Chapter 9

My call to Horace was kinda disappointing, but it would work for me anyway. He’d be coming back to see me by mid-April.

And then it was April 14th, the second worst day of my life, or maybe it was the first worst day of my life.

He took the seat across from me in the same little conference room we’d occupied in most of his visits to me in the Apache. He looked solemn; that scared me.

“I can see by your look that it’s bad news, right?” I said. His head snapped up. “I’m not getting out, right?”

“No, no, you are getting out. June 1st,” he said. “I just got the news. That’s why I hadn’t come sooner. I wanted to know what was what before I talked to you again, and now I do.”

“Okay, but you look like it’s not all good news,” I said. The man sighed.

“It’s been a long time. I mean you being in here,” he said. “A lot has changed.”

“Okay,” I said. “Just tell me that they don’t know about my physical situation. God she just can’t know about that. I have to do the dirty work and tell her myself.”

“They do not,” he said. “Could they find out? Sure, he has the money to find out anything; I mean Rodney does. But at this time, no, they do not know.” I relaxed.

“Thank God. Like I say, I need to be the one to tell Riley. I do not want it coming from somebody or somewhere else,” I said. Horace Hollins was nodding. I could see from his demeanor that there was more.

“Horace?”

“I have a letter here for you from Riley, and well, Rodney too, I guess,” he said.

“A letter? Why didn’t she just send it?” I said.

“She, they, know you’re getting out, and feared the letter might not get to you even though there is still more than a month to go,” he said.

What he said made no sense to me. Letters never took longer than a week, even with admin reading every word in them, the letters. But for some reason, she had sent this one with my lawyer. Maybe to get by the censors; that worried me.

“Okay?” I said.

He took it out of his coat pocket and set it on the table in front of me; he was not smiling. I looked at it, and I was mildly afraid of it. Well, actually, more the delicate way that he had set it down on the table’s surface than of the letter itself.

“Horace?”

“Adam, if I may, I would like to say a few things before you read it, and no, I haven’t read it. It’s to you, but, that said, I do know more or less what’s in it. So...”

“Okay,” I said. I waited for him to speak. He looked kinda sad. That made me sad. It was a full, long minute before he spoke. His first few words, as I was about to learn, would shred my soul!

“Adam, I have permission from Riley to tell you the things that I am about to tell you. And, you need to know that what I am about to tell you is true in every sense of the words you will be hearing. You may not believe me in that regard, but if not, you would be wrong. Okay?”

“Yes, I understand. But I am getting the sense that what you are going to tell me will be bad for me. Right?”

“In some sense yes,” he said. He was silent again for another long minute. I waited. I was being dumped; I was sure of it. But, well, now I would be seeing if I were right.

“Adam, Riley is married. She has three children now, not just Briana. She still loves you, but not in the same way she did back in the day. As I say, she is married now, and her husband is your brother Rodney,” he said.

Talk about slamming a man to the mat! I was so stunned that I could not actually comprehend what the man had said on any meaningful level. And yet, conversely, I did understand. I was right about her dumping me. The upside to that was that she would not ever need to know that I was no longer a man, well, a complete and normal man. She wouldn’t be missing anything.

“Oh,” I said, more quietly than I had ever said anything.

“She asked me to ask you to read the letter in front of me, that so that you could ask any questions you might have of an immediate nature, or say anything you needed to; but, not to push you if you didn’t want to,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, again. He waited.

I looked down at the table, at the letter. I pulled the toxic thing close to me and looked at it some more. It was my turn to wait a full minute before opening it. I did, I waited. I opened it. I looked at the man across from me before I started to silently read her words to me.

Adam,

Adam my love. You can never know how hard this letter was for me to write. It is a letter because I could not imagine facing you knowing how these words might, no would, affect you. But I did need to write them if not say them.

I know that Horace has spoken with you, and you now know the biggest thing: I am married. I do have three children: Briana, James, and LeeAnn. My husband is your brother, Rodney. And yes, Adam, I do love him as I once loved you. And make no mistake, I do love and honor you still, different than what might have been, but truly, nonetheless.

Rodney has not seen this letter, but some of what I am writing here are things that he and I have discussed regarding how to go forward now that you will soon be free and out of that awful place: the place you saved me from. And, oh my God how awful I feel for being the cause of you being in there; you can never know how awful I feel. That said...

Adam, we need you to be a member of our family, just as you have always been. Please do not abandon us, as you might assume, wrongly assume, that we have abandoned you. We love you, and my man, the table I am sitting at now and writing this letter is wet with my tears, tears of fear that you might abandon us, me. Don’t do it, Adam.

Rodney has kept your condo all of this time, almost twenty years, in perfect condition. It has been somewhat upgraded because of the advance of technology over these many years, but otherwise it is as you left it those many years ago. Also, your ‘62 Buick is also in perfect—that’s perfect—condition for you to have and drive as soon as you get out, and you already have a driver’s license; it is in the glove compartment of the car—again, that is due to Rodney’s influence.

“Finally, Rod knows that you will be seriously angry with him, and perhaps even more so with me, but he wants you to know that our door will never be closed to you; you only have to walk through it.