Chapter 27: What a Bed Costs
People assume a halfway house is free.
It is not free. It has a fee schedule, and the fee schedule is on the corkboard by the office door.
Program fee: one hundred and twenty-eight dollars a week, due Friday before six.
If you are not working you still owe it. It accrues.
Ms. Prine calls that arrears and posts the names every Monday.
Mandatory savings: twenty-five per cent of net wages into a house account you cannot draw on until discharge.
You do not hold the passbook. The house holds it.
You get a printed statement on the first of the month with a running total at the bottom.
I earned thirteen dollars twenty-five an hour at twenty-six hours a week.
Three hundred and forty-four fifty gross. After withholding, three hundred and five and change.
One hundred and twenty-eight to the house. Seventy-six twenty-five to savings.
That left one hundred dollars and seventy-five cents a week to be a person with.
I kept it in a composition notebook that cost a dollar twenty-nine. Ruled, seventy pages, marbled cover.
I ruled my own columns with the edge of my locker key, because there was no ruler in the building.
DATE. IN. OUT. WHAT FOR. BALANCE.
I still have that notebook. It is the only document from that year I kept on purpose.
Here is what came out of the hundred and seventy-five.
Bus. Lunch. Laundry, a dollar fifty to wash and a dollar fifty to dry, coin machines in the basement.
My room's days were Tuesday and Saturday.
Soap, toothpaste, deodorant, tampons. A four-pack of underwear for six ninety-nine.
Shoes, once, which is its own chapter.
Supervision fee to the state, thirty-five a month.
Restitution, seventy-five a month, taken before I ever saw the money.
Applied against a balance of eighteen thousand four hundred dollars.
That is the one number I never wrote in the notebook. I could say it in my sleep.
At seventy-five a month it comes to twenty years and five months.
I did that sum once, in the second week, and then I stopped doing it.
A bed at Cranmore is a bottom bunk with a three-inch mattress in a zippered plastic cover that squeaks.
You get one locker. Twelve by eighteen by twenty-four inches.
You get one shelf of the bathroom cabinet, marked with tape and your last name in marker.
You may not use an outside padlock.
You buy the house padlock for six dollars fifty, they keep a duplicate key, and you sign for both facts on one line.
I bought mine in the second week.
It was the first object I had owned outright since I was twenty-four.
It came in a blister pack, and we were not allowed scissors.
I worked a corner loose against the edge of the stair rail for eleven minutes until it tore.
Then I stood there holding a padlock and two keys, one of which I had to hand to Ms. Prine.
Meals are breakfast and dinner, served off two folding tables in the front room. Lunch is yours.
Breakfast is cereal in a dispenser, bread, margarine, and coffee in an urn switched off at nine.
Dinner runs on a two-week cycle.
Thursday is chicken thighs and rice, and I ate every Thursday like a person with a plan.
I made lunch in the kitchen between 6:10 and 6:25, the window when the counter is free.
Two slices of bread, one slice of cheese, in a bag I reused until it went cloudy.
Forty-one cents a day at the prices that month.
Nobody at Cranmore was cruel about money. Everybody was exact about it.
You knew who had a Friday problem, because the name went up Monday and people read it walking past.
There were eight of us and one bathroom and a sheet on the door with fifteen-minute blocks.
I had 6:25 to 6:40. That is a good slot.
Yaz had 5:40, hated it, and traded it twice for cigarettes, which are contraband, which is how I learned they were.
The phone is a wall unit in the hall with a fifteen-minute limit and a sign-up sheet on a clipboard.
I did not sign the phone sheet once in four months.
There was no number I wanted to dial. That is not sadness. That is a fact about a list of numbers.
On the first of the month my savings statement came folded once, in an envelope with a window.
Four weeks in the house. Three hundred and five dollars in the account. No interest.
At that rate I would leave the programme with just under two thousand dollars and a felony conviction.
I wrote the figure at the bottom of the page and drew a line under it with the locker key.
Then I turned to a clean page, because the next thing in the ledger was the bus.