The bus dropped me off in downtown Merionta, and even though I’d decided to splurge on a ride-share the rest of the way home, I wasn’t in a hurry. After ten years away, involuntarily, I figured I might as well see what had been happening in town. Maybe I’d run into someone I’d known, back then, when we we’d graduated from high school and spent lazy summer afternoons on the pebbly banks of the creek or climbing on the sharp rocks above the trail. Maybe I’d even run into Janelle.
I was expecting more empty shop windows, maybe a building burned down for the insurance money. That was a local industry, second only to filing dubious disability claims. I didn’t think there’d be panhandlers in Merionta, not even now. We may be poor, but we’re not going to beg from each other. The taxpayers, well, that’s another matter. They live in places with high glossy buildings and fancy supermarkets we would never be able to shop at, and we figure they have a little disposable income to help their fellow citizens in the mountains far away from all the jobs. I’d heard my attorney on the phone with his wife discussing where they’d go to dinner that night, and it wasn’t going to be the mess hall where I ate mystery meat and overcooked industrial-vat vegetables that all tasted the same. I overheard they were going to a “Wee-gur” restaurant, whatever that was. It didn’t sound too good.
“Sorry about that,” he’d smile at me with great white teeth after putting down his cell phone. “The wife, you know.”
No, I didn’t know. I knew I was facing a hanging judge and a hanging DC jury, and Janelle had already broken up with me after turning me into the authorities. My next cellmate was likely to make me HIS wife.
Jason wasn’t a public attorney—I was spared that thanks to a group of well-meaning lovers of liberty whose donations went to our common defense fund. But Jason wasn’t a believer, just a junior member of the middle-range law firm who had passed the DC bar and wore a nice suit that nobody in Merionta could ever have worn, even at a funeral.
Now that I was back in Merionta, I looked hard for any signs of change. The cornerstone of the dusty red brick bank building still said 1908. Off the main street was a real nice row of brownstones. I sidled by. They looked occupied, at least there was no for sale/rent signs to be seen. That was progress, although you wondered where the folks occupying them had bothered to come from. Otherwise everything looked pretty much the same. Sleepy in the mid-afternoon of a humid summer weekday. A few tourists might wander around on a weekend, checking out the used furniture store in search of undiscovered treasures.
I walked into the diner, gambling on an off hour to stay anonymous.
“Are you Nena’s boy?” The middle-aged man behind the counter looked familiar. Nena was my mom. Grandma is her mom. Later I recognized him as the ticket taker from the movie theater when I was in high school.
“Yes,” I said. A shadow must have crossed my face. Mom died a few years ago, but by the time she knew she was dying she couldn’t come visit me in Pennsylvania.
“My sympathies. They just let you out now?”
“Yeah.”
“Lordy. Have something good to eat. On the house.”
“That’s real kind of you.” I had about $50 to my name so meant it sincerely.
“Not just because you’re Nena’s boy. But for what you did for the country.”
At that point, I couldn’t help myself. I began to bawl. Some hero. Nobody had called me a hero. They had called me an insurrectionist, a deplorable, a MAGA Maggot, a white supremacist, a Q-non type, or whatever that was. The guards in the DC jail abused us without let-up. They just used bigger words in the courtroom.
Jason basically called me a loser, in an attempt to win mercy. “Underprivileged, uneducated, misled by those smarter than himself,” he had implored the sneering jury and judge. I was angrier at Jason than at the Washington types. But they were all doing their jobs, which was to convict me and in Jason’s case, shave a year off the sentence. “If you hadn’t hit the policeman with the pole…” the lawyers who replaced Jason would always say sorrowfully in our occasional phone conversations. But I knew in the that hardened criminals in the cities were killing ordinary citizens with no real punishment, or just probation. I’d just picked the wrong riot.
The counterman joined me in the booth, handing me some napkins to dry my eyes. “It’s been a tough time for you, hasn’t it, buddy?” A heaping plate of steak, eggs, and hash browns materialized.
My first real meal in over ten years. Dave waited patiently while I ate. As he collected the plate, he asked for my autograph. Then the police officer came in. I flinched. Dave got up and seated him a good distance from me, but the police officer did give me a good hard look as he passed by. He must have known who I was, but I didn’t recognize him. Maybe he came from somewhere else.
“I’ll give you a ride to your grandma’s place,” Dave offered. “It’ll be quiet here for another hour.” I gratefully accepted. I hoped Grandma would let me drive her car back and forth to Merionta, where they’d found me a job cleaning the city offices. That’s what an AA in legal studies I earned in prison got me, plus a little resentment.
When he dropped me off at the foot of the gravel driveway, I took a moment to gaze on the house. When I’d last seen it, the FBI guys had hustled me out of the house before dawn, on a winter morning, and only my mother’s yelling reluctantly convinced them to allow me to go and put on some warmer clothes. “They wanted to humiliate you, to drag you off in your jammies,” my mother said in a phone call. “Freezing to death.”
The grayed house needed painting, bad. I figured I could do that now that I was home. The Trump sign that an FBI agent had yanked out of the hard ground angrily was long gone. But little bedraggled American flags, the kind they give out fresh at the July Fourth parade, lined the grassy strip next to the porch. We would collect a new one at each parade and each campaign event, ever since I was a boy.
My grandma appeared on the porch, a little shorter than before, a little stooped. She was wearing lavender slacks and a matching top, maybe in honor of my return. “Nathan, honey,” she said. I stopped staring, went up to hug her, and she gave me a good tight hug as well. I almost expected Grandma to say, “your mom went into town to the Wal-Mart, she’ll be back soon.” Something was missing in the air.
I told her about Dave’s kindness, and she nodded. “They’re good people.” She was relieved that I had a job, which was a condition for parole, and she said, “Just be glad they let you out. It’s honest work.”
As the weeks and months passed, life fell into a routine. That was ok. Better home routines than prison routines. I was glad I could give Grandma money, because she was hard up with just Social Security to rely on and I would put gas into the old Chevy. I couldn’t believe how expensive gas was nowadays. But you couldn’t live in Merionta and not drive. You just spent less on other things. Some Sundays I accompanied Grandma to church, but I was the youngest by far in the little meeting house. The parole officer was pleased, except she said, “don’t take it too far.”
I bought a used iphone on credit, never forgetting how the last one had gotten me into trouble. I managed to paint the house on fall weekends and I ran errands for Grandma in Merionta after work. We celebrated a decent quiet Christmas. I gave her a fancy heating pad, because she said, “everything hurts all the time. A little heat helps while I’m watching TV.” She gave me nice soft socks and new jeans and sweatshirts, which I appreciated. The musty clothes left in my bedroom mostly fit a scrawny teenager, not the man who had filled out on carb-laden prison food.
All the guys I’d hung out with in high school had moved away from Merionta, or were married with kids and busy. I was shy about contacting them, and usually they didn’t return my texts. Maybe it wasn’t personal. The guys with whom I’d gone to Washington were off limits, even though most of them had been released years ago. They had just been convicted of “parading,” which means going to Congress when you are foolish enough to think you can just walk into the People’s House without money to hand to a politician. I sometimes saw them at the Wal-Mart and the hardware store and we said a quick hi, but no more.
But of course I thought about Janelle.
“She’s still around,” Grandma said with contempt. “After she betrayed you, and got some cachet, she married the deputy sheriff. They’re divorced now.” She said Janelle had been featured in the Roanoke paper as a heroine for Democracy, whatever that was nowadays. I found the article online, and she just looked small and scared to me, flanked by two lawyers.
My heart leapt. “Does she have any kids?”
“A little girl that died. And don’t you go near her. Right back to jail you’d go.”
Yes, I knew Janelle had a protection order against me. The authorities were afraid I’d take revenge. We’d had a fight a few weeks before the protest about the election. She didn’t think there had been fraud, but she wasn’t interested in hearing more. “It’s far away,” she said. “What difference does it make to people like us?”
At this point, all the anger having shriveled and died off, I just wanted to ask, “why did you do it?”
But I also wondered whether she still had her slender figure and whether those long brown curls had been cut. I was now 30 years old, had done without women for a decade, and while the Chinese girls in the massage parlor on the outskirts of Merionta were perfectly hospitable, I didn’t need to be a good Christian to know this wasn’t a healthful way to live. Just as I had avoided bad people and kept busy in prison, I wanted to do the right thing outside as well. But not many women, even around here, were eager to date a mop-wielding parolee and the AA degree just emphasized that I was weird. Looking in the mirror, though, I still thought I was pretty good looking, at least no worse than any other guy my age and trimmer thanks to the prison gym. A few faded acne scars. I’d cut my hair and grown a short brown beard.
“I just want to talk to her again. No harm intended.”
“Find another girl,” my grandmother warned me darkly. “Hand me that heating pad, would you, Nathan?”
One night I dreamt I was lying on the bluff above the river, just as it was the summer after we graduated, and she came out of the woods wearing a cut-off T-shirt and her ripped jeans, and sat next to me, not saying anything, just smiling into the sun. Then I woke up.
But Merionta’s a small town and everyone runs into each other eventually. When I got the call from Dave on a blustery April afternoon, I wasted no time but jumped in the car and drove downtown. And there she was, sitting in a booth eating a chicken salad sandwich with one hand while holding her phone with the other. She didn’t even notice me coming down the aisle until I’d sat down opposite her. I had recognized her instantly.
She stared at me in shock. She must have known I was coming home, but not expected I’d approach her this frankly. I figured that in this public place, in a diner booth, she wouldn’t feel scared.
Ten years of daydreaming on a cot, mixed with anger, tends to exaggerate your remembrances. Sometimes Janelle was a centerfold type with luscious brown curls cascading down her back, and enticing brown eyes, like a harem girl’s. Sometimes she was a dark-eyed demon hissing “go away” at me, with a phalanx of policemen guarding her. Sometimes she had no features at all; she was just a filmy ghostly presence, waiting for me.
But in reality, she looked a lot more ordinary. Her hair was shoulder length, but not fussy. Her nails were clean but not painted. She wasn’t wearing makeup, not that I could tell. My heart leaping, I read this as “she’s got nobody to do this for.”
She started to rise from the booth, saying, “I’m gonna call…”
“No, don’t. I’m not going to hurt you or cause a scene. I just want to know something….”
She sat back down, heavily, as if she’d known for years this moment would come and the only detail left was ‘when.’
“Why did you do it?”
“I couldn’t wait for you to come back from jail. Ron said he’d raise the baby as his own. He kept his word.”
“Baby?” Now it was my turn to stare in shock. That was a different answer than I’d expected.
“I was pregnant. You were in jail and I knew you weren’t coming back anytime soon. They came and threatened me. They said if I didn’t testify, they’d make sure Uncle Will never got out of jail.” I had gone up to Washington with Janelle’s uncle, and he ended up serving three months in minimum security. He’d passed while I was in jail.
“Baby…is that the baby which passed?” I asked.
“No, that was the baby with Ronnie. She got hit by a car outside the preschool. We sued and got money, but that was the end of our marriage. Our baby is fine. She’s playing softball at the park with the grade school team and I’m going to pick her up in a few minutes. She turned ten last month.”
“I had no idea…” I whispered. “Did you never tell her about me?”
“No,” said Janelle firmly. “Ronnie has been a good dad to her, even if we’re no longer together. But he got remarried and lives in Abington….and well, he hasn’t been seeing her that much.”
“What’s her name?” And, I was going to beg, can I see her? Can we walk over to the park together? Can I see a photo?
“Kaylee Elizabeth Vickers.”
Janelle wiped a tear from her eye. “I’m sorry, Nathan. I’ve been sorry all these years. But I couldn’t write to you. Not when I was married to Ronnie. I prayed to God for forgiveness. I said, maybe Nathan will come back, and he won’t be angry, because you were always a calm sort, and then I can tell him the truth. If you’d been vengeful, I couldn’t have admitted anything.”
“It hurts, doesn’t it?” I said.
“Losing Maggie—the baby—not being able to tell Kaylee the truth, although I would have someday. Every day thinking of how I had betrayed you. I still think you were in the wrong, but they screwed you over because you were on the wrong side, the side that wasn’t connected.”
How different everything was now, compared with only yesterday. In some ways, I’d suffered less than she had. My mom wasn’t worth more than Janelle’s little daughter who was hit by the car. Divorce is never easy. All the guys around me in prison whose wives had divorced them said it was like a sucker punch that never quite went away, unless they’d been ready to move on anyway. That was a different story, but also sad.
“I’ve got to go to the park and get Kaylee,” said Janelle, standing up abruptly.
“Wait, can I come with you?” The past ten years had not been a total waste. Even though I hadn’t even known about her, I had a daughter who was growing up. “Can I see a picture?”
“No, I don’t want a scene. You’ll meet her, just not today.”
“Is she…a good kid?”
Janelle turned around and smiled at me with big teeth. “She’s a great kid! And she looks a little like you.” I noticed that while she was no longer slender, she had filled out too, just like me, except she was a lot curvier.
“Can I take you to a movie on Saturday night?”
Janelle said, “We’ll meet you here at 6 o’clock a week from Saturday. I have something else going on this weekend. Just tell me you’re done with the political stuff.”
“I’m done with the political stuff. I’ve given up on that.” There wasn’t any more freedom movement anymore anyway—the Washington types had snuffed it out. Who would I even ask about it now?
I could have told her about all the injustice I’d suffered and witnessed, and heard about in jail. But she didn’t want to know. Grandma didn’t want to hear. Nobody cared, and if they did care, it was because they weren’t on your side. It was time to package up that sad little reality like a little porcelain statue you were given for graduation and put it in a box in the attic and forget it. It was the price I was willing to pay for a normal life with a normal woman and family.
I stared at the table for a few minutes, to give Janelle time to get away without me seeming in pursuit. I ordered soda and a chicken salad sandwich too, with fries. As I sipped the soda, the realization dawned on me that Grandma must have known Janelle had had our baby, but had refused to tell me. But that was an issue for another day. It was trivial against all the other good things that had happened to me today.
Dave bent down, smiling at me as he placed the place on the table. “Everything’s going to be better from now on, I can tell.”
The sandwich was very tasty.
“Everything Always Hurts” first appeared in the 2024 Virginia Writers Journal, which can be purchased on Amazon. Paula Weiss is also the Journal’s nonfiction editor.