“Vic going to show me her basketball shot,” Jorjette whined. “You know everyone say she the best, she beat Angie. And we got kitchen duty in one hour; we gotta go now if we’re going at all.”

“We could do it another time,” I said. “Although another time I probably won’t have any tomatoes. Do you grow them yourself, Cornish?”

I held one out for him to look at. He admitted that gardening was his hobby but that his tomatoes hadn’t ripened yet.

“You have one hour down there, girls,” he finally said, accepting the tomato as he signaled to the man behind the bulletproof glass to release the lock on the jail–wing door.

When we got to the rec room, a woman CO I didn’t know was on duty. She was watching Oprah with a handful of women on the couch. Miss Ruby sat in the middle of the group, her iron–gray hair freshly cut and curled, shell earrings three or four times regulation size in her ears.

Her eyes flicked at Jorjette and me when we came in and pulled up chairs nearby, but she gave no sign of noticing us until Jorjette approached her during a commercial break and asked nervously how Miss Ruby was doing today.

Miss Ruby inclined her head, said as well as anyone could in this heat, too hot to go outside, but she longed for a breath of fresh air. Jorjette said, well, it was pretty hard on everyone but she knew Miss Ruby’s joints suffered real bad in the heat. Maybe she’d like a nice fresh tomato, to remind her of the fresh outdoor air?

“Cream here brought it for you special.”

Miss Ruby accepted the tomato and jerked her head toward the far end of the deal table. The CO stayed on the couch watching Oprah, and the handful of other women left us alone: Miss Ruby wanted privacy, Miss Ruby got privacy.

“I can’t make up my mind about you, Cream,” she said when we were seated. “Are you a fighter or a Good Samaritan? First you beat up a couple of gangbangers, but now I hear you spend your spare time writing letters for the girls. Some of them think you’re an undercover cop.”

I blinked. Of course in a way that was the truth, but I didn’t know Miss Ruby and I couldn’t trust my secrets to a stranger, especially one who seemed to be plugged in to the gossip pipeline as thoroughly as Miss Ruby was.

“If I’d known my life history mattered here, I’d have written it up on the bathroom wall,” I said. “I was arrested same as everyone else.”

“And that would be for what crime, I wonder?”