Mean Woman Blues

two banks of phones, but you could only call collect, because of course they’d taken your money. The phones were in use right now (and most of the time), and from time to time, it appeared, the guards turned them off just to be ornery. Anyway, sometimes they just wouldn’t work, and then all of a sudden they did.
    For the moment, that was okay. She was thinking, weighing consequences. Her parents would certainly bail her out, but there’d be a big fat price. Two prices: the problems she’d have dealing with their judgment about it and the problems they’d have with worry and shame. And there was an additionally complicating factor: It was a precarious feeling, not knowing why she was here. She felt unaccountably guilty. Could she have forged checks in her sleep or something?
    There was only one person she wanted to see, one person who could make her feel as if she weren’t scum after all, one person who wasn’t going to judge her, and that was Isaac. She was pretty sure she loved him, or could love him if he’d be kind enough to return the sentiment, but the simple fact was, she’d just caught him with another woman.
    Everyone else in the place was a career criminal and didn’t care who knew it. Some of the women dozed, but they poked up when someone new came in. When it was Terri, a prisoner hollered at her, a skinny woman who looked drugged-out and tired and used up. “Hey. What you in for? You look like a
good
girl.”
    “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
    “What’d you do?”
    She couldn’t say she’d done nothing. Everybody knew there were no innocent people in jail. She didn’t want to listen to a dozen hags laughing at her. She fudged her answer a little bit: “I’m in for forgery.” The word felt so odd on her tongue. Forgery was something that happened in movies; she wasn’t even sure how you did it. With great care, surely. You must have to practice the other person’s signature and maybe steal their driver’s license. Even in her sleep she couldn’t have done that. Maybe she was a multiple personality. Maybe today’s multiples went in for money instead of sex.
    “Oh, forgery. That’s nothin’. My sister-in-law did that once.”
    “What happened to her?” Terri was avid.
    “I don’t remember.” The light went out of the woman’s face, replaced by what looked like a twinge of pain. She was probably coming down from whatever she was on.
    Terri had a semi-comforting thought. Once when her bank statement had come, she saw that some other Terri Whittaker’s check was in the package, a check that had been paid from her account.
    She took it in and was shocked to be asked to sign an affidavit of forgery. “But I don’t think there’s forgery,” she had said. “I think this check is from someone else’s account— another Terri Whittaker.” She didn’t say, “This is some dim-witted bank error,” but she certainly thought it.
    In the end she signed the affidavit because they told her it was the only alternative to paying the check herself, but she’d always felt guilty about it. Had the chickens now come home to roost? Had someone signed an affidavit against her, as the result of a clerical error? At least it was an explanation.
    She felt frozen in more ways than one. She thought later that she must have been in shock. She sat immobile and shivering, trying to take in her surroundings, comprehend her situation. She really didn’t want to put her mind to what to do next.
    They called her for pre-booking, and she felt a shock of betrayal. How could they hold her without booking her? Forgetting the question prohibition, she blurted it out. The deputy laughed. “We can hold you seventy-two hours without booking you.”
    Seventy-two hours!
    “You’ve got to be kidding! You can’t do that.”
    The woman smiled, not a worry in the world. “Sure can.”
    She was so damn smug and superior, like she enjoyed making Terri miserable.
    Every cell in Terri’s body protested.
But I’m a good citizen. I pay taxes. I vote. I’m a
good
girl
. She knew better than to say it.
    When she came back to the lockup, one of the phones was free, so she grabbed it. But she didn’t do anything, just stood there and dithered some more. Finally, someone said, “You gonna use it or not?”
    Timidly, Terri moved away.
    There was a toilet of sorts in the holding tank, a toilet partly shielded by a waist-high concrete wall, but from certain angles everyone could see you sitting there doing