They Sent Me to Prison for the Family Fire, So I Came Home to Sell the Ranch Out From Under Them novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Fourth Street

In Ansel's grandmother's empty house Maite sleeps on the floor with the porch light on and shows him the shoebox of letters she kept, until her father and the sheriff arrive in headlights.

I called my parole officer from his truck before we'd left the lot.

I told her I was safe, I had a place to sleep, and I was giving her the address.

She said she'd have to log it as a violation unless I got a verbal approval by midnight.

"Then approve it," I said.

She was quiet a long time on the line.

"I saw the news from the festival already," she said.

"Your family's lawyer has been on my voicemail since six."

"And?"

"Go to bed, Ms. Etcheverry.

"I'll call you at eight."

That was how I learned that calling in at ten at night is also a way of acting.

The house on Fourth Street was two rooms and a porch behind a lilac that had gone to sticks.

Ansel unlocked it with a key from a hook inside his truck door.

"My grandmother's," he said.

"It's empty between tenants.

"There's a mattress in the back room and sheets in the closet."

He didn't put his hand on my back to steer me.

I noticed that.

He turned the lights on in the front room and stood by the door with his hat in his hands.

"I'll sleep in the truck," he said.

"You will not," I said.

"Then the couch."

"There's no couch," I said.

He looked at the bare room and nodded slowly at the fact, the way he nodded at a bill of sale.

"Then the floor," he said.

The back bedroom had a mattress on a bed frame, with a quilt folded on top.

I stood in the doorway and looked at it for a long time.

For five years I had slept on a steel shelf four feet from a woman who talked in her sleep.

A bed with a quilt on it was a thing I could look at and not believe in.

I pulled the quilt off and lay down on the boards with it over me.

The floor was hard and flat, and the cold came up through it.

I was asleep inside a minute.

I woke at one, and the porch light was still on.

The yellow of it came through the window onto the quilt.

I could hear him not sleeping on the other side of the wall.

I got up and went out to him in my bare feet.

He was sitting on the porch step in his shirtsleeves with a thermos, looking at the dark street.

He stood when the screen door opened.

"I didn't mean to wake you."

"You didn't."

I sat down on the step beside him.

The boards were cold.

A shoebox sat on the porch rail that hadn't been there when we arrived, and I looked at it.

"That's yours," he said.

"It was in your bag from Carson City.

"You left it in the truck."

"I know whose it is."

I took it down and opened the lid.

Sixty envelopes lay inside in order, the cheap white ones, each with my name in his small square printing.

I had read every one of them except the first.

I had never written back to any of them.

"You kept them," Ansel said.

"They're mine," I said.

It came out sharper than I meant.

I put my thumb under the flap of the last envelope, the one from September.

A splinter from the rail ran into the heel of my palm.

I swore under my breath.

"Let me see," Ansel said.

"It's nothing," I said.

"It's the left one."

He took the flashlight off the rail and clicked it on.

He took my hand and turned it palm up toward the light.

The scar from the fire lay across it, pale and shiny and hairless from the heel to the base of my fingers.

I had held that hand up to a tent full of people two hours before.

Nobody had touched it since it healed.

My mother hadn't, and the guards hadn't.

Ansel's thumb came down across the middle of the scar, very lightly, and moved toward the splinter.

I felt it all the way up my arm.

I felt it in my chest.

His breath stopped.

I heard it stop, a small hitch of air, and then I saw his shoulders rise as he took the next one carefully.

He didn't look at me.

He looked at my palm, and his thumb did not move.

"There," he said, and he drew the splinter out with his fingernail.

"Got it."

"Thank you."

"It's deep.

"You'll want it washed."

"I'm tired," I said.

I don't know why I said it.

He heard something in it, or he didn't, and he laid my hand back on my knee as if it might break.

"You should sleep," he said.

"You should."

"I will."

Neither of us moved.

I had read his statement in the trial transcript my second year inside.

It was one paragraph, six lines.

I cannot be sure she wasn't carrying something.

I had learned it by heart on the steel shelf, and I had never said it to anyone.

I looked at the hand he had just held, and I thought: he came every first Sunday.

I thought: he can't be sure.

At the end of Fourth Street, headlights turned the corner and came on slowly.

There were two sets, one low and one high.

The high one had a light bar on top, not lit.

The low one was my father's white truck, and I knew it by the sound of the engine.

Ansel stood up.

"That's the sheriff," he said.

"And that's Josu," I said.

They pulled in at the curb, and the doors opened.

My father got out in his good hat with a paper in his hand, and the sheriff came behind him.

"Evening," he said, as if he'd come about a lamb.

"She's walked off her parole address, Ansel.

"We'd like her home tonight."

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