Leah shook her head. “No. We’ve been doing really well. We’ve got our routine now. And he’s getting really good about talking through his bad days instead of shutting down. It’s just that…until he’s home, a little part of me will always be waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Alexis nodded. “That’s understandable. But you’re almost halfway there now, right?”
“Well, we’re hoping he’s going to be eligible for good time served. If he is, that means we’ve already passed the halfway mark.”
“Wait, what do you mean? What’s good time served?”
“Basically it’s a sentence reduction for good behavior. He has to serve a minimum of eighty percent of his sentence, but if he reaches that without incident, they can decide to let him out.”
“So then he’d be getting out in…” Alexis pursed her lips, trying to do the math.
“Seven more months.”
“Oh my God, Leah, that’s great!”
Leah nodded. “I’m trying not to get my hopes up. We’ll see.”
Alexis smiled up at the waiter as he brought Leah’s third glass of wine to the table. “So you get to see him every other Saturday?”
“Usually. I switch off with Catherine and Jake, but sometimes I have to go every third Saturday if his mother and sister want to rotate in.”
“Okay, because I’ve been meaning to ask you, I have a few things for him. Some books and magazines. Can I give those to you to bring, or should I send them?”
“Send them,” she said. “They have to pass inspection before he can have them. I’m not allowed to bring anything into the facility when I go.”
“Inspection?” Alexis asked, taking a bite of her pasta. “What, like someone could hide a shiv in a magazine?”
Leah laughed. “No, it’s more for content. They can’t have anything R-rated or pornographic.”
“Oh,” Alexis said with a nod of her head. “Bummer.” Leah smirked as she added, “No porn, though. It’s some stuff your brother picked out. A bunch of automotive magazines. I have no idea if they’re the ones he reads or not.”
“If it’s car stuff, he’ll love it,” Leah said. “Honestly, he’ll pretty much read anything now. My dad sent him some book on US history a few weeks ago and he read it cover to cover. I keep telling him it’s a pity he had to be incarcerated in order to become a good English student.”
Alexis laughed loudly, cupping her hand over her mouth when the people at the next table looked in her direction, and Leah laughed too, feeling momentarily carefree.
“Thank you,” Leah said suddenly, and Alexis’s expression softened as she looked across the table at her.
“You’re welcome.”
They finished their meal, and as they hugged their good-byes in the parking lot of the restaurant, Leah had never felt closer to her.
As soon as she was inside her car, she rummaged through her purse and pulled out her phone before hitting the speed dial for Catherine.
After a few rings, her soft, raspy voice came through the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hi, it’s me,” Leah said as she started the car.
“Hi, sweetheart. How are you doing today?”
“I’m good. About a six today. You?”
“Hmm,” she hummed. “Maybe a five.”
“You should have a few glasses of wine,” Leah suggested. “That’s always good to add a point or two.”
Catherine chuckled.
They spoke on the phone two or three times a week, and early on they’d come up with the number system to let each other know what kind of day they were having. Ten meant they were feeling great, and one was total meltdown.
“What time will you be here on Saturday?” Catherine asked.
“Probably around four or five? Depends on if they’re running things on time over there,” she said, pulling out of her parking space. It had become an unspoken tradition that after visiting Danny on her Saturdays, Leah would stop off at Catherine’s on the way home and have dinner with her.
“Okay. How does eggplant rollantini sound for dinner?”
“Delicious,” she said, “but you know you don’t have to cook for me.”
“Leah, old Italian ladies live to feed people. Don’t take that away from me.”
She laughed as she merged onto the highway. “Okay, you win.”
“Alright sweetheart. I don’t want you to get a ticket for being on the phone with me while you’re driving. Thank you for checking in, and I’ll see you Saturday.”
“Okay. Call me before then if you drop below a five.”
“I will. Bye now.”
“Bye,” Leah said before she cleared the screen, tossing the phone onto her passenger seat.
And then she reached to turn the radio off, allowing the silence to fill the car.
For whatever reason she just felt like thinking today.
She spent so much of her time avoiding it; her life had become heavily rooted in routine over the last few months, and she rarely allowed herself a reprieve from that. Consistency was comforting these days; she needed it like she needed air.
But even the routines that she took solace in were carried out with an air of detachment. It was like when she used to run on the treadmill for conditioning during field hockey season; whenever Leah would look down at the display and realize she still had a ways to go, she would try to separate her mind from her body, pretending it wasn’t her feeling the pain in her legs, the ache in her side, the burning in her throat. And that’s what most of her days were like now: disengaging herself from really feeling anything until the clock on the display ticked down to zero.
Until he was next to her again.
One thing she had going for her was her profession. There was no way she could mope or succumb to any kind of sadness when she had one hundred different personalities in and out of her room all day, with a hundred different questions and a hundred different needs. She had always loved her job, but now she let teaching absolutely consume her. She had to.
Robyn and Holly had been wonderful, of course. Always finding a way to check in or include her, always acting like everything was normal around her, just like she’d asked them to.
But despite all that, Leah knew she was just going through the motions. That every smile and every laugh came with some level of fraudulence. There were little blips of happiness for her, but she knew she wouldn’t feel wholly content with anything in her life until he was home.
And every night, without fail, she cried.
It wasn’t even a conscious thing anymore, and she barely felt anything when she did. Like everything else, it had just become routine for her, like breathing or blinking. She would lie in bed, and as if on cue, the tears would come, trickling down her cheeks without warning, without permission, without feeling, as if she were literally leaking the sadness away.
The sound of her phone ringing on the passenger seat pulled her from her thoughts, and she sighed in relief, deciding she’d had enough thinking for one day. Leah reached to turn the radio back on before she swiped her phone off the passenger seat and brought it to her ear.
“Hello?”
“What the hell did you do to your car this time?”
Leah smiled. “Hey, Jake. And I didn’t do anything, I swear. It just started doing it on its own.”
“Well, I’m in your neck of the woods. You want me to swing by and check it out?”
“Yeah, if you don’t mind. I’m not home right now, but I’ll be there in like ten minutes.”
“Alright. Is it doing it right now?”
“Not really. It only does it at high speeds. It’s like this wobbly-shake thing.”
“Wobbly-shake,” he repeated. “Thanks. Your technical terminology will make this much easier for me to figure out.”
“You’re an idiot.”
He laughed loudly before he said, “See you in a few.”
“Bye,” Leah said with a laugh before she ended the call.
By the time she pulled into her development, Jake was parked in the space next to hers, leaning against his bumper with his arms crossed over his chest.
“Hey,” Leah said as she got out of the car, and he walked over to her, giving her a hug and a kiss on the cheek.