“If you mention my name again, I promise you’ll be going straight back to prison.”
My sister said it calmly, the way you’d tell someone their shoe was untied.
Then she tossed a thick white envelope onto the grass in front of my feet. It landed with a soft thump. One corner had torn open, and I could see the edges of hundred-dollar bills inside, wrapped in a rubber band.
I was standing in Opal Hargrove’s backyard in Worthington with a wet bedsheet in my hands and two clothespins in my mouth. I took the clothespins out slowly.
It had been six weeks since my release from prison.
Six weeks, and the sound of a slamming door still made me sit straight up in bed at night with my heart pounding. Six weeks, and I still asked permission before I opened the refrigerator.
Now Monica was standing in front of me, outside a house that wasn’t mine, threatening to send me back.
And on her wrist was our father’s watch.
The gold one, with the scratched face and the brown leather band. The one he’d pressed into my hand in the hospital, two days before he died, and said, “You keep this, Becky. You’re the one who’ll keep time for everybody.”
The one I’d left in the top drawer of my nightstand the morning the police came to my house.
Monica saw me looking at it. She didn’t cover it up. She turned her wrist a little so the sun caught the glass.
“Pick up your money,” I told her. My voice was shaking, but I kept going. “You already took four years of my life. You’re not buying the ones I have left.”
Monica smiled. It was a cold, small smile. I’d seen it before, when we were kids, right before she told our mother that I was the one who broke the lamp.
“You still think you can win,” she said.
To explain how my sister and I ended up facing each other across a clothesline that day, I have to start six weeks earlier, at the front gate of the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville.
My name is Rebecca Hale. I’m thirty-six years old.
I spent almost four years behind bars, serving a five-year sentence for fraud I didn’t commit.
Before all of that, I owned a company called Buckeye Medical Supply. We distributed medical equipment to private clinics around central Ohio. Wheelchairs, blood pressure monitors, exam tables, hospital beds for home care. I started it from nothing, in a tiny rented storefront between a nail salon and a tax office. I had a comfortable house in Dublin, a suburb outside Columbus, with a red front door and a backyard with a maple tree.
And I was married to Trevor Mallory, a man I’d thought of as my closest friend.
When I walked out of that prison gate, everything I owned fit inside a clear plastic bag. Two pairs of jeans. Three shirts. Some underwear. A hairbrush. A paperback book with the cover torn off.
And seventy-five dollars in release money, in an envelope with my name typed on it.
That was it. That was what was left of my whole life.
Nobody came to pick me up.
I’d called Trevor from the prison phone two weeks before my release date. Then again one week before. Then again three days before. It rang and rang. The last time, it went straight to voicemail, and the message said the mailbox was full.
I’d called Monica too. Her number had been changed.
So I took the bus.
I sat in the back row, by the window, with my plastic bag in my lap. A woman across the aisle was eating a bag of chips, and the crinkling sound was so loud and so normal that I started crying, very quietly, so nobody would notice.
I hadn’t heard anybody eat chips in almost four years.
Here’s what I knew when I got out.
Trevor had taken control of my company after my arrest. Monica was still running its finances, the way she had for six years before everything happened.
And my house, my house with the red door, had a mortgage on it that I had never signed. I’d found out from a letter my lawyer forwarded to me in prison, eight months before my release. A bank I’d never heard of. A loan I’d never asked for. My signature, supposedly, at the bottom.
I’d written to Trevor about it. Three times.
He never wrote back.
For nine days, I looked for work.
I stayed at a women’s shelter on the east side of Columbus. They let you stay two weeks if you were looking for a job. The bed was narrow, and the woman in the bunk above me talked in her sleep, but it was clean, and nobody counted me at night.
Every morning, I put on my one good shirt, a blue button-down that was a little too big for me now, and went out.
The first place was a dental office looking for a receptionist. The office manager was a friendly woman with a lot of bracelets. She liked me. She said so. She said, “You’re exactly what we need.” Then she said they just needed to run a quick background check.
She called me the next afternoon.
“I’m so sorry, Rebecca,” she said. “It’s just… with patient information, and billing… I’m sure you understand.”
I said I understood.
The second place was a warehouse. The third was a hardware store. Both times, it went the same way. A nice interview. A handshake. A background check. A phone call.
I’m sure you understand.
The fourth place offered me something. Overnight office cleaning in a business park twenty miles north of the city, eleven at night to seven in the morning. Nine dollars an hour.
“When can you start?” the man asked.
“What’s the address?” I said.
He told me.
There was no bus that went there at night. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have the money for a car. I didn’t even have a permanent address to put on the paperwork, because the shelter only let you use theirs for two weeks.
I thanked him and hung up.
Then I sat on a bench outside the shelter and counted my money. Forty-one dollars left.
I did the math three times. It didn’t get any better.
On the ninth day, I took a bus up to Worthington because a coffee shop there had a HELP WANTED sign in the window. When I got there, the sign was gone.
I was so tired and hungry that I walked into the little grocery store next door to buy a banana and a carton of milk. Two dollars and eighteen cents.
On my way out, I passed the community bulletin board by the door. Lost cats. Guitar lessons. A church rummage sale.
And an index card, handwritten in careful blue ink, in old-fashioned cursive.
Live-in woman wanted to cook and keep house. Room, board, and $600 a week. Must be honest and able to work. Inquire: Mrs. O. Hargrove.
There was a phone number at the bottom.
I read it twice.
Then I took the card off the board, put it in my pocket, and walked to the pay phone outside, because I didn’t have a cell phone. 