“I won’t be naive about it,” she said, helping him.
“I guess that’s what I meant. Can you get your license and uniform taken care of right away? Start on Friday and work the weekend?”
“You bet.”
He laughed at her. “Around here we say, You betcha.”
“You betcha, then.”
He leaned down and whispered to her. “The guests are almost all Midwestern tightwads. Friendly as hell but the tips suck.”
“I’ll be okay.” She laughed. She wanted to jump up and down. To throw her arms around him and kiss him. To shout to the heavens that her life was now officially beginning.
After completing the rest of the required paperwork, having a tour of the dining room and kitchen, meeting a few of the staff and learning how to punch in and out, Krista began the long walk back to the house. It was late afternoon, nearly four. A nice time of day. She hadn’t let Charley drive her over, though of course she had offered. Surely Charley had not called this nice Mr. McAllister and begged him to give her a job, then act all surprised if Krista mentioned her? No, Mr. McAllister’s surprise was genuine. And he had this thing about giving people a chance, that was easy to see. Everyone liked him there, too; people couldn’t fake that all the time. Except Elizabeth, the sourpuss, who didn’t like anyone. People made faces when her name came up, though no one said anything.
Krista wouldn’t ask about her. She wasn’t going to ask any questions! She just wanted to work; she wanted to pitch in for groceries, give her mother some money, buy her own underwear, live a real life.
Halfway home she passed an empty lot with a boat ramp and dock. Not an uncommon sight. Many people bought a lot, erected the dock and plowed a ramp, but were years away or maybe never intended to build a house. They might bring a trailer up here or camp for a couple of weeks each summer and leave the land as it was.
She walked down the sloping lot toward the lake. There was a nice swing hanging from a broad-boughed elm. People must not steal much around here, she thought. She sat on the swing, took off her shoes and leaned back, guiding the swing to and fro with her toes on the grass. Staring out at the beautiful, still lake.
There was that feeling again. In her throat. And along with the feeling came thoughts of work, her mother, Meg’s cancer, seeing Charley’s son, maybe even seeing Charley’s long-lost daughter, then work again and the idea of buying her mother a cell phone. And then she let it go. Let it all flood out of her in great gulps and sobs. Loud cries, unlike anything she’d done in years. You didn’t dare show this kind of weakness in prison. “Oh, God, oh, God, thank you, God, thank you, God, thank you, God,” she cried. And then she drew up her knees, embraced them with her arms and laid her head down for a good, healthy, cleansing cry. Everything was going to be all right. Finally. Finally. Finally. It flooded out of her in relief such as she had never known.
* * *
Krista let herself cry for a good half hour until it left her eyes feeling swollen and her cheeks chapped. She never let herself obsess about the past, but today it all came back. Megan and Charley knew her story, of course, and they didn’t expect her to go over it again. But she asked herself, What would I do if Mr. McAllister asked me? She’d tell him, she decided at once. Because not only had he earned the right, taking a chance on her as he had, but if he wanted to, he could look it up. No convicted criminal’s story was private.
She’d written about it in the autobiographical story she’d been working on. That, in fact, was a relatively short and simple account. Krista started getting into trouble early, at about the time everyone bailed out and left her, at the age of fourteen, to hold things together. It was an impossible job. Her cousin drowned, her dad fled, her little sister was put first in a hospital and then in foster care; her mother fell into a dark and relentless depression, and her older sister, Hope, had somehow convinced their grandparents to remove her from the discomforts of her dysfunctional family and take her in. Hope had been like that all her life—able to detach herself from reality while she concentrated on her fantasy life. Krista often tried to imagine how that worked. Let’s see—Mom can’t get off the couch, Dad’s gone, Bev’s in the booby hatch, Krista’s in jail... Do you think we could have squab at my graduation party, Grandma?
Krista was fourteen when she was the only one left but her mother. And her mother was not up to speed, as they say.
“And how about you, Krista?” the judge had asked after Hope went to him. “Are you of a mind to come and live with us, follow our rules and meet our expectations?”
Krista wouldn’t leave Jo. The judge was willing to give his daughter a little money on which to survive and there was some government check of some kind because there was no income to support them, but unless Jo agreed to let the judge work a divorce from her wayward, missing spouse, she was on her own. Krista didn’t quite understand why Jo wouldn’t do that but there was a young, inexperienced part of her that felt a certain relief that Jo didn’t completely give up on Roy. It made no sense, but he was her father. How could Krista leave her, too? And live in that rigid mausoleum on Grand Avenue with Aunt Lou dropping in regularly to count the silver and look down her nose at Hope and Krista? And be in by nine p.m. and wear frilly crap to church every Sunday? So, in her first step on the road to rebellion to her grandfather, she said, “Hell, no. I’d rather eat shit and die.”
Krista did it her way. She hung out with bad kids, got in trouble for everything from shoplifting to possession of marijuana, dropped out of school—to the relief of her teachers—and verbally abused her mother, who she loved. After about three years of that Krista ran away at the age of seventeen with an older guy named Rick French and they lived day to day and town to town all the way to California.
There was no question in Krista’s mind she deserved to go to prison for the bad things she’d done. She and Rick stole, did drugs and sometimes sold them; she prostituted herself for money and kept downright evil company. But she never owned a gun and was opposed to doing bodily harm to anyone. One could argue that selling drugs was doing bodily harm but they only sold to addicts and never tried to coax any pure-blooded youngster into trying drugs. They were too hard up for money to give away drugs!
When she realized Rick had used a gun to rob a gas station she panicked and tried to leave him. He responded by finding her and beating her senseless in the bedroom of a house while there was a party going on. A bunch of people were right outside the door and could hear his fists crunching into her face and body. They heard her screaming, heard her begging. When she found out Rick had actually shot a man, who later died, in another robbery, just the fact that she showed fear and remorse caused him to beat her again.
A few months later they stopped at an all-night gas-and-convenience store for beer and cigarettes. Rick must have made a spontaneous decision to rob the place. The store was empty but for Rick and Krista and she was looking at magazines. She heard Rick’s voice. “I’ll have all the money in the till, Bud.”
There was silence for a second. “Now!” Rick said. Then he called out to her. “Got that beer, babe?”
Next, Krista heard a loud shout and the sounds of a struggle. She ran around the aisle and saw that Rick and an overweight, middle-aged clerk were struggling over the counter. The gun, which had been knocked out of Rick’s hand, lay at Krista’s feet. The clerk had a grip on Rick’s leather jacket. Rick was straining to break free as Krista bent to pick up the gun. Rick tore himself loose; Krista trained the gun on the clerk. And froze.
“Shoot him, baby. Then we’ll go.”
She stood stricken. Paralyzed.
“If you don’t shoot the son of a bitch, I’ll shoot you. Let’s do it, Krista.”
Shoot him? It was bad enough all she had done. Looking back on it, she realized she could have gotten away from him when she first knew how dangerous he was, but at the time she didn’t understand that. She was afraid of him, afraid he’d find her and kill her. At that time, chemically impaired and battered and all of seventeen, she saw no way out. One thing she did know for absolute sure, and even time and sobriety and knowledge would never change the fact, was that at the time of that holdup she had no way out. If she didn’t follow his orders he was going to kill her.
Rick made an exasperated grunt and moved toward her. She pointed the gun at Rick and fired. The force blew Rick backward, crashing through a floor display of paperbacks, onto the floor. Her vision cleared and she saw him lying there in a rapidly growing dark red puddle. Not moving at all. Her first clear, logical thought was that the bad part of her life was finally over. It felt so good.
“Call the police,” she told the clerk. Then she waited for them to come and get her. Believing, all the while, that her mom or grandpa or Aunt Lou or someone would help her explain this huge misunderstanding and she would gladly go home and live a quiet and law-abiding life.
The facts slowly became self-evident. Grandpa Berkey had no influence in California and his hard line against criminals prevented him from paying for a defense attorney, it would seem. Krista got a not-very-talented public defender. The abuse Krista suffered at the hands of Rick was inadmissible and she was an accomplice/accessory in all the crimes he had committed, all of which she helped the police determine. Including the armed robbery while she sat in the car with no knowledge he even owned a gun. Her criminal history since the age of fourteen was all admissible, of course. It gave her the appearance of something a bit more dangerous than a misunderstood teenager. She became the Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde. They kicked her ass and took her name. She got two life sentences plus the armed robbery convictions.
Her grandfather the judge wrote her a very long, very moralistic letter in his shaky old hand and advised her that she had no grounds for appeal in his opinion. He had obviously followed the case but wouldn’t help. He died shortly thereafter. Grandma and Aunt Lou never wrote. Krista heard from her mother when she finally got medical help and rose out of her depression. Jo was devastated by what had happened to her children.