Queen Never Cry novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Gate

Released after twenty-six months, Pippa is met by her grandmother at the prison gate and goes straight to her daughter's school, where Posy runs across the street into her arms.

They gave me back my own coat at the gate of Dwight Correctional.

It was the grey wool one I wore to the sentencing, and it hung looser now.

I carried a paper bag with a toothbrush, a letter from the chaplain, and two hundred and twelve dollars.

The sky was the color of dishwater, and the wind came flat across the cornfields.

Twenty-six months.

I had counted every one of them on the wall by my bunk.

The guard at the gate said, "Don't come back, Corrigan," the way they all do.

I said, "I won't."

Then the steel door rolled open, and I saw the only person in the parking lot.

She stood by the fence in her good camel coat, with her white hair pinned up.

A cane with a silver duck's head leaned on her arm.

She had a thermos tucked under one arm.

My grandmother was seventy-nine years old and had taken two buses to be early.

I kept walking.

Everything in my chest wanted to run, and I made my feet go at a steady pace.

She watched me come all the way, and her mouth shook once.

Then it went hard again.

"Not here," Hester said. "Not where the guards can see you."

"I wasn't going to."

"Good girl." She pushed the thermos into my hands. "Coffee. And a ham sandwich, because I do not trust what they feed you."

I took one bite and it was the best thing I had tasted in two years.

My eyes burned, and I looked at the cornfield until they stopped.

She rubbed my back once, hard, with the heel of her hand.

"There is a bathroom with a lock at the laundromat," she said. "You can fall apart in there."

The laundromat was on Milwaukee Avenue.

My grandmother rented two rooms above it, and the whole stairwell smelled of hot lint and detergent.

The Lake Forest house had thirty-one rooms.

Here the kitchen was a hot plate beside a window, and every dryer in the building hummed through the floor.

Hester set out two mugs and told me everything while I stood in my coat.

Desmond had divorced me by default eighteen months ago.

Eight months ago he married Lydia in the garden of the Drake Hotel.

He had sole custody of Posy, and a judge had signed a protective order that kept me five hundred feet from her.

I could see my daughter only through supervised visits, if a family court allowed it.

"Where does she go to school?" I said.

"Pippa."

"Where, Hester."

She lowered herself into the chair and looked older than she had in the parking lot.

"Lakeview Day School," she said. "On Fullerton. Pickup is at three fifteen."

I looked at the clock above the hot plate.

It said two o'clock.

"You'll be arrested," my grandmother said. "The first hour you are free."

"If I step inside five hundred feet."

"You can't tell where five hundred feet is."

"I can count."

I washed my face at her tiny sink.

I changed into a navy sweater of hers that smelled of lavender, because mine smelled of the county.

Then I took the bus to Fullerton, and I stood on the far side of the street across from a stone building with a flag.

It was a public sidewalk, eighty-three feet from the school gate.

I paced it twice and counted.

Mothers in puffy vests lined the curb, and not one of them looked at me.

At three fifteen the doors opened and the children poured out in coats and backpacks.

I saw her at once.

She was taller.

Her curls were cut to her chin, and the gap in her front teeth was bigger, and she walked with her head down.

She held the hand of a woman in cream tailoring and pearl studs.

Lydia was smiling at the other mothers.

Posy looked up.

She looked across the street, past the cars and the crossing guard, and straight at me.

I did not wave.

I did not move.

My daughter stopped dead on the curb.

I watched her face change from blank to a disbelief so wide it hurt to look at.

"Mama?" she said.

Lydia's head snapped around.

Then Posy yanked her hand free and ran into the street.

The crossing guard shouted, and brakes squealed.

I stood perfectly still on my sidewalk, with my arms at my sides, because I had counted the feet.

She hit me at the knees and wrapped both arms around my coat, and I knelt on the pavement.

She smelled of crayons, and strawberry shampoo, and something that was only hers.

"I kept the ribbon," she whispered into my neck.

Behind her a black SUV pulled to the curb and the door flew open.

Desmond got out with his phone already at his ear.

"Officer," he said, perfectly calm. "That woman is violating a protective order."

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