Chapter 8 - THE PRISON VISIT
(1,500 words)
One year later.
The high-security visitor facility at the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex was cold, sterile, and smelled faintly of floor wax and stale coffee. Heavy fluorescent lights hummed overhead, reflecting off thick bulletproof glass partitions separating inmates from visitors.
Preston sat on a hard plastic stool on his side of the glass.
He looked unrecognizable. He had lost thirty pounds, his face was gaunt and hollow, his once-polished hair cut into a rough, uneven buzzcut. He wore a faded, oversized orange jumpsuit stamped with his inmate registration number across the chest.
His hands shook as he picked up the heavy plastic telephone receiver attached to the wall.
Sitting on the other side of the glass partition was Beatrice.
His mother looked twenty years older. Her expensive skin treatments were gone, replaced by deep, bitter wrinkles around her mouth. She wore a cheap, faded cardigan sweater from a thrift store, her hands calloused from her forty-hour-a-week job at the commercial laundromat downtown.
“Mom...” Preston rasped through the receiver, his voice cracking. “Did you bring the commissary money? I need twenty dollars for soap and phone credits.”
Beatrice let out a raspy, bitter sigh, clutching her cheap vinyl purse against her lap. “I don't have twenty dollars, Preston! My rent went up fifty dollars this month, and my arthritis is so bad I can barely fold the sheets at the laundromat!”
“Can’t you ask someone at the country club?!” Preston pleaded desperately, pressing his forehead against the scratched glass. “What about Gloria? What about the Vance family trust?!”
Beatrice let out a harsh, barking laugh. “The country club cancelled my membership twelve months ago, Preston! Gloria blocked my number! The entire city laughs whenever our name is mentioned!”
Beatrice pointed a trembling, spotted finger at her son through the glass.
“This is your fault!” Beatrice hissed, her eyes burning with bitter rage. “You had it all! You were married to the richest woman in the state! You lived in a fifty-million-dollar estate! And you ruined it because you wanted to play big shot with a twenty-five-year-old marketing girl!”
“My fault?!” Preston screamed into the receiver, his face turning red with pathetic rage. “You’re the one who treated her like a maid! You’re the one who smashed that plate on the floor two hours before the gala and told her she wasn't good enough for me!”
“Because I thought she was poor!” Beatrice wailed, tears smearing her cheap mascara. “If I had known she owned Sterling Crown, I would have washed her feet every single morning!”
The guard standing near the door stepped forward, tapping his heavy wooden nightstick against the metal table. “Keep your voices down or visiting hour is over!”
Both of them fell into a heavy, suffocating silence.
Preston looked down at his rough, chapped hands—hands that had never done an hour of manual labor in his entire life, now covered in calluses from working the prison laundry duty for twelve cents an hour.
Every night, as he lay on his thin foam mattress inside a eight-by-ten concrete cell listening to the iron doors slam shut, he closed his eyes and saw Eleanor standing on that grand ballroom stage in her blue velvet dress, gleaming under a hundred chandeliers.
He remembered the seven years she had cooked his meals, ironed his shirts, and sat quietly at his table while he bragged about his fake success.
He had owned the world, and he had thrown it into the garbage for a moment of shallow pride.
“Visiting hours are over,” the guard announced crisply.
Beatrice slowly stood up from her plastic chair, adjusting her cheap cardigan, without offering her son another word of comfort. She hung up the receiver and walked out through the heavy steel security doors into the hot Florida sun to catch the city bus back to her tiny apartment.
Preston sat on his stool for two long minutes after she left, staring at the black, silent telephone receiver in his hand.
May you like
A guard grabbed his arm, pulling him up from the stool. “Back to your cell, Vance.”
Preston shuffled down the concrete hallway, his plastic sandals squeaking against the linoleum, as the heavy iron gates locked behind him forever.
