So what if Michelle was older. Henry wanted to pick her up, left hand slung over the wheel, the right in her lap, steering her any which way she wished, be it to the mall or Mexico. The landscape at this corner of the state was expansive and flat, lumpy at best, so parking at the edge of some cliff to enjoy rolling vistas and dig into each other alongside a row of other parked, rocking vehicles wasn’t exactly an option. Maybe a fancy restaurant? He would gladly spend every last cent of this paycheck on sushi or surf’n’turf or whatever la-di-da candlelit dinner might please her, and she was more than welcome to skip off to the ladies’ room and puke it all up afterward, for all he cared. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered other than the prospect of being totally alone together. They had so much to say.

The eighth crease of the pebble Michelle had snuck into his shoe was more bend than fold. As carefully as he just opened this envelope, he’d pinched the tiny petals of paper back until it was a matchbook-sized scrap. On it, in her knobby scrawl, was her email next to a heart she’d filled in with black ink. It’d taken a full two weeks after Henry’s release till she finally wrote back, explaining she didn’t have internet at home and could only sneak onto her Hotmail account at school when the librarians were distracted. Her messages, when they did come, were as jumbled as her handwriting, confessional and hilarious, unpunctuated except for marching bands of exclamation points. Every night after work, he would log on to the computer in the living room, muffling the modem with a sweatshirt so the dial-up tone and digital squeals wouldn’t wake Papa in the next room. Even if she hadn’t managed to write earlier that day, he was content to read through their previous exchanges and let his imagination spell out the slim daggers of her fingers, working their way off the keyboard and around his throat.

“I know a place we can cash these after work, open all night,” Al said. He folded his check into the cellophane of his cigarette pack. “Meghan’s having people over tonight, you down?”

Henry slid his check into the front pocket of his jeans. Stroking the slight corner beneath the denim set off a damn near carnal glee.