Blame: A Novel by Michelle Huneven

appreciate your forthrightness. But I forgave you years ago.
    I was not surprised
, her former best friend Hannah wrote,
     
    to hear you were in prison. Sooner or later somebody was going to have the good sense to lock you up—though I’m sure you’ve already found some married guard to schtup, or someone else’s girlfriend, someone too weak or kind to deflect your freight-train come-ons. Patsy, you say you’re sorry and want to make amends to me? You want to know how to do that? Cross me off your list! Never contact me again! That’s the only true amend you could ever make to me.
     
    Sincerely, H.
     
    And this:
     
    Dear Patsy,
    I got your letter. I hope you are all right. I’m fine but I don’t like school this year. I have boring teachers except for English.
    I am on a big reading binge lately, are you? The best thing I read lately is The Alexandria Quartet which is actually 4 books in 1 box. Uncle Brice gave it to me for my birthday. (I just turned 14!)
    About what you said in your letter. Don’t feel bad about the beer and stuff. You didn’t see me, but I stole a pill from your purse and took the whole thing. That’s why I was so sleepy that night. Don’t worry about piercing my ears, either. I really wanted them pierced. Anyway, the second my grandmother saw me wearing earrings she made me take them out. My ears grew right back.
    Yours Truly, Joey Hawthorne
    •
     
    Still going to meetings, Pats?
    As always, her father was too interested, too hopeful.
    Don’t, she said. She hated the flaring of hope in his eyes. Then she hated the fear that replaced it.
    I go, she said.
    Thatagirl.
    What else is there to do? Patsy studied the other families in the visiting room and thought about her list of those she had harmed, one of whom was her father. In college, she’d stolen three hundred and fifty dollars from him. He’d overpaid her tuition one quarter and the bursar sent her the refund check. If she’d told him about it at the time, he probably would have told her to keep the money. But she cashed the check and spent it recklessly, pointedly, paying for drinks and meals until all of it was gone.
    Women were in Bertrin for stealing less. Larena got two years for paying rent with a two-hundred-dollar check drawn on a closed account—granted, not her first offense. And fifty-nine-year-old Rondene pulled two years for cashing a $137 welfare check nicked from a neighbor’s mailbox—though Rondene’s case was different. She didn’t even need the money. I jus loves to steal!
Loves
it! she told Patsy. I cain’t wait to get outta this place and steal some more!
    She couldn’t pay her father back, not now. She’d write him a check one day when she was out.
    Guess what, Dad? she said, and again, his face ignited with hope.
    I might go to fire camp in February, she said. I have to run a ten-minute mile and be able to do ten men’s push-ups and chin-ups. But it’s safer and easier time, and outdoors. This older woman I know, Gloria, qualified, so I don’t see why I won’t.
    Oh, Patsy, he said, his eyes filled with tears.
    •
    MacLemoore!
    She woke to darkness dropping away, a black wing swooping past.
    What’s that?
    No tenting, you know that.
    Oh, CO Hefferton, the night witch. Patsy rubbed her face to wake up and determined that Rhoda overhead had kicked aside her blanketso it curtained the lower bunk—and looked like tenting, what women did here for privacy, sex.
    Do it again, I’ll write you up.
    Rhoda kicked off her blanket the next night too—hot flashes, she said—but another CO was on and didn’t care or notice. Sensitized, Patsy soon woke up on cue when the blankets fell, gloried briefly in the fleeting darkness and seclusion, then yanked the blankets to the floor. A write-up could cost her a chance at fire camp.
    Eventually the two women swapped bunks. Patsy liked it up high, where the acoustic tiles blurred into chalky landscapes, and something about the altitude recalled the dorms at St.