Now and Again by Charlotte Rogan

competing admonitions: Move a little faster! Haste makes waste! Nobody cares if you’re late or not! She shivered to think that defeat was lurking and might be inevitable. But late for what? And why defeat?
    The prison was set on a rise, dwarfing the people who flocked every day from the employee parking lot up the long flight of granite steps and through a gauntlet of metal detectors and guards charged with keeping the prisoners in and contraband out. Every time Maggie stepped through the gate into the chilly welcome center, she winced as if she were guilty of something, as if the metal detector could see the image of the top-secret document that was squirreled away in her brain or as if the escaped one-eyed men with hooks for arms her father had invented to scare his children into obedience were watching her from wherever they were hiding. It was easy to imagine her father waiting in the shadows too, to shout at her for something she had done or not done—a shoe unlaced, a toy left carelessly on the stair instead of put away in a closet, for crying or not crying when he smacked her, or the only jam to be found in the cupboard was strawberry when didn’t he always like peach—or to chase the four of them into their rooms, bolting the doors from the outside as if order in the house, as in the world, depended upon incarceration.
    And where was her mother while all of this was going on? By the age of thirty-nine, Mary Sterling had taken to the shadows too, her body shrunken inside her paisley dress. She sent the children for the shopping and rarely ventured out. Maggie had looked helplessly on as her mother was buffeted before the winds of her father’s rages. That will never happen to me, she promised herself, and it hadn’t. Lyle always asked her what she thought before voicing his own opinion, and even though her father was long gone by the time Lyle had come along, Lyle seemed to understand that paternal absence was a kind of presence, so he tiptoed around it and helped with the dishes and remembered not to slam the door.
    Every morning, Maggie took off her bracelets and put her purse on a conveyor belt so it could be x-rayed and searched. Every morning, she smiled at the guards and wondered if they too shouted at their wives. The head of the morning detail was a narrow man with furrowed skin and furtive eyes whose name was Louis, but in the evenings, the burly Hugo was in charge. Hugo exuded an air of tense restraint, as if he was holding his manliness in check or training for some test of stamina and determination. He seemed to find the intimacy implied in searching Maggie’s purse or running a scanner over her body amusing, and their thirty-second interactions began to feel like aggressive physical encounters. Hugo would say, “We have to stop meeting like this,” in a way that could be interpreted as a joke or as something more serious disguised as a joke. Or he would scrutinize Maggie’s face or dress with a savage gleam in his eyes until she blushed and fumbled for just the right lighthearted comment that would acknowledge his superiority in terms of size and strength, while also reminding him that she had a family and that she wasn’t available now and never would be.
    But something about her interactions with Hugo suited Maggie. The layers to their little conversations fit with a growing sense that she was leading a double life, and she wondered if Hugo also thought of himself as two people: as the determined warrior he was at work and as the virile masher she imagined him to be when he went out on the weekends with his friends. Occasionally she allowed herself to respond to him in a way that hinted at the dual roles both of them were playing. “I see you’re wearing your Schwarzenegger smile today,” she might say, or “Prison guard by day, lady-killer by night.” And then Hugo would smirk at her and reply, “I haven’t killed anybody yet.”
    This wasn’t the kind of banter Maggie was used to,