She cut slices from the roast beef she had made for dinner yesterday, picked the best ones, and put them on the bread for Jack’s sandwich with the layers of lettuce and mayonnaise and some black pepper, then wrapped it in wax paper with perfect folds, like a present. She put two small thermoses in the box, one with cold milk and the other with hot coffee, because Jack was going in for the night shift, 7:00 p.m. until 7:00 a.m. Having him get sleepy was a huge worry to her.

She hated that he worked at the prison. He wasn’t the sort of man to work as a prison guard. He was big and strong, and he had played left tackle for Weldonville when they were in school, but he wasn’t mean or a fighter. It was hard on him to be in the punishment business.

It was hard on the whole town to be in the punishment business. She and Jack had been about thirteen when the men from the Federal Bureau of Prisons came to hold an informational meeting at city hall, but she remembered it, and if she hadn’t, her parents had talked about it enough so that she couldn’t misremember it. The government men had talked about Weldonville being one of the competing sites for the new federal facility. They knew a lot about the town—that the cattle grazing and mining that had given people a livelihood were long gone. Lots of people had taken to working away from town, driving long-haul trucks or commuting once a week from Denver or Colorado Springs. The prison would employ over a thousand people in government jobs in a facility that didn’t need to make a profit and could never go out of business or move to another country.

A few days later the mayor had asked that the city have a vote to tell the local politicians what to do. People were eager for the jobs, so the politicians lobbied for the prison. Whether there really was a competition or not, the town of Weldonville got the prison. The government selected a contractor, and the contractor even included a few local people in the workforce, which kept them employed for five years. By the time they were laid off, the big, bright, brand-new prison was taking applications.