After a week in the pencell, as my incarcerated neighbor, Eddie Dantes, referred to our jailing, I only had one visitor (Ashleigh), and I’d had enough of Eddie’s revenge plots. I asked the guard if it was true that I had one phone call.
He told me, Yeah. But it’s only valid for the first 24 hours of imprisonment. Then he laughed in way that told me he was fibbing.
Truth be told, the biggest reason I didn’t ask to call anyone is I didn’t know anyone’s phone number. Stinking cell phones! Well, there was one number I knew by heart, but she… aaah!
Imagine my surprise at my next visitor, not-so-much in the way that Ashleigh shocked me by simply showing up, but at the amount of time it took for this person to show her face. I gave it away didn’t I?
In the meeting room, my mom remained relatively quiet. Usually, once her ramblings started rolling, she was like a vocal freight train.
I, on the other, was relatively quiet when we were together. So the peace and quiet was nice and quaint, while it lasted.
Why did you go and do a thing like that, Aiden? ‘A thing like that’ being setting the bar in Marlin’s Inn on fire.
“What was I supposed to do? You were going to stab, Hank!” With a busted catsup bottle. Classy.
You remember then, don’t you?
“Remember what?”
Never mind.
“Never mind? You don’t get to bring up something and immediately cancel it out? What are you asking if I remember?”
So how many times has Ashleigh visited you? I’m sure she misses you dearly while you’re in here.
“Never mind that for now. What don’t I remember that you thought I remembered?”
My mom proceeded to bring up a bit about my father. My father, whom I always assumed was a drunk.
You know why your father left us, right? I stabbed him. I came home drunk after work one night, and when he confronted me about it, I grabbed a nail file and foom! Right in his srm.
I sat in silence. Not only had I no inkling of such an exchange, but my entire understanding of the complexities of my parents’ relationship was completely wrong.
And did she really use the sound effect of Foom! to describe her stabbing my dad?
She’s so melodramatic I want to poke my eyes out!
Old Men at the Bar 