If I am foolhardy, daring without judgment, I wrote, it isn’t because I don’t love you, Lotty. I hate to bring you grief, and if I am seriously injured you will grieve. I don’t have an answer to the conundrum. Not the old masculine swagger that I couldn’t love you as much as I do if I didn’t love honor more. Something more restless drives me, a kind of terror that if I don’t take care of things myself I will be left with a terrible helplessness. More than anyone I’ve ever known, you’ve kept that helplessness at bay. Thank you for your years of love.

In the morning I quickly put it in an envelope without reading it over. On my way to breakfast I handed it over to CO Cornish for the outbound mail.

The condemned woman’s last meal: cornflakes, powdered orange juice, watery coffee, a piece of soggy toast. At nine, CO Cornish brought me to the gate of the prison’s work wing. There we were counted again and marched down the hall to our assignments. One group was escorted to the room of phone banks, where Miss Ruby and other well–spoken inmates took hotel reservations for families crossing America on their summer vacations. The rest of us were taken farther down the hall to the sewing room. We stood at attention while we were counted for a third time, this time by Wenzel and Hartigan, and then sent to our machines.

Before I could start on the pile of pieces I had left over from yesterday, Hartigan grabbed my arm. “You!” he spat at me in English. For one heart–stopping minute I thought maybe Baladine had already tracked me down and given orders to treat me in some unspeakable way.

Apparently it was only my ineptitude as a seamstress that made Hartigan grab me. In a graphic mix of Spanish and English he explained I was being demoted to a cutter. The pay there was a flat dollar–thirty an hour, did I understand?

“Comprendo,” I said through lips thick with anger.

For the next three hours, with one ten–minute break, I stood in the cutting room, pinning stencils to thick stacks of cotton, then holding the stacks in position as automatic shears sliced through them. It was backbreaking work, made harder by Hartigan’s periodic eruption into the room to yell, “Vamos, mas rapido!”