At the Pump’n’Jump, my mind was full. Alejandro’s breath in my ear and his hands shoving my jeans down. Dayly’s frightened eyes behind the gun that wavered in front of my face. The crunching, shuddering halting of the car against the traffic light pole. I absently served customers and let these things cycle through my brain, anything but Jamie and Henry and Sasha, the breaking up of my son’s family, the plunge into icy, turbulent waters. I thought about the plumber, Ramirez, at the hoarder house in San Chinto. What had Officer Lemon been doing inside the house while the plumber came out to speak to me? Why hadn’t he heard us talking? Was it his house, or the house of a relative or friend? I hadn’t had any experience with hoarding during my time as a doctor. I’d heard horror stories from other paediatricians of children from such places coming in with rat bites, malnourishment, bedsores from sleeping on filthy, bare mattresses for months on end. Lemon had seemed like a regular, stand-up cop. He’d looked and smelled good as he leaned over me in the dented Gangstermobile.
At ten o’clock I started cleaning the drinks fridges, restless and bored. Plenty of questions, no answers. I thought about Lemon’s messages to Dayly.
Are we on track?
A week left, maybe less.
Where are you?
Where are you?
Where are you?
A pair of long-haired, guffawing teenage boys used the distraction that the drinks fridge was providing me to pour themselves a mega blue slushie and slip one of their own hairs into it. They feigned horror and disgust, threatened to post a picture of the contaminated drink to Instagram. I let them have the slushie, as I had three months earlier, and a few months before that. They were obviously too stoned to realise they had played the gag on me before, or perhaps they did it so often they couldn’t keep track of their hits.
At eleven, my phone dinged. It was Ada.
You’re not at your house. Are you at that shitbox gas station where you work?
I texted back. Yes, I’m here. Is everything okay?
I’m coming by.
I knew there was no point in asking Ada to explain herself. I exhaled and texted Sneak.
Can you come to the Pump’n’Jump now? Ada’s on her way here and I don’t want to be alone with her.
Sneak was a couple of minutes in answering.
Why?
WHY? I shook my head, bewildered. Because Macaroni, that’s why!
I had been sharing a dorm room with Sneak, Ada and thirty other women when the Happy Valley Macaroni Incident occurred. An inmate named Nelly Raddlett, new to the prison, had been loudly professing how thoroughly she had enjoyed the evening’s macaroni dinner to a group of girls in front of the television set, where Ada was trying to watch a rerun of The Sopranos. Raddlett pronounced the word mac-uh-ron-nee, not mac-uh-row-nee. The mispronunciation had so irritated Ada that by the fourth or fifth repetition, Ada had stood up, walked to the front of the room and told Raddlett that if she mispronounced macaroni one more time, she was going to take a belt from the nearest guard and beat her with it.
I’d watched on from my bunk, curious to see if Raddlett was stupid or bold enough to mispronounce the word again, or if indeed Ada had the kind of clout in the prison to obtain a belt from a guard for the purposes of beating another inmate with it.
Both happened.
Thirty-one women and two guards stood idly by that night while Ada Maverick beat Nelly Raddlett for two solid minutes with a doubled-up leather belt over the mispronunciation of a type of pasta.
No, I mean why is she coming? Sneak asked.
Just get your ass here, I texted.