I kept mine, and behind me—I could feel this—the cat watched us both.

The woman, leaving, was as confused to say goodbye as she had been to say hello. More confused because of my crouch. Someone inside the bank laughed and someone, talking, walked farther away. To want to go home was to wish a man dead but I did want, very much, to go home. My grandmother’s fingers moved on the wheel, then went still. For now, the guard stood between us, his posture the posture of someone neither watching nor guarding but doing what the guard did, standing out in the cold. Mittens on, he attempted to pull something from his pocket. Mittens off, he tried again. The cat and I watched this: the guard struggling to remove and unwrap a series of mints from his pocket, bringing his head down toward the candy, listening to each one before it went in his mouth.