Chapter 3: The Collarbone
I crouched.
I put the clear plastic bag down on the tarmac, square, folded top facing me.
I did it for a practical reason. My license was in that bag, and eleven dollars, and it was the whole of what I owned.
There was grit under my knee. I remember the grit.
I stood up.
Six years in that place teaches you one thing about distance. The fight starts before anybody moves.
It starts when one person changes where her feet are.
I changed where my feet were.
I took a full fist of her coat at the collarbone.
Not the throat.
I want that on the record, because a version went around in which it was the throat. That version came from a woman standing eleven feet away who could not have seen my hand.
The collarbone. Wool, lapel, the shirt under it, gathered up into my right hand until my knuckles were against the bone.
I walked her backward two steps into the car door.
Two steps, because that was the distance. The door held her up. It made the sound a car door makes.
I did not strike her.
I have gone over this more times than I can say, and I did not strike her, and the reason is not that I am better than that. In a housing unit you learn what a closed hand costs and what an open hand costs. The price is written on the inside of your eyelids by year two.
Her hands came up open, palms out, which is what people do when they have never done this.
The keys fell. I heard them hit and slide.
Her face did not do fear the way I expected. It did surprise, and then it did something worse, which was the look of a person deciding who she was going to tell.
I lifted my left hand.
I took her left wrist. Not hard. I did not need hard. Her arm came up like it was on a string. I held it between our two faces, at the height of my chin.
The bangle slid down her forearm and stopped.
Gold, thin, no clasp, the flat place on the underside.
“That was my mother's,” I said.
Four words.
I have made a lot of long arguments since then. Written ones, with exhibits and tabs. That is the only sentence I ever said that did exactly what I wanted it to do.
She said, “Cass.”
I said nothing.
She said, “Renata gave it to me.”
That was the first true thing anyone said to me outside the fence, and it cost her something, and I do not think she knew that when she said it.
My aunt Renata had a key to the house on Pell Street. She had it because I gave it to her at twenty-four, three days before I stood up in Courtroom 4, so somebody could water the plants.
I held the wrist eleven seconds. I know it was eleven because I counted.
Then I let go of the wrist.
Then I let go of the coat.
In that order, and slowly, because letting go fast reads as a wind-up. She stayed against the door a second after I stopped holding her there.
Her coat was ruined at the shoulder. Wool takes a fist and keeps it. There was a fan of creases across the front that no steamer was ever going to lift.
She put her hand to the collar and pressed it flat, twice, like smoothing a bedspread.
“You're on parole,” she said.
“Yes.”
“They can send you back for this.”
“Yes.”
“Then what are you doing.”
I looked at the officer by the second car. He had turned so his body faced us and his chin was down. He had watched all of it. He did not move.
I learned later his name was Halbert, that he had eleven months to his own retirement, and that he wrote nothing.
“I'm not getting in the car,” I said.
“Don't be stupid. It's twenty-two miles.”
“I know how far it is.”
The keys lay near the front tire, splayed out, the brass tag face up.
I looked at them about as long as it takes to read a short sentence.
There is a version of that morning where I bend down and pick them up.
In that version I drive twenty-two miles to Pell Street with my cousin beside me, and I sign a couple of things, and it takes ten minutes, and I am signing things in that house still.
I know what I am. I am a woman who signed the papers.
I bent down and picked up my plastic bag instead.
Grit came up on my palm and I wiped it on my thigh.
“Cass,” she said. “Cass, come on. Cass.”
I let go of her coat and I did not pick up the keys, and those are two separate facts, and I have never been sorry about either.