“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” John kissed her on the cheek.
Senta smiled at this chaste greeting and asked, “Are they watching us?”
“I don’t know.”
“You wanna fuck and give ’em somethin’ to see?”
“Maybe not right yet.”
“Okay.” Senta’s mood was light and engaging. This was an act of pure kindness, designed to make him feel better.
They settled across the table from each other. Senta leaned forward taking his hands in hers.
“Lou read it in the Phoenix Herald that you’d been arrested for some murder that happened when you were a kid,” she said. “He told me week before last and I came down the next day but they made me wait until now.”
“I don’t think the warden likes me.” John smiled and squeezed her hands.
“I missed you,” she said. “I really did.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t come by for so long. I just got involved in lots of stuff.”
“Don’t I know it,” Senta said looking around the room. “I missed you but just the little bit we had together changed my life so much that I could never be mad.”
“Changed your life how?” John appreciated Senta’s smile and touch but what he needed was something to think about, something outside the confines of his imprisonment.
“The things you said.”
“What things?”
“The last time I saw you you said that history is a tool like a hammer or a saw.”
“I said that?”
“Don’t you remember?”
“I guess we got pretty drunk most nights.”
“Yeah. And you were just talkin’. I mean you probably talked like that all the time at school but what you said was new to me. It stuck. I thought about it for weeks and weeks. It seemed so important but I couldn’t tell how. I was going to ask you but you never came back. And that was better because the question stayed in my mind; I couldn’t let it go.
“Finally I got it down to one word — history. You had told me that there was the history we read about in books and then our own stories — what we lived through ourselves. I didn’t know what that meant exactly but I kept on thinking about it. Thinking and thinking... and finally it hit me. I went to the shelf in the hallway closet and took down the old box of photographs. Must’a been a thousand pictures but there was only three of Nesta.”
“Who?” John asked.
“My baby girl,” Senta said. “Nesta. She was only a week old when I gave her up. I’d just turned fifteen and my parents made me because they were afraid I’d leave my beautiful baby with them.
“When I saw her picture I knew I’d been heartbroken my whole life about Nesta. I remembered what you said: ‘The man swings the hammer but it’s the hammer that makes the man.’ Givin’ Nesta away made the rest of my life what it was.
“I hired me a detective and he found my child working in a plastics factory outside Ojai, California.
“I got a lot of money in the bank. Savin’ makes me feel safe. This one customer of mine who’s a bookkeeper calls me his parsimonious prostitute. I brought Nesta home to me. Her name had been changed to Rachel Dawson but she lets me call her Nesta. We’re gonna build a house, a new home that’ll be everything we lost. That was because of you, John. You gave me something to think about and the way to think about it. It’s kind of like you gave me the bricks to build our house.”
“You would have probably decided to look for your daughter one day anyway,” John argued mildly.
“I never would have until you made me look in that closet. I came here because I wanted you to know if you asked me out on a date that I would definitely go.”
“That’s a wonderful gift.”
“Do you want me to tell you about our house?”
“Sure.”
Senta described the floor plan and the memories that each room would contain. The composition of the building would be what had been missing from their lives.
There was a music room and library; bedrooms on different floors with a spiral ladder that connected them. And for when Nesta decided to go out on her own there was a cottage in the backyard that she could come back to whenever she wanted.
“What does that all sound like?” Senta said when she’d finished.
John lifted her hands to kiss them. A moment later a black-suited guard appeared at a doorway behind her.
“Is it time?” Senta asked the guard.
“Yes,” the man said.
“Next time will be about you,” she promised.
John kissed her again and she departed.
After Senta left, John expected Marle to come and bring him back to his cell.
But when Marle did not return John understood that there was more company to come; though he couldn’t imagine a better visitor than Senta.
When the outer door opened again, the guard ushered in Ron Underhill.
“Thirty-five minutes,” the guard told Ron. “Or you can knock.”
Ron nodded and the sentry left.
John stood to meet his surprise guest.
The university gardener sported a black suit that fit his slender frame quite well. He wore a white dress shirt with buttoned cuffs that came down half an inch beyond the jacket sleeves, and an orange tie with three blue diamonds stitched down the center. His shoes were black with a dull shine. John thought that Underhill had this ensemble for funerals.
The men shook hands.
“How are you, Professor Woman?” the gardener asked.
“Locked up.”
“They treating you okay?” The look on the older man’s face seemed to add weight to the question, as if he might do something if the answer was not positive.
“Can’t complain. The food’s bad but it’s the best they can do I’m sure.”
“Why don’t we have a sit-down?” Ron suggested.
The gardener’s body was slight, like that of the coyote that stalked John after the accident. His hands were large and powerful. He was what people call a white man though his skin was a ruddy amber color from day after day under the desert sun.
Not knowing quite what to say John stated simply, “Well... here we are.”
“Yes indeed. You never know where you’ll end up in this life,” Underhill opined. “Every day we think we know what’s waiting for us but it’s always something else.”
There came another lull in the conversation.
“I’m a little surprised to see you here, Mr. Underhill,” John said at last. “I mean I hardly know you and no one else from the school has come. Mr. Pepperdine paid for my lawyer but that’s all the contact I’ve had with NUSW.”
“That Willie’s a good poker player.”
“You know him?”
“He likes hydrangeas and I cultivate some in the biology department’s greenhouse. We play poker there for pennies sometimes. He always walks away with a dollar or more of my money. That’s how the rich stay rich, I guess.”
“Thank you for coming. I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“I like the way you talk, Professor Woman. You play with ideas that most people treat with devotion. At first you sound almost sacrilegious but then it’s clear as day that you care. I believe that when you wake up in the morning you’re wondering where the day will go. So when I heard that they’d put you in jail I decided to come out here and tell you I believe in you and to keep your confidence up.”
“But what if I’m guilty?” John smiled.
The gardener returned the grin. “You see? You always twist things around in a light way. Here I am trying to comfort you and there you are making me laugh.”
“Thank you, Ron, but you didn’t answer my question.”
“If you killed a man that doesn’t mean you’re a murderer. If you murdered a man it doesn’t mean you didn’t have good reason. I like you, Professor Woman. I came out to Phoenix to look you in the eye and tell you so.”