I kept the letter on top of my in-box for weeks, always moving it to the top, keeping it where I could see it, but I didn’t write back. Whatever I could say to him would be so inadequate I couldn’t imagine it on paper. I settled one case, started another, and the rest plodded along, piling up on my desk, while Sawyer’s note kept floating to the top.

Finally, one cold blue Tuesday when the roads were dry, I left everything in the mess it was in, called a warden I knew for permission to bring food and picked up burgers on the way out to Deer Lodge. They brought Sawyer into the prison’s visiting area and let us sit at the same table, no barrier at all. He’d lost the weight of the idle months, but he didn’t look healthy. He looked pale, a little gray in the face, and older. We looked at each other awkwardly, like neither of us knew what we were doing there. The paper bags, still warm and smelling of fried things, felt heavy and wrong in my hands.

“I guess you’ve just had lunch,” I said.

Sawyer gave me an appraising look. “Is there a shake in there?”

Sometimes I have a little luck—I had a chocolate shake and a vanilla one, still mostly frozen. We unpacked the bags and sat at the table, and Sawyer ate and talked about the inmates, using first names, telling stories that sounded like he’d planned them in his mind for someone to come from the outside and listen. He washed down burger with chocolate shake, sucked noisily through the straw.

“You know my wife’s gone,” he said finally. “You know where she went?”

I shook my head.

“When I stopped working and started getting crazy, she got a pen pal. A guy in prison in Wyoming. They wrote back and forth all year and I never knew. Then he got furloughed and she went to live with him. She sent me a letter that says they’re living on a farm and have forty cats and she’s never been so happy. Can you believe that? She mailed the letter from another town so I couldn’t find her.”

“Would you want to find her?”

“Yeah!” he said. “—No. I don’t know. A guy in prison. I can’t believe she found a guy in prison. I’m a guy in prison. What’s wrong with me? But she would have left anyway.”

“What did the guy do?”

“She won’t tell me. Probably an ax murderer. It’s Wyoming.” He grinned and his face stretched into wrinkles he didn’t have before, but the grin was charming. Sawyer was still game.

“So, you never wrote to me,” he said, picking at the last of his fries. The bags and boxes and cups were strewn between us, empty now, an embarrassment of grease.