“—drank his way through a stop sign so maybe he’s not the best role model.”
“You shut your mouth.”
She wanted to slap him, but she worried about the Buick skidding into a tree.
All of a sudden Chuck rose and, with a grace that seemed impossible given his bulk, pulled himself into the back seat. Shelly looked over her shoulder, and he had closed his eyes.
“You don’t know anything about hockey,” he muttered and said nothing else that night.
Shelly woke Wednesday morning, bleary and grumpy from too much worrying and too little sleep, wanting a cigarette for the first time in months. At work, she found a memo from the warden listing Doyle’s menu: cheeseburger plain with onion slices, french fries, orange Jell-O, a glass of milk, a hard-candy mint for after. At the bottom, the warden’s scrawled note: Don’t jazz it up. Give the guy what he wants.
Her staff shuffled around the tilt grills and steam kettles, and the kitchen smelled of pesto and grilled chicken — that night’s entree. Don’t jazz it up. Fine. She could cook a cheeseburger. She’d cooked thousands of cheeseburgers, back when Hank was alive and Chuck was still a cherub. Meatloaf, too. All the basics: meat, potatoes, vegetables from a can. Now and then, on an anniversary or on Mother’s Day, Hank took her someplace with candles and lace tablecloths, and they ate nice, but she never imagined she could create what appeared on those plates. Then Hank died, and she dreamed about him sitting with her at the kitchen table eating tomato soup and black bread, and he said, “You should try cooking school. It’s’a way to make a living.”
She had always figured you needed a Rockefeller’s salary and a degree from Harvard to make the dishes she saw prepared on public television. But after a few months of classes at Hartford Culinary College, Shelly learned that all a person needed to move beyond meatloaf and mashed potatoes was time to enjoy the kitchen. For hours she’d stand over the stove, the food processor, the cutting board, peeling garlic or sprinkling saffron or deveining shrimp, loving the work in a way she’d never loved anything before. She didn’t graduate — money ran short — but she passed enough classes to get the job at the prison kitchen, and pretty quick she worked her way up to manager. That gave her time and money. And she had ideas how to use both.
She’d seen how people became respectful when seated before a plate of marinated pork tenderloin, and she wondered how prisoners might act if they ate chestnut soup instead of chicken-patty sandwiches, spinach fettucine instead of sloppy joes, chicken molé instead of Salisbury steak. She wasn’t stupid. She didn’t figure she could turn a murderer into a school crossing guard, but, she thought, maybe good food might make him a little less angry. It wasn’t easy changing the menu — the cafeteria’s budget wasn’t so big after all — but she learned to substitute ham for prosciutto, Swiss cheese for Gruyère.
The prisoners flushed the food at first. Shelly kept trying, and eventually they started to eat what she served. Some even liked it. The warden praised her, especially when she won a state government award for initiative and creativity, but the new menu didn’t change anybody’s behavior. After a while, that didn’t matter to Shelly. If she had to cook, she wanted to cook good food.
When she took her break, she found Danny in the snack room. He sat at a round table, reading a newspaper and picking his teeth with a plastic fork that had all its tines broken off except one.
“Just reading about your boy.”
“Chuck said they were doing a story on him. I didn’t know it ran already.”
“Not Chuck.” He slid the paper across the table. She took it, then sat and read the front-page headline:
She saw two photographs, one new and in color of a sixty-ish woman with a face puckered from a lifetime of two packs a day. She held a photo of her son the murderer as a preschooler. That picture was reproduced — larger — next to hers. Probably snapped on his birthday. He wore a pointed paper hat and a short-sleeve white shirt with a dark tie. He held a stuffed lion toy. His hair was curly and blond, his skin Irish pink. The caption read: “Bobby Doyle, age five.”
“Cute,” she said.
“Amazing his mother sticks by him. My mother’s pretty much forgotten me. I mean, she keeps proof that she had me — my badges with the Cub Scouts and a big picture of me in an altar boy uniform. Nothing after that, though. Like once I hit puberty, I vanished.”
“You were an altar boy?”
“Until I stole a candlestick.” He laughed. “Most guys in here will tell you they were good guys once.”
“Can I take this?” she said.
Danny nodded — “You’re the boss, Julia Child” — picking his teeth.
That night on her couch, chilled despite her flannel pajamas and the wool blanket wrapped around her legs, Shelly read the newspaper story to the inside pages. He had loved dogs, said his mother. Played checkers like a whiz. The article also mentioned that he had killed two girls after raping them — the daughters of his girlfriend at the time. Inside was a mug shot of Doyle: his lips curled in a frown, and his clenched jawbones pushing out of his cheeks. The worst part was his eyes. Not like Hank’s, which had been scary for what they promised. Doyle’s eyes delivered, shot through with blood and rage. Shelly looked back and forth from Doyle the boy to Doyle the killer.
She started when Chuck threw open the front door, home from hockey practice. He passed her without a word — despite her “Hello” — a newspaper under one arm and his goalkeeper’s mask in hand. He grabbed a bag of cookies from the kitchen, then shut himself in his room.
When she knocked, there was no answer.
“Chuck?”
“I’m busy.”
“And I’m in no mood to talk to you through a door.”
She twisted the knob and went in.
He whipped a jackknife at the wall, trying to stick the blade through the newspaper he had taped there. In the middle of the page was a photograph of a hockey goalie.
“What are you doing?”
He threw the knife again. It hit flat against the newspaper and fell.
“I said—”
“Getting mad.”
“At who?”
“Churchill Bannerman. Goalie from Avon.”
“What’d he do?”
“Nothing. It’s a hockey thing.” He kept throwing, missing, retrieving the knife…
“Give me the knife, Chuck. If you know what’s good for you, give me the knife now.”
He tossed it once more, missing again, then fell back on the mulch of dirty clothes covering his bed.
She folded the knife, then gathered a deep breath and looked around his room.
“Have you had dinner?”
He waved the bag of cookies.
“How about if I heat some eggplant lasagna for you.”
“If it’s prison food, I don’t want it.”
“What difference does it make?”
“If it’s prison food, I don’t want it.”
It sounded like a dare, as if forcing dinner on him would be asking for trouble. He stared, breathing quietly if he breathed at all.
“Suit yourself,” she said, and she walked out, leaving his door open. He shut it as soon as she was in the hallway.
In bed, she read the newspaper story once, then twice, while chewing the plastic cap of a ballpoint pen. She wondered about Chuck and Danny and Doyle — all good kids once — and the wonder turned to worry about how short a step it might be from knifing a wall to knifing a body. Before she turned out her bedside lamp, she buried Chuck’s jackknife in a dresser drawer beneath her socks and panties.
On Execution Day, Shelly brushed her teeth and wondered whether Doyle was brushing his teeth, too, or whether he wouldn’t bother. What did a man do on his last day? As he rinsed the toothpaste from his mouth, would he relive what he had done? Would he regret it? Or would he think back to happier days? She wondered about Doyle’s happy days. She wondered whether he had played hockey in high school.