Chapter 4: Visiting Day

The state prison at Reidsville sits three hours from Savannah, behind two fences and a field of cut grass.

I drove it alone in Opal's old Buick, because the terms said nothing about Beau coming along and I was not going to ask.

I still felt his hand around mine on the drive.

I kept flexing my fingers on the wheel to get the feeling out, and it stayed.

The guard at the desk checked my name against a list and gave me a locker key.

"Braswell, Amos," he read. "Table nine."

The visiting room smelled of floor wax and vending machine coffee.

My father was already sitting at table nine, with his hands flat on the top.

He was fifty-eight and looked seventy, with a grey crew cut and the same wire glasses he had worn at my mother's funeral.

He stood up when he saw me, which they let him do for one second.

"Sabra Jean," he said.

"Hi, Daddy."

I hugged him across the corner of the table, and I could count his shoulder blades through the blue shirt.

We sat.

He looked at my hand.

"That's a ring," he said.

"Yes."

"Whose is it?"

I had practiced this in the car for two hundred miles.

"I got married on Friday," I said. "His name is Beau Ravenel."

The room kept making its noise around us, a baby crying two tables over, a guard's radio.

My father did not move.

Then his hands came off the table and went into his lap.

He began to fold the edge of his shirt over and over between his fingers.

"Ravenel," he said.

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