I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway Read Online Free PDF Page B

expression—but I can tell that if you go forward, it means something entirely different than if you turn left. One way and you’re sort of a hero; the other way and you definitely are not.
    A couple of minutes after the turn we come to a stop in front of an electronic arm. A guard’s voice booms out of an intercom:
    State the purpose of your visit.
    June quickly rolls down her window and speaks into the intercom while gazing upward at the two-story tower where the voice is apparently coming from. It looks like there is a gang of air traffic controllers up there.
    “We’re here to see an inmate, sir.”
    Do you have any firearms, blah blah blah, narcotics, or other contraband?
    Maybe it’s just me, but that seems like a stupid question. “Why would we tell them if we did?” I ask loudly. The driver smirks.
    “Be quiet, honey,” June shushes me. She’s not at all harsh about it, but she says it in such a way that I’m definitely not going to be raising my hand for a follow-up question. “No, sir,” she says to the guard. “We don’t.”
    Go ahead.
    The arm lifts and the taxi pulls up to the drop-off area. We get out, and June pays the driver. “Thank you,” she says politely. He takes off without saying anything in response, glad to have these prison-visitor types out of his cab.
    I gaze up at the prison. I am wowed by this building! It’s massive and white, with a big dome—not quite as grand as the Minnesota state capitol, which I visited on a field trip for school, but close. With its white marble and neoclassical lines, Leavenworth is both flashy and severe . As if Nurse Ratched was being played by the lead singer in an eighties hair band. And the windows! There must be a thousand of them. As we climb the steps, I pick out a window and wave and smile in case my dad is watching me from his cell.
    I’m secretly proud my daddy lives in such an impressive place.
    Right inside the front door is the guard station where you check in, which looks like a cross between a drive-up bank and a single-room-occupancy hotel—a few guards behind bulletproof glass and a little silver vent to talk through. June fills out some paperwork saying who we are and which inmate we’re here to see.
    Then we’re off to the waiting room to cool our jets for a while.The waiting room is a medium-size institutional square with built-in molded chairs in shades of olive, mucilage, and rotten sherbet lining the wall. At one end of the room is a bank of vending machines. The Pepsi machine takes thirty-five cents and of course I want one, but June says no. So instead, I go around in a frenzy, checking all the coin returns, hoping someone else’s forgotten nickel or dime will turn this into my lucky day. June rummages through her bag, pulling out the coloring books, Rook playing cards (“real” cards would be, like, the Devil), and Barbie dolls that I’m allowed to take into the visiting room.
    There’s a clock staring down from the wall, and I watch the second hand sweep around and around. This part of the visit always seems to take forever, but today it’s taking forever and a day. It’s not just me, either, because I can see that June is starting to lose her patience as well.
    “ What’s taking so long?” June glances at her tiny wristwatch, the one that I play with in church on Sundays, which leaves deep indentations in her cushy wrist. “Man alive! You’d think they went to China to get him.”
    We are not allowed to say “gosh,” “golly,” “gee,” “gee whiz,” and certainly not “god,” “jeez,” “Jesus,” or anything else that even comes close to taking the Lord’s name in vain. That doesn’t leave much except “man” and “man alive,” which isn’t much to work with at a time like this.
    (June told me that when I first came to live with her, I used to sit on my suitcase and swear a blue streak. Just reel off a litany of crazy swear words, the kind pimps, drug dealers, hookers, and other less