The Best American Mystery Stories 2001

Michael Downs Prison Food

From Witness

Shelly Wolansky’s desk faced a wall, and to the right, over the in-basket, was the only window in the prison kitchen. It was a small window, no bigger than a cutting board, with a view Shelly could live without: razor-wire and grim concrete walls, beyond that acres of dead weeds bordered by cyclone fence and more razor wire, and in the distance Route 5 and the doughnut shop where corrections officers could buy Bavarian crème and chocolate frosted at a 20 percent discount. When Shelly had seen it all once, she’d seen it too many times.

Her head ached. Her desk was a mess. She untucked her shirt, undid the top button of her pants — the waistband pinched when she sat, the price she paid for having quit smoking — and reread the warden’s memo. He needed her to work Thursday night — the night of the execution — to make the last meal.

The warden promised Friday off — Thursday, too, except the few hours that night. Fine with her. Not working Friday meant she could make Chuck’s hockey tournament in New Haven, keep an eye on him. Lord knows he needed watching, especially after the bit two months back with that other boy’s car. That was the worst, but she didn’t like the way he’d been drawing penalties on the ice, either. Chuck’s coach had said it was part of the game, that hockey players need an attitude. “Yeah, well, he needs his attitude adjusted,” she had said.

If Hank were still alive…

Ah, quit it, Shelly told herself. Maybe, if, maybe, if. You can’t play that game anymore. Four years is too long.

The banging pans and rattling blowers of the kitchen didn’t help her headache, and when Danny, the trusty, dropped a soup pot he was washing, she yelled at him. “Sorry, Julia Child!” he shouted back. She smiled, despite herself. She liked it when people in the prison called her Julia Child. She liked what it said about how she ran the kitchen.

Shelly rolled back in her chair — inventory reports could wait — and glanced out the window. It was snowing. Somehow that made the view even harder to bear. In the distance, out past the fence, she could see little stick people waving signs. Protesters already, and the execution still two days away. All those people standing in the cold — good news for the doughnut shop.

The kitchen’s fluorescent bulbs stuttered. The stainless steel shone dull in the flickering light. She needed her hands in food, needed to chop something. So she buttoned her pants, pulled on latex gloves, and stopped near a cutting board to put zucchini under the knife. She wondered what the guy would order for his last meal. Though she’d worked at the prison three years, the state hadn’t killed anyone since she started. A new governor now changed all that. She figured this late-night supper would be the first of many, and that thought turned her stomach queasy.

“What’s up, Julia Child?”

Danny nudged her, shoulder-to-shoulder as if they were dancing. “You’re staring into space land,” he said, bending around to see her face. He smiled his soda-pop smile, the smile of a con man, which he had been until an old couple turned him in. The file Shelly read had told how Danny, out on bail before the trial, stopped by the couple’s house and hospitalized them for six weeks each. That tantrum earned him his spot in maximum security. Good behavior, and likely that smile, had freed him for the kitchen. That and the fact the warden liked to make the white guys trusties.

“You’re not supposed to touch the staff,” she said.

He ignored her and pointed at the knife. “You don’t focus, you might lose a finger. What’s on your mind?”

Shelly put down the knife. It was easy to see how he could bilk people — his gentle laugh, his sincere and curious face — Shelly had overheard kitchen workers confess deep anxieties to Danny. But he was scary, too, because of what he’d done. Because he was maximum. Because when Shelly looked close enough, she noticed parallel scars at his wrist and the earlobe that was missing, and when she paid attention to his voice she heard that dialect white men only speak when they’ve been inside the walls a long time.

“I’m cooking that guy’s meal Thursday night.”

“Doyle?” He laughed. “He’s a mean bastard, that one.”

“I don’t want to know. I’m sure it was a long, long time ago.”

“Hell no, Julia Child. Not long back, they let Doyle in the yard with the rest of us, and he said something to piss off some Latin Kings. You don’t piss off the Kings. They stabbed him. That son of a bitch just pressed a sock over the hole in his belly so he wouldn’t look weak. Later, he’s walking some hall with guards on both sides, his hands and legs cuffed, and they pass the dude who stabbed him. Doyle bites off the dude’s nose. And now Julia Child’s making him dinner.”

“Don’t you have trays to wash?”

“About five years’ worth, with good behavior.”

Back at the sink, he worked the high-pressure hose, spraying until steam swallowed him. Having Danny around was as bad as having that window over her desk, reminders she didn’t need. When she saw him, she couldn’t help but see the baseball bat that broke the ribcage of the old man, smashed the old woman’s arthritic hands. No matter how Danny laughed or winked, he couldn’t hide his history. He wore it as plainly as he wore his blue prison shirt, untucked and buttoned to the collar, just like all the inmates.

Sometimes Chuck dressed for school the same way. “It’s a style,” he argued. “No big deal.”

At the rink that night, Shelly nodded to other parents as she picked a spot on the splintering bleachers behind the team box. The boys skated onto the ice, greeted by hand-clapping and rock ‘n’ roll that gargled from the arena’s loudspeakers, and Shelly remembered how earlier, when she left the prison for the rink, the protesters had sung “Amazing Grace” and shoved signs in front of her windshield as she drove out the gate. Like she had anything to do with whether the guy lived or died, like she did anything but run the kitchen and cook.

A teenage girl came and sat beside Shelly. Chuck’s girlfriend. “Hi, Tina,” Shelly said, friendly despite her better judgment.

“Hey.”

Tina wore a fatigue jacket, and her lacquered hair hung in her eyes like a purple shield. Why is it, Shelly wondered, that high school boys love the psychos the way dogs love antifreeze? How could Chuck love this girl, who let him twist for days before returning his phone calls, who flirted with other guys, and who even invited them along when she and Chuck had a date? That’s how he had wrecked his Chevy Nova, smashing the Firebird of some guy Tina was vamping. Chuck got his license revoked and two years probation. Tina never said sorry. Just after that, Shelly started having nightmares: Tina, a wedding ring on her finger, her arms open for a hug, saying, “Hi, Mom.” In the dream, Shelly never knew whether to hug her daughter-in-law or spank her.

Chuck was in the goal mouth now, deflecting slap shots, monstrous in his pads and goalkeeper’s mask. Shelly stared at the mask, trying to make out what was scrawled in red across the forehead.

“What’s that say?” she asked, pointing.

“Maim,” said Tina.

“Maim? Like, wound?”

“Dismember. Cripple. Yeah.” Tina laughed.

“It’s not funny, Tina.”

“I think it is.”

Teenage testosterone, Shelly told herself. Same as when he plastered the walls of his room with pictures of hockey players brawling. Same as when he stayed up late playing blood-soaked video games on his computer. But what about the night he wrecked the cars? Could she blame testosterone then? Hadn’t he crossed some line? And what about “maim”?

Hank, Hank… when you died, he was still a boy, asking permission to spend his allowance on Hershey Bars, full of please and thank you. Four years later, he’s some other thing, out of my control. He scares me, Hank.

But thinking of her husband settled her, because she’d seen Hank handle the worst kinds of people, from drunks in his favorite taverns to the lowlifes he dealt with every day as a Hartford cop. Sometimes she’d drive to the city and wait in the station’s lobby to meet him for lunch, and he’d come in from patrol, a look in his eyes that made whatever punk he had in cuffs waddle like he had peed himself. Sometimes the punk really had peed himself. But Hank never raised a fist. Never used a club. His eyes did the work. Hank’s eyes — frightening and cold when he was angry — promised something worse than a beating if he’d ever let loose. And that look, that promise, gave her faith that nothing would ever hurt him, that he’d always come home. Foolish hope. Because the doorbell did ring one night. Not when he was at work, no. It rang late, when he’d gone out with the boys, and then it was Enfield’s cops instead of Hartford’s. Hank had a few. Missed a stop sign.

No. Maim wasn’t funny.

Shelly stared at her son in case he’d notice her and feel chastised. For all the good it did. Midway through the third period, Chuck charged out of the goal and with his stick flattened the other team’s center, doubled the kid over. The kid jumped up looking for a fight, but Chuck punched first and kept punching until the referees pulled them apart. All the time on the bench, even with the coach in his face, Chuck never removed his mask.

Game over, Shelly waited outside the locker room but kept her distance from other parents. She didn’t want their small talk when all they’d be thinking is what the hell was wrong with her boy. Tina stayed near but said nothing. After a while, the coach came out, and he told Shelly that he’d have no choice: Another fight, Chuck’s off the team.

“Maybe if you’d done something earlier…” she said.

“I’m not his father,” he said. “There’s a limit.”

When the coach returned to the locker room, a shabbily dressed man slipped out, wearing thick glasses and carrying a notebook under his arm. Chuck appeared a few minutes later, his puffy down coat unzipped, his dress shirt wrinkled, his game-day tie loosely knotted. He hadn’t shaved, and his cheeks shined with acne and exertion.

He draped his arm around Tina. They both said, “Hey.”

“That took a while,” Shelly said.

“I was talking to some guy from the newspaper.”

“They want to do a story on you?”

“Yeah. I guess that’s why he was talking to me.”

Outside, Shelly unlocked the trunk of the old Buick. Chuck dropped his duffel bag with such weight that a clump of crusted, wet snow — brown with dirt and rust — fell from the bumper and splashed on the pavement.

At Tina’s house, Shelly adjusted the rearview mirror so she could watch. With car exhaust drifting around them in blue clouds, Chuck tried to kiss Tina. She stepped back. They whispered, their words puffs of frozen breath. He grabbed her wrist. She yanked it away. Shelly thought of driving off, leaving them to eat each other alive.

Then Tina shoved Chuck and marched to her door. Chill air rushed with him into the Buick.

“What’s with all the bad actor stuff?” Shelly asked as they drove home.

“With Tina?”

“With everything. Coach says you’re off the team, you keep pulling that stuff.”

“He won’t. There’s nobody else to play goalie.”

“I don’t like it anyway.”

“It gives me a boost,” he said. From his backpack he look a candy bar, ripped open the wrapper and swallowed in two bites. “That other team is the bad guys. You don’t shake hands with bad guys. You just kick their asses.”

“Your father dealt with bad guys every day. He never hit one. He—”

“—drank his way through a stop sign so maybe he’s not the best role model.”

“You shut your mouth.”

She wanted to slap him, but she worried about the Buick skidding into a tree.

All of a sudden Chuck rose and, with a grace that seemed impossible given his bulk, pulled himself into the back seat. Shelly looked over her shoulder, and he had closed his eyes.

“You don’t know anything about hockey,” he muttered and said nothing else that night.

Shelly woke Wednesday morning, bleary and grumpy from too much worrying and too little sleep, wanting a cigarette for the first time in months. At work, she found a memo from the warden listing Doyle’s menu: cheeseburger plain with onion slices, french fries, orange Jell-O, a glass of milk, a hard-candy mint for after. At the bottom, the warden’s scrawled note: Don’t jazz it up. Give the guy what he wants.

Her staff shuffled around the tilt grills and steam kettles, and the kitchen smelled of pesto and grilled chicken — that night’s entree. Don’t jazz it up. Fine. She could cook a cheeseburger. She’d cooked thousands of cheeseburgers, back when Hank was alive and Chuck was still a cherub. Meatloaf, too. All the basics: meat, potatoes, vegetables from a can. Now and then, on an anniversary or on Mother’s Day, Hank took her someplace with candles and lace tablecloths, and they ate nice, but she never imagined she could create what appeared on those plates. Then Hank died, and she dreamed about him sitting with her at the kitchen table eating tomato soup and black bread, and he said, “You should try cooking school. It’s’a way to make a living.”

She had always figured you needed a Rockefeller’s salary and a degree from Harvard to make the dishes she saw prepared on public television. But after a few months of classes at Hartford Culinary College, Shelly learned that all a person needed to move beyond meatloaf and mashed potatoes was time to enjoy the kitchen. For hours she’d stand over the stove, the food processor, the cutting board, peeling garlic or sprinkling saffron or deveining shrimp, loving the work in a way she’d never loved anything before. She didn’t graduate — money ran short — but she passed enough classes to get the job at the prison kitchen, and pretty quick she worked her way up to manager. That gave her time and money. And she had ideas how to use both.

She’d seen how people became respectful when seated before a plate of marinated pork tenderloin, and she wondered how prisoners might act if they ate chestnut soup instead of chicken-patty sandwiches, spinach fettucine instead of sloppy joes, chicken molé instead of Salisbury steak. She wasn’t stupid. She didn’t figure she could turn a murderer into a school crossing guard, but, she thought, maybe good food might make him a little less angry. It wasn’t easy changing the menu — the cafeteria’s budget wasn’t so big after all — but she learned to substitute ham for prosciutto, Swiss cheese for Gruyère.

The prisoners flushed the food at first. Shelly kept trying, and eventually they started to eat what she served. Some even liked it. The warden praised her, especially when she won a state government award for initiative and creativity, but the new menu didn’t change anybody’s behavior. After a while, that didn’t matter to Shelly. If she had to cook, she wanted to cook good food.

When she took her break, she found Danny in the snack room. He sat at a round table, reading a newspaper and picking his teeth with a plastic fork that had all its tines broken off except one.

“Just reading about your boy.”

“Chuck said they were doing a story on him. I didn’t know it ran already.”

“Not Chuck.” He slid the paper across the table. She took it, then sat and read the front-page headline:

She saw two photographs, one new and in color of a sixty-ish woman with a face puckered from a lifetime of two packs a day. She held a photo of her son the murderer as a preschooler. That picture was reproduced — larger — next to hers. Probably snapped on his birthday. He wore a pointed paper hat and a short-sleeve white shirt with a dark tie. He held a stuffed lion toy. His hair was curly and blond, his skin Irish pink. The caption read: “Bobby Doyle, age five.”

“Cute,” she said.

“Amazing his mother sticks by him. My mother’s pretty much forgotten me. I mean, she keeps proof that she had me — my badges with the Cub Scouts and a big picture of me in an altar boy uniform. Nothing after that, though. Like once I hit puberty, I vanished.”

“You were an altar boy?”

“Until I stole a candlestick.” He laughed. “Most guys in here will tell you they were good guys once.”

“Can I take this?” she said.

Danny nodded — “You’re the boss, Julia Child” — picking his teeth.

That night on her couch, chilled despite her flannel pajamas and the wool blanket wrapped around her legs, Shelly read the newspaper story to the inside pages. He had loved dogs, said his mother. Played checkers like a whiz. The article also mentioned that he had killed two girls after raping them — the daughters of his girlfriend at the time. Inside was a mug shot of Doyle: his lips curled in a frown, and his clenched jawbones pushing out of his cheeks. The worst part was his eyes. Not like Hank’s, which had been scary for what they promised. Doyle’s eyes delivered, shot through with blood and rage. Shelly looked back and forth from Doyle the boy to Doyle the killer.

She started when Chuck threw open the front door, home from hockey practice. He passed her without a word — despite her “Hello” — a newspaper under one arm and his goalkeeper’s mask in hand. He grabbed a bag of cookies from the kitchen, then shut himself in his room.

When she knocked, there was no answer.

“Chuck?”

“I’m busy.”

“And I’m in no mood to talk to you through a door.”

She twisted the knob and went in.

He whipped a jackknife at the wall, trying to stick the blade through the newspaper he had taped there. In the middle of the page was a photograph of a hockey goalie.

“What are you doing?”

He threw the knife again. It hit flat against the newspaper and fell.

“I said—”

“Getting mad.”

“At who?”

“Churchill Bannerman. Goalie from Avon.”

“What’d he do?”

“Nothing. It’s a hockey thing.” He kept throwing, missing, retrieving the knife…

“Give me the knife, Chuck. If you know what’s good for you, give me the knife now.”

He tossed it once more, missing again, then fell back on the mulch of dirty clothes covering his bed.

She folded the knife, then gathered a deep breath and looked around his room.

“Have you had dinner?”

He waved the bag of cookies.

“How about if I heat some eggplant lasagna for you.”

“If it’s prison food, I don’t want it.”

“What difference does it make?”

“If it’s prison food, I don’t want it.”

It sounded like a dare, as if forcing dinner on him would be asking for trouble. He stared, breathing quietly if he breathed at all.

“Suit yourself,” she said, and she walked out, leaving his door open. He shut it as soon as she was in the hallway.

In bed, she read the newspaper story once, then twice, while chewing the plastic cap of a ballpoint pen. She wondered about Chuck and Danny and Doyle — all good kids once — and the wonder turned to worry about how short a step it might be from knifing a wall to knifing a body. Before she turned out her bedside lamp, she buried Chuck’s jackknife in a dresser drawer beneath her socks and panties.

On Execution Day, Shelly brushed her teeth and wondered whether Doyle was brushing his teeth, too, or whether he wouldn’t bother. What did a man do on his last day? As he rinsed the toothpaste from his mouth, would he relive what he had done? Would he regret it? Or would he think back to happier days? She wondered about Doyle’s happy days. She wondered whether he had played hockey in high school.

She found Chuck in the living room, eating chips out of a bag, gazing at cartoons on TV.

“That your breakfast?”

A nod.

“Breakfast of champions. At least sit with me at the table while I eat. Pretend we’re family.”

He shrugged and followed. His baggy pants, designed to make him look like a hoodlum, made him seem to her only a boy in man’s clothes. He wore his cap turned so the bill faced sideways, and he’d left the price tag attached. He looked silly.

“We’ve been reading in current events class about the execution,” he said. “Some of us thought we’d go watch.”

Shelly popped a prison omelet into the microwave. Leftovers from the day before. She punched the buttons on the microwave, playing its one note over and over. “Watch what? You won’t see a thing.”

“We thought we’d carry signs: ‘Bobby Doyle Fan Club.’ It’d be cool.” His face opened a little, and he dropped into a chair. He fiddled with the corner of the kitchen table where the laminate was peeling, picking at it with his fingernails.

“I want you home. We’ve got to be up by five for the tournament.”

“But isn’t that wild? Right after midnight — the Witching Hour — and the dude’s dead. Pffffit. Nada. Our teacher told us they’ll strap him to a table shaped like a cross.” He smiled. “A nurse is going to swab the spot where they’ll give him the IV, like he needs to worry about infection. They paralyze him. That’s how he’ll die. And because he’s paralyzed, his organs and stuff won’t relax, so he won’t shit himself. Nice and clean, no screaming or anything. Like he falls asleep. Lullaby, little Bobby.” He stopped talking and looked at her. “Hey, Mom.”

“Hmm?”

“Microwave’s beeping.”

Shelly opened the oven door to stop the sound, but left her food inside.

“Chuck, you don’t shock me, OK? Do a ‘Bobby Doyle Fan Club.’ I don’t care. Just don’t do a Bobby Doyle.”

“Mom…”

“Look. I’m working tonight. I’m making his last meal. And I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“You’re making his last meal? That’s totally cool.”

“You think it’s cool?”

“Totally. It’s so messed up. I mean, what a waste of food, right?” He plunged a hand into his bag of chips, shoved a few in his mouth. “I bet he won’t get leftovers.”

Shelly parked on the street outside the Hartford Public Library waiting for the doors to open, her worry over Chuck stewing into anger. She checked the Buick’s ashtray for stubs, found only a few wisps of ash, and wanted to blame Chuck for that, too.

Inside the library, her mood worsened with the nausea she got spinning microfilm back to the murders.

BRISTOL — Whoever raped and killed the two Williams sisters earlier this week first bound them with phone cords and stuffed their mouths with aluminum foil, police, said yesterday.

Shelly’s throat tightened, a sympathetic gag.

Bite marks on the foil indicate that the girls — Nancy, 13, and Kim, 11 — were alive when their mouths were stuffed, and probably raped after that, according to Homicide Detective Glenn Falzarrano of the Bristol Police Department. Each girl was then shot through the head with a.38 caliber handgun.

Falzarrano asked that any information that could lead to an arrest be given to his office immediately…

A helpful librarian interrupted to show her a feature article a national magazine ran about the murders. “A lot of people have been asking this week,” the woman said.

The magazine reveled in awful detail. The girls, the prosecutor had told the jury, “writhed like earthworms in their own living room.” The police caught Doyle hiding in the ruin of a stone farmhouse near Litchfield where he had killed a stray dog for food.

But the article also offered Doyle’s history: Cub Scout through his bear badge, a pole vaulter at Bristol Central High, later an exterior detailer in a body shop. Reliable, his boss had said. A good eye for colors. Along with all that, a photograph of Bobby in high school with some friends in a cellar, surrounded by dumbbells and barbells and concrete, the boys skinny in tight T-shirts, each trying to look threatening, trying so much they looked sweet.

And there were school pictures of the girls. Nancy, the older, had dark, feathered hair, braces on her teeth, and spare shoulders that looked too slight to support her neck. Kim, also a brunette but with a lighter tint, squeezed her lips shut as if smiling would be an act of surrender. Shelly looked for a long time.

A whiz at checkers, his mother had said. And he had liked dogs.

The house was quiet, Chuck not yet back from practice, but he had been home for lunch and left a carton of milk on the counter to spoil. She poured the milk down the sink and decided that she needed music during dinner, something to drive away images of Bobby Doyle with those sisters, their mouths packed with aluminum foil, the last taste on their tongues. Country, maybe. Some twangy, seductive voice. She touched the power button on the radio.

Ripping heavy metal guitars and barking voices slammed from the speakers. She panicked, punched the power off. Caught her breath. That damn kid. That little shit.

She reheated chicken fettucine and sautéed vegetables, then let them steam in front of her, and remembered how she and Chuck used to share dinnertime. She’d make meals, even reheated ones from the prison, and mother and son would sit at the table with place mats and napkins and food in serving dishes, everything presented like she learned in cooking school. He’d ask about the prison, but she wanted to hear what happened at school. As he got older and as her exhaustion grew at the end of each day, sometimes she wouldn’t remember place mats. Sometimes she’d heat leftovers and want to watch sitcoms from the couch. Then sometimes became always.

The fettucine and vegetables stopped steaming so she returned them to the fridge, thinking that maybe Chuck would have stayed a gentle kid if she’d kept putting out place mats, if meals had remained special. Food, she thought, should always be an occasion.

On the road to the prison that night, the Buick’s heater blowing loud dry air at her, she squinted at the glare from approaching headlights and kept her left foot at the ready above the brake pedal. It wouldn’t do to die on the way to make the last meal for Doyle, that son of a bitch.

She figured she’d cooked for him before without realizing it. Guards must have brought him trays of her food from the cafeteria where the rest of the population broke bread. Now she pictured Doyle eating that cheeseburger with onion slices, the Jell-O, the french fries. She imagined him wiping his mouth while the corrections officers watched. Maybe some family would be there. A brother, his mother. Certainly his mother, who would wear bright colors — a polka-dot blouse of pink and blue, bangles and bracelets on her arms as if at a family picnic. They’d sit in the brightness of the death-row visiting room, painted white and lit by the bald glare of a 120-watt bulb. He’d have chains around the ankles of his slippered feet. A tattoo of a spider would creep up his neck from out of his shirt, the strands of web like a collar. He’d lean against the wall of cinderblocks, fold a napkin around his fries, wink, and say, “Maybe I’ll save these for tomorrow.”

Cheeseburgers. Jell-O. Fries. Not a green vegetable in the whole damn meal. That outraged her for some reason she couldn’t explain, made her move her foot away from the brake pedal and press harder on the accelerator as if she might catch Doyle crossing the road and run him down. No green vegetable. The bastard.

Stomach queasy, fists tight on the steering wheel, she remembered how Chuck had laughed at her for feeding a man who would be dead, laughed at the waste of food, but that wasn’t what bothered her. She would have made glorious food for Hank had she known she was going to lose him. She would have baked a sour cream apple pie laced with walnuts and a hint of almond; she would have mixed a cranberry chutney to spread over hickory-smoked ham; she would have set a table of crystal and china and silver, and brought sparkling mineral waters and wine and strong Dutch coffee when he finished — an unforgettable farewell of flavor and grace.

But God, she couldn’t remember. What had she fed Hank before he died? The protesters marched now in front of the chain-link gate — a line of nuns and children and grown-ups with umbrellas — who refused to budge until she honked. Cold rain pattered her as she stepped from the Buick, one hand clenching the collar of her raincoat, and she turned to watch the protesters light candles that the wind blew out, then try to light them again. A short distance away, TV crews huddled near their vans, occasionally turning their camera lights on the protesters who would then shout and wave their homemade posters: MURDER BY THE STATE IS STILL MURDER! and THOU SHALT NOT KILL! but the writing bled in the drizzle.

She had never approached the prison alone. Even on her first day of work, she joined a group of new employees who had gathered in the parking lot for orientation, and every day since then Shelly had walked through the employee gate with others, talking to the person next to her about weather, TV shows, kids. In a group, it was easy to ignore the towers, the harsh lights, the emptiness of the yard, the paranoia of a place where nobody breathed without someone else’s say-so.

At the entry door, behind a bulletproof glass shield, sat a night-shift corrections officer Shelly didn’t know, whose cold voice crackled from a speaker to demand her employee ID. She passed surveillance cameras, walked down noiseless hallways, through doors that opened with an echoing, teeth-shivering buzz, until she reached the kitchen, which glowed blue in a twilight of hazard lamps and pilot lights. No blowers rattled.

She unzipped her wet coat, shook it, then hung it over the back of her desk chair. Light through the window caught her attention. Not just the prison lights, but the TV lights that shined on the protesters, and the headlights of cars driving on Route 5, and the colorful neon of the doughnut shop. Shelly shivered and felt hungry for a plain doughnut, drowned in coffee. She flipped on the kitchen’s fluorescents, then found a new message tacked to the bulletin board, scrawled in Danny’s handwriting. “Welcome to The Last Chance Kitchen,” it read. “If the food don’t kill you, the state will.” Shelly crumpled the note and dropped it in the trash.

The Jell-O would need time to set, so she broke out a box of it, boiled water, then mixed the water in a bowl with the orange powder. She splashed in ice cubes and shoved it in the freezer. Those protesters. What did they know about the people inside these walls and whether those people should live or die? Had they ever worked beside someone like Danny? Had they ever feared someone like him? Two more swings of that bat, or an ambulance stuck in traffic, and he might have been the guy strapped to a table tonight.

In the walk-in refrigerator, she found ground beef, defrosted, and brought that back to the work counter beside Stove #2. The stupid bastard. That was the crime on this night, wasn’t it? that Doyle could pick out his last menu when so many others — decent people, kids, old people, young girls, fathers — couldn’t plan for a last taste of something salty or sweet, tart or creamy or bitter or all of those in one dazzling mouthful. She imagined Hank in the tavern that night, cracking peanuts and letting the shells drop to the foot of the barstool. Beer on his tongue, and a bump, too. Scotch. Fire for the throat after a long day on the street corralling those punks. Ah, but you had it easy, Hank. Just had to keep yourself from killing them. You never sat beside them in the break room. Never cooked for them. Could you have done that? Could you talk nice to a girl who made a cat toy out of your son? Could you live with Chuck, knowing that when he smashed that other boy’s car, the boy was in it, arms across his face to shield against the shattering glass?

Would you cook for your son?

Those girls. Those poor, frightened girls.

Shelly sliced the onions. She turned the knob on the grill to 275. Then, with kitchen scissors, she snipped a sheet of aluminum foil into bits. Like confetti for a party.

We do what we’ve got to do, Hank. We do what we’ve got to do.

Shelly swept the shredded foil from the counter into her hand, then littered the meat with it, rolled and slapped it into a patty filled with so many shining reminders that Bobby Doyle would get some in every bite, or spend his last hours picking it out.

Maybe she’d lose her job. Maybe he’d squeal that someone had messed with his cheeseburger. This worried her a moment, but then she remembered what Danny had said about the knife wound and the sock and Doyle not wanting anyone to think that they could get to him, that he was weak. The burger sizzled on the grill, and when she flipped it the foil had burned black and greasy.

When all was ready, she placed the hot foods in the portable warmer, and set the Jell-O in a little cooler. She phoned for a corrections officer, and a stocky young fellow arrived a few minutes later. “Some night, ain’t it?” he said as he leaned over the hot pot, pushing it out the door.

“It’s awful quiet for a place where so much is going on,” she said. “Makes me want to sing just to hear a human voice.”

“You do that,” he said. “Could use a song myself.”

As he headed down the hallway, she tried to find a tune, but nothing came to mind. She listened instead to the shudder as the hot pot wheels rolled.

When she arrived home — late, having stopped for gasoline and cigarettes — the house was dark, not even a porch light, so she figured Chuck was already asleep. At the front door, as she searched her key ring, she flinched at the sound of breathing and the creak of the porch swing.

“Hey, Mom,” Chuck said.

Through the dark, she could just make out Chuck on the swing and someone else beside him.

“You could’ve said something earlier,” she said.

“Could’ve,” Chuck said. “Would’ve scared you no matter what.”

“Who’s that with you?”

“Tina.”

“Hey, Mrs. Wolansky.”

Shelly waved and went inside. With measured steps, she walked to every room — even Chuck’s — and turned on every light in the house before closing her bedroom door. She opened a window, though it let the cold in, and placed an ashtray on the sill. She smoked one cigarette, then another, waiting for a phone call or a knock at the door, but nothing broke the silence. She undressed, put on a flannel nightgown, then slipped between the sheets and shivered.

A few hours later, still long before dawn, Chuck dropped his duffel bag into the Buick’s trunk and sat in the back seat. He carried his “maim” mask, which had been in his hands since he left his room that morning.

“So, is he dead?” Chuck asked, pulling the mask over his face. Looking in the rearview mirror, Shelly read “MIAM.”

“I suppose. I thought we’d pick up a newspaper to find out.”

They stopped at the doughnut shop on Route 5. While the woman behind the counter worked hard to look at her register and nowhere else, Chuck, in his mask, ordered three chocolate frosteds and a pint of chocolate milk. Shelly ordered a plain doughnut and a cup of coffee, regular. With the change on her bill, she bought a newspaper from the box out front, its headline heavy and black: DOYLE DIES.

There on the sidewalk, she read by neon light how he lay on the table, headphones over his ears and a portable CD player attached to his belt. He would not look at the mirrored panel behind which the witnesses sat: the uncle of the girls, the prison warden, two reporters, and the prosecuting attorney who tried him. He was listening, the report said, to Pink Floyd when he died: “The Great Gig in the Sky.”

“He didn’t eat much,” the warden was quoted as saying. “Just a few french fries. A bit of a cheeseburger.”

Shelly stood, silent for a moment, not reading, not thinking, surprised that she felt sorry for Doyle, surprised at her grief and regret. She inhaled quickly, by reflex, then remembered that Chuck waited inside, that she had also ordered a doughnut and coffee. The food seemed more than she could stomach.

Inside, Chuck sat in a booth, the mask off his face now and set on the table. He had eaten a doughnut and a half. “So?” he said.

“He’s dead.” She sat across from him on the cracked red vinyl.

“And he ate your food? Man, you’re just about famous, huh?”

“Chuck, leave it alone.” She wiped her eyes.

“Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong.” She turned to face the fluorescent lights, then to the racks of doughnuts behind the counter. Finally, she stared out the plate window at the prison across the highway, at the search lights, the fencing, the concrete. A monster of a building filled with monsters. Danny. Doyle. The worst kind of people. She wanted to close her eyes, but the prison filled the window frame, demanding that she look, that she see. The worst kind of people.

“What’s wrong is you used to be such a nice kid, you know, and I worry about you now. I do. Geez, I hate crying.”

“So stop.”

“I had a hard night, OK? Do me this favor. Scratch that word off your mask. Shake hands with the other team. It’s hard enough making meals for all those punks in jail. I can’t make them for punks at home, too.”

He started to laugh.

“I’m not kidding.” The words choked out of her. “You wear that mask again, you can eat junk food the rest of your life. Eat salty chips until your insides dehydrate, I don’t care.”

“Like you ever cook for me anyway.” He chomped on a doughnut, chocolate smearing the cusps of his frown, that frown he wore to play the dangerous man. He was no such thing, she thought. He wasn’t even in his mother’s league.

She slapped him, so fast, so hard he dropped the doughnut. The frosted side stuck to the floor.

“That’s exactly who I cook for,” she said, her palm stinging. “For the last three years, every day of the week in that god-awful place cooking. For who else? Rapists? Murderers? Grow up, Chuck. I’ve cooked for you.”

Other customers stopped talking, and Shelly knew they stared, worrying they might have to get involved. The bell on the door jingled as a couple of day-shift corrections officers arrived for their morning treat and waved at Shelly, but she ignored them. Chuck shifted nearer the wall, away from her.

She saw how the mark of her hand blotched his pale cheek. Just that quick she could turn on him. Just that quick she could hurt him. Lord help her. She remembered Hank’s face, remembered those moments when his eyes revealed and held back such fury, and now she wanted to kiss each eye in gratitude because she understood, she knew, the rage and violence Hank had smothered.

When Chuck lifted his face he looked scared and angry, and Shelly wanted above all else that he would turn out more his father’s son than his mother’s, that he would learn to put down the stick and to sheath the knife. She stood, hand in purse feeling for car keys, but Chuck stayed seated, fingers at a loss, twisting the bottom of his game-day tie.