She comes around the counter. Toe to toe with Henry, she smells wonderful. A clean, earthy aroma. Manicured nails make tiny clicks against each other and the buttons of his shirt. Her knuckles graze his chest. He’s so hungry that he’s made a moron, made feeble, and it’s been so long since a woman last touched him. As she cinches the knot up to his clavicle, the top of her hand warms the length of his sternum. She pats his upper arm, gives it a squeeze. Tells him now that’s better. Very handsome.

Blood rushes to his cheeks, makes him lurch as if by a tide. To her hands, those gentle, delicate hands, he says thank you. Can’t quite bring himself to look directly at her, as if doing so might change her mind about him. He turns to leave before he says or does something to embarrass himself.

“Sir?”

“Yeah?” he sputters, twisting back to her. “I mean, yes?”

She is beautiful. Exquisite. He wants to empty the cash register and run away with her.

“You forgot to pay. Total is three eighteen.”

$1.75

Two hours and twice as many buses had passed before Henry gave up. Michelle wasn’t just late—she wasn’t coming. Turned out he would need the bus fare he’d so proudly waved away. He turned from the open road, shuffled under the watchtowers, back through the prison gates. Buzzes and clanks. Inside, the same guard who’d discharged him earlier now gave him seven quarters. Then a wry smirk, which Henry found oddly reassuring, as if suggesting he wasn’t the first to have come crawling back for spare change.

When the next bus pulled up, the driver clapped a hand over the coin slot. His forearms were thick and smudgy with tattoos. He nodded, then told Henry, “Welcome back, son.”

Wanting to put as much distance between himself and charity as possible, Henry went to the last seat and huddled against the window. In its frame scrolled the watchtowers, windowless complexes, chain-link perimeter, and razor-wire curlicues, until the prison and five years gave way to combed farmland and October fog.

Michelle had better have a good fucking excuse. Even Papa’d remembered to come scoop Henry from rehab, nearly a decade ago. As dejected as this abandonment left him, the feeling still got leavened by the movement of the bus, its steady charge through the sprawl. It was bewildering how, for his entire life, he’d taken such velocity for granted, if he ever considered it at all. Back in his cell, after lights-out, the walls narrowed with each exhale, closing in on him, suffocating him. Gag ball. Straitjacket. Drowning. Every night his aches and memories had engorged him into an animal too big and scared for that concrete box, but now—out here—he was downright puny.