Page 8 of Worth of Waste

He hadn’t called his lawyer in.

He didn’t have family or friends that were unconnected to the mob.

Who in the hell was it?

“Let’s go,” the guard said, directing Dino out of the cell.

He would find out soon enough.

Karen

KAREN hadn’t thought about how cold a prison must feel like on the inside. She had always been the passerby on the outside, getting just a glimpse of the large building with its concrete walls. She hadn’t actually given much thought as to how the people inside must feel to be locked away.

Of course, she knew criminals deserved to be exactly where they were—locked up, hidden away from society to do their time.

She was not naive to what prisons were meant for, she simply hadn’t been put in a position where she needed to care about the people—or rather, one person—inside the concrete walls. Until now, it seemed.

Karen tugged her jacket closer to her chest, trying not to be bothered by the guards on both sides of the Plexiglas windows. The hard chair was doing nothing to soothe the sudden ache in her back, and even sitting didn’t help the restlessness coursing through her nervous system.

She still wasn’t sure if she should have come to visit Dino. A part of her wanted to see him, needed to talk to him, if only for a few minutes. She needed answers that only he could give her, but whether or not he would be willing to talk was a whole other story.

The other part of her, a little louder than the part that wanted to be where she was, had her squirming in her seat with an anxious flare that just wouldn’t let go, no matter how hard she tried to ignore it.

Maybe she shouldn’t have come at all.

Shit, as it were, it had taken her a good two weeks just to gain up the courage to go looking for where Dino had been placed, and then another two weeks to talk herself into a visit. Karen hadn’t realized just how involved visiting an inmate actually was. There was much more to it than just showing up and asking for time to see a prisoner.

She had been smart enough to call ahead and find out if there were scheduled visiting days, but no one had thought to mention during that phone call that visitors needed to sign in, reserve certain times, plus go through a massive amount of security before they could even get their visit with an inmate.

Showing up with no previous sign-in, no visiting reservation, and having no clue how the security for the prison was actually run, Karen had been left waiting for hours on the off chance that someone might flake on their visiting time.

She hadn’t even been guaranteed a visit with Dino when she finally got through the sign-in information, but rather, shoved into a waiting area where she fiddled with her phone and stared at gray walls for hours.

Thankfully, someone hadn’t shown up for their visitation, and Karen was walked through another hallway and sat down in a hard chair, facing a Plexiglas window where she could see another chair waited. On the walls of both sides of the glass, phones sat waiting for her to pick up one, and Dino to pick up the other. Thin barrier walls separated her seating section from a row of several others.

The barriers did nothing to help hide the conversations going on.

She could still hear the conversations of others visiting inmates, though she couldn’t hear what the inmates were saying from their side of the wall, or even see them behind their barriers.

Hearing them was more than enough.

A mother talking to her son.

A girlfriend crying to her boyfriend.

A friend reassuring his friend.

Karen wished there was a bit more privacy offered for people, but as soon as the thought came on, she knew how ridiculous it was. This was prison, for fuck’s sake.

There was no privacy.

No one expected any sort of discretion.

That was probably her first real understanding that coming to the prison to see and talk to Dino was absolutely a mistake. It didn’t matter that a huge portion of her heart was still owned by a man she didn’t really know at all. It didn’t make a difference that his lies did little to cut away at the feelings she still held for him.

The questions she wanted to ask—the things she needed to know—could not be asked here.

Still, even knowing this, Karen didn’t move from her chair. Her fingers drummed a fast beat to the small ledge that acted as a shelf in front of the Plexiglas window.