Chapter 31: Conditions of Supervision
The district office is room 210 on Aubrey Street, second floor.
Reporting is the first Wednesday of the month, walk-in, eight to eleven.
You take a number from a dispenser bolted to the wall. Mine was 41. They were on 26.
There are nineteen plastic chairs and a television bracketed near the ceiling playing a channel with no sound.
The captions run four seconds behind the picture, which nobody but me seemed to find annoying.
My officer was Brandt. Late forties, short grey hair, a desk with three trays and nothing on the walls.
He had a caseload of ninety-one. He told me that in the first minute of our first meeting, not as a complaint. As a fact I would need.
The conditions of supervision are one sheet, printed both sides, nineteen numbered paragraphs.
I had signed it at release, in a room with fourteen other people, in under ninety seconds.
I had not read it then. I read it that Wednesday in chair eleven while the numbers went from 26 to 41.
Condition four: maintain lawful employment and report any change within seventy-two hours.
Condition six: reside at an approved address and report any change within twenty-four hours.
Condition nine: submit to search of person, residence, vehicle, and property upon reasonable suspicion.
Condition eleven: no contact, direct or indirect, with the victim's family.
Condition fourteen: pay supervision fees of thirty-five dollars monthly and restitution as ordered.
Condition seventeen: do not leave the county without written permission.
Condition eleven is the one people ask me about.
It is a standard term. It exists to protect the family, and I have never once thought it unjust.
It also meant that for six years I had six letters in a box and no lawful way to answer them. I want that fact where it belongs, in a list of conditions.
At 9:40 they called 41.
Brandt had my file open. It is a manila folder with a two-hole fastener at the top and my name on the tab in marker.
He said, “Address.”
I said, “Cranmore House, forty-two Sedge Road.”
He turned a page. He said, “I have you at 118 Delham Street.”
There it was.
I could have said the placement was late, or that intake wrote it wrong, or that I assumed it was updated.
Three explanations, all of them available, all of them plausible enough to survive a Wednesday morning.
I said, “That address was wrong when I gave it to you.”
He looked up.
I said, “At intake you asked if I had housing. I said yes. I did not have housing. I gave you my parents' old address because I did not know what else to say.”
He did not react the way I expected.
He picked up a pen and wrote for about eleven seconds.
Then he said, “Why are you telling me this now?”
I said, “Because you were going to send somebody there eventually.”
That was true. It was not the whole truth. The whole truth is that a file with a lie in it goes off in your hand later, and eleven weeks of paperwork had taught me so.
He asked when I moved into Cranmore. I told him the date. He asked for a residence verification form.
I had it in my coat, signed by Ms. Prine, dated, with the house telephone number written under the signature.
I had brought it because Ms. Prine told me to, and because I bring documents.
He read it, stamped it, and put it on top of the old sheet. That is how a file corrects itself. The wrong page stays underneath forever.
Then he wrote on a green slip and turned it around.
Weekly reporting for sixty days. Wednesdays, eight to eleven.
Eight Wednesdays. Two hours each, unpaid, plus the bus if I had to break the pass window.
I did the sum in my head at the desk. About a hundred and forty dollars of my life.
I said, “Understood.”
He said, “It's not a violation. It's a note in the file.”
Then he said the only personal thing he said to me in twenty-two months.
He said, “You're the first one this year who told me before I found it.”
I said, “Does that help?”
He said, “No.”
Then he wrote weekly reporting on the form anyway. The note existed, and the note decides.
I signed at the bottom, printed my name under the signature, and dated it.
He tore off my copy along the perforation and handed it across the desk.
I folded it in three and put it in the notebook with the criminal history report.
Downstairs the numbers had reached 58. A man in a work jacket was asleep sitting upright with his number in his fist.
I clocked in at Kesler Street at 10:26 and worked through lunch.
Three hundred and ninety pages that day.
Ten short. Marisol did not write it down. I wrote it down.