it feel like to be in love? What did it feel like to hold somebody who wanted to hold you back? He wanted to talk to her again. He wanted to know about her life.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t afford it.
Growing up, John hadn’t had to worry about how to put food on the table or clothes on his back. His parents took care of everything. There were always fresh sheets on the bed, the toilet was magically clean and whenever he opened the refrigerator, it was filled with all the things he liked to eat. Even in prison, everything was provided for him. They had a strict schedule and firm rules, but as long as you did what you were told, you didn’t have to worry about anything.
During a good month at the car wash, John pulled in about a thousand dollars after taxes. Rent for his ten-foot by ten-foot roach-encrusted room was four hundred fifty dollars—a premium, to be certain, but no one else would take him in so his landlord felt entitled. Renting an apartment would have made things cheaper, but John couldn’t swing the hefty deposit, let alone the various connection charges and down payments utility companies required. MARTA wasn’t cheap, either. The city offered a Monthly Trans Card for unlimited bus and subway rides, but that cost around fifty-two dollars a month. Sometimes, John couldn’t afford to pay all that up front and he ended up shelling out a buck seventy-five each way in order to get to and from work.
Food, which mainly consisted of dry cereal, banana and peanut butter sandwiches and the occasional piece of fruit, ran around a hundred twenty dollars a month. John had to buy milk in small containers he could drink right away and stick with nonperishable foods. The cooler in his room was used to keep the roaches out; John couldn’t buy a bag of ice every day, especially in the summer when the heat would turn it to water before he could get it home on the bus.
For the privilege of being paroled, he paid the state two hundred thirty dollars a month. Rape and murder wasn’t cheap, and if he failed to make a payment, his ass went straight back to prison. The first money order he bought each month was made payable to the state.
This usually left him with a little less than seventy-five dollars each week for things that he needed. That was from a good week, though, and some weeks he pulled in considerably less. John forced himself to save money, skipping meals sometimes, making himself so dizzy from lack of food that he practically fell into bed at night. Once, in desperation, he had gone into one of the millions of cash-until-payday stores spotting the poorer parts of the city, but John couldn’t bring himself to pay 480 percent interest on a week-long loan. Even if he had been, they required you to have a checking account so they could wire the money directly to your bank. No bank in the world would give John Shelley a checking account.
Health insurance was a fantastical dream. John lived in terror of getting sick.
After the ill-fated phone call to his sister, John walked through the rain, kicking puddles, wishing he could kick himself for calling Joyce. She had enough trouble without him putting more on her. The truth was, he just wanted to talk to her, wanted to see how she was doing. John called her maybe once a month and she was always as happy to hear from him as she had been this morning.
A MARTA bus squealed to a stop in front of him and John checked the number before getting on. This month had been a good one, so he waved his Trans Card in front of the reader, giving the driver a nod of recognition.
“Getting cold,” the driver said.
“Sure is,” John agreed, enjoying the simple banter until he realized he’d have to buy a winter jacket. God, how much would that cost?
The bus jerked as it accelerated and John grabbed the back of a seat to steady himself as he walked down the aisle. The bus was packed, and he found a seat by an old black woman who was reading a Bible in her lap. Despite the weather, she was wearing a large pair of black sunglasses over her eyeglasses. She didn’t look up when he sat down, but he knew she had read him out of the corner of her eye.
There