His Last Wife

e starting more shit with someone else. You in here hiding out?”

“Basically.”

“Well, what was you gonna do if I was her? This ain’t some dorm room. She can see your skinny ass right through them bars,” Garcia-Bell said, pointing to the open cell door as she took a seat beside Kerry on the bottom bunk.

The mattress above them was bare. Kerry’s first cell mate, a white woman who’d stabbed her boyfriend five times in the head, had bonded out.

“Guess I don’t care,” Kerry said. “If I’m going to get beat up, what does it matter if she does it in here or out there? I’m still getting beat up.”

“It would be worse in here. No one around. It’ll take a while for the guards to get here,” Garcia-Bell explained. “Plus, Thompson got a lot of enemies. You never know if someone might want to sneak some licks in if she starts something with you on the yard.”

Kerry looked off and laughed a little to herself.

“What? What’s so funny?” Garcia-Bell asked.

Kerry’s mind switched from inside the walls of the prison to outside, where her world was so different. A simple word like yard could mean so many other things; however, none of them included a tiny outside space with nothing but dry, depleted dirt and female prisoners fighting fiercely over turns to use deflated basketballs and rusting gym equipment.

“That word—yard—it reminds me of where I went to college,” Kerry replied, not knowing if she should mention her alma mater, Spelman College, if Garcia-Bell would’ve heard of the historically black college or knew what the term meant there. In 1998, Kerry’s time on the yard included watching her best friend Marcy step with her sorority sisters, sitting on the steps in front of Manley Hall, chatting with her Spelman sisters and professors about images of black women in the media, the future of the black woman in politics and, of course, black love. There she was a third-generation Spelman girl, was called “Black Barbie,” and had dozens of Morehouse brothers from the college across the street chasing after her. There she met Jamison.

“You gonna have to let that shit go—all that shit from outside—who you were, who you thought you were—if you gonna make it in here,” Garcia-Bell cautioned. “Ain’t no tea and crumpets behind these here bars. In order to survive, you gonna have to knuckle up.”

“Knuckle up?”

“Fight, Kerry. You gonna have to fight. Ain’t nobody ever taught you how to fight?”

“You mean, like actual fisticuffs?” Kerry said, watching a group of prisoners who always stuck together walk by her cell.

“Don’t ever say that word again, but, yes, that’s what I mean,” Garcia-Bell confirmed, laughing.

“No—no one taught me how to fight. Who would? Who taught you?”

“Mi madre,” Garcia-Bell said, as if it should’ve been obvious.

“Your mother? Please. The closest Thirjane Jackson came to teaching me to fight was how to keep the mean girls in Jack and Jill from talking about me behind my back,” Kerry said.

“Jack and Jill? Like that nursery rhyme?”

“Yes. It was a social club my mother made me join when I was young,” Kerry explained. “Had to be her perfect little girl in Jack and Jill.”

“Well, you far from that now. And thinking about that out there ain’t gonna do nothing but get you caught up in here.”

“That’s the thing: I don’t plan on getting caught up in here. I’m not staying here.” Kerry had convinced herself of this. After days and weeks and months of not seeing the sun rise and set, and missing the joy of witnessing the summer season shift to a muggy Georgia fall while enjoying a walk through Piedmont Park, she promised herself she’d be home by the holiday season. She’d be with her family. Dress Tyrian as a pirate for Halloween. Help make Thanksgiving dinner. Trim the tree for Christmas without complaining. Dreams of those simple things kept her hopeful.

“Hmm. You keep saying you’re getting out by this and that time, but then I keep seeing you here in the morning.”

Kerry had already told Garcia-Bell all about her case—about how when she ran up to the rooftop of the Westin to find her ex-husband that gray morning, she knew something was wrong, knew something was going to happen. There was a woman up there. The woman was the one who threw Jamison over the edge to his death. Not Kerry. Kerry still loved Jamison. In the hotel room where they’d been cuddling just hours before, they’d talked about getting remarried. Kerry would be his third wife—after he divorced his second wife, Val.

Garcia-Bell already knew the whole story. Like everyone else in Atlanta, rich and poor, young and old, black and white, criminals and noncriminals, she wanted to know how in the world the city’s fourth black mayor—who’d come from nothing and promised the people everything—ended up split wide open with his heart and everything hanging out and his face crushed beyond recognition in the middle of Peachtree Street during morning rush-hour traffic. She’d even heard this very version of events from Kerry’s mother when Thirjane Jackson had been interviewed by a reporter with Fox Five News. But she let Kerry retell it all a few times anyway. She felt Kerry needed to.

“Well, one day you’re going to come looking for me and I’m not going to be here. I’ve got people in my corner rooting for me. It’s going to work out. I believe that,” Kerry said.

“People?” Garcia-Bell struggled not to sound cynical, but it was too hard. “By that you mean your ex-husband’s widow? The one who’s supposedly going to bust you out of here and help you find the killer?”

“Yes. I do,” Kerry replied resolutely. “I told you, she knows I didn’t do this and she has proof. It’s taking her a little time, but she’s helping my lawyer build my case and soon, everyone will know the truth. I’m innocent.”

“Sure’s taking her a long time.”

“These things take time. You know that yourself.”