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Mark woke to an annoying, persistent tapping on his cell bars.
“Wakey wakey, Mr Kingland,” Vernon’s voice taunted him from beyond the bars.
“Oh, hell,” Mark moaned, and rolled over to face the wall, but his reprieve from the prison guard was short lived. The room shook as Vernon gave the bars an almighty whack with his nightstick.
“I said get up!”
“All right, all right!” Mark pulled himself off the bed and glared at Vernon. “What the hell is your problem?”
“You’re my problem.”
“Why? What the hell have I done to you? All the hell you’ve given me since I walked in here, and for what? Just getting your rocks off, are ya?” Marks bellows were met only by Vernon’s taunting eyes and vicious smile. “I should have you fired,” Mark spat.
Vernon’s grin widened. “Yeah, right.” He looked at Mark as though he would laugh.
Mark wanted to tear his own hair out, he was so frustrated by uselessness of all this. More than anything he wanted to go back to bed. As he was about to lie back down, Vernon said, “You’ve got a visitor by the way, thought you’d like to know.”
“And how hard was it to tell me that in the first place? Why did you have to get on my case? Why can’t you just do your damn job?”
“I can do my job and have fun too,” Vernon sneered, as he pulled the bars back to let Mark out.
Vernon followed Mark down the hall to the visitors room, let him in and disappeared back down the way they came. Mark saw his mother on the far side of the room, and sitting next to her was a man he’d never seen before. His mother and the man were deep in conversation, and only noticed Mark when he sat himself down opposite them. When his mother saw him, she beamed.
“Hey baby, how are you doing?”
Mark didn’t answer her, or even look at her. Instead, he eyed the stranger up and down. The man smiled an uneasy smile.
“Mark, Mark?” his mother leaned over to get his attention, “Mark, this is David.”
“David?”
“Your father.”
Mark’s mouth fell open and he was unable to speak. He stared David up and down again, then looked hard into his face. He tried to see himself in David’s features, but his eyes were too bloodshot and blurry from shock and lack of sleep to be able to see details. To Mark, all it was sitting there was some guy he had never seen before and who was supposed to be his father. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Was this good or bad? He didn’t know. His brain was too melted to process anything. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. Even all the questions that had filled his brains for years just disappeared, and all he could do was stare.
“Now, Mark, David is going to help in any way he can to reduce your sentence. We’ve spoken to your lawyers already and they are putting together something for the judge …”
“Where did you find him?” Mark asked, his voice low.
“Well, I tracked him down through the Motor Registry and …”
“The lawyer told me he couldn’t find Dad, that he’d given up.”
Mark’s mother was silent for a moment, then finally answered, “Well, I had a lucky break.”
Mark nodded, slow and deliberate. He didn’t take his eyes off David, who by now was fidgeting with his shirt, fingernails, anything besides looking back at Mark.
“Where have you been all these years?” Mark asked David in a dull voice.
“Oh, around,” David’s voice shook, and his fingers fidgeted. He didn’t seem like the wife beating loser his mother had described. Mark tore his eyes away from David. He tried to focus on his mother instead, but felt like he would drop to the floor in an exhausted heap any minute.
“So what are the lawyers doing?”
“They just asked David a bunch of questions, and now they’re preparing something to give to the judge as …” her simple brain struggled to remember the words the lawyer had used, “oh, late evidence, or something like that.”
“Right.”
His mother tried to ignore Mark’s lack of enthusiasm. She turned to David and patted his hand. “Isn’t our son beautiful? He turned out to be very handsome, don’t you think?”
David said nothing, only giving Mark a quick look up and down then returning to his fidgeting. Mark was sure he didn’t look great right now, and he was no oil painting at the best of times. He tried to smile at his mother to thank her for attempting to cheer him up, but he couldn’t manage it. He had enough trouble keeping his eyes open, never mind having the energy to do something as foreign as smiling.
Mark heard a guard approach, and took it as an opportunity to get out of there. “I have to go now, mum.”
“Can’t you stay and talk to your father some more?” his mother pleaded.
“He had twenty-two years to talk to me,” Mark flashed a glare at David, who only looked down at his feet.
As Mark was led back to his cell, he wondered if he should thank heaven for the miracle he’d asked for and seemed to have been granted. But he held off for the moment to see if ‘father dearest’ could deliver the goods that would get him out of jail sooner rather than later
© Cynthia M. Piromalli
©2003 StoriesByEmail.com
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