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Street and find something Cajun or Greek. Better yet, Italian.
    Yes, Italian. I will drink several glasses of a full-bodied red wine—a Brunello di Montalcino would be nice, or a Barbaresco—and
     I will read the news or e-mails on my iPad so no one tries to talk to me. So no one tries to pick me up, the way people often do
     when I travel alone and eat and drink alone and do so many things alone. I will sit at a table by a window and text Benton
     and drink wine and tell him that he was right about something being very wrong. I’ve been set up or manipulated, and I’m not
     welcome here, and the gloves are off, I’ll let him know. I intend to grab the truth with my bare hands.
    “Well, imagine not really knowing what you look like anymore,” says the shackled woman sitting across from me, and her physical
     appearance is her biggest heartbreak, not the death of Jack Fielding or the boy she ran over when she was drunk.
    “There was tremendous opportunity for me. I missed a very real chance to be somebody,” she says. “An actress, a model, a famous
     poet. I have a damn good singing voice. Maybe I could have composed my own lyrics and been a Kelly Clarkson. Of course, they
     didn’t have
American Idol
when I was coming along, and Katy Perry is a closer fit, more what I used to look like if she was blond. I suppose I could
     still be a famous poet. But success and acclaim are much more reachable if you’re beautiful, and I was. Back in the old days,
     I’d stop traffic. People would gawk. The way I looked back then, I could have what I wanted.”
    Kathleen Lawler is unnaturally pale from years of being shielded from the sun, her body soft and shapeless, not overweight
     but broken down and doughy from a life that has been chronically inactive and unavoidably sedentary. Her breasts sag, and
     her upper thighs spread widely in the plastic chair, her former attention-getting figure as formless now as the white prison
     uniform she and other inmates wear in segregation. It’s as if she’s no longer physically human, as if she’s evolved backward, returned to a primitive stage of existence like a platyhelminthes, a flatworm, she says sardonically
     with a thickly elastic Georgia drawl that makes me think of taffy.
    “I know you’re probably sitting here looking at me and wondering what I’m talking about,” she says, as I recall pictures I’ve
     seen, including mug shots from her arrest in 1978 after she and Jack were caught having sex.
    “But when I met him at that ranch outside of Atlanta?” she says. “Well, I was something. I don’t mind saying it, because it’s
     true. Long corn-silk hair, big-busted, with an ass like a Georgia peach and legs that wouldn’t quit, and huge golden-brown
     eyes, what Jack used to call my tiger eyes. It’s funny how some things get passed on, like you’ve been programmed in the womb
     or maybe at conception and there’s no escaping. The roulette wheel spins and stops and your number comes up and that’s what
     you are no matter how hard you try or even if you don’t try at all. You are what you are, you are what you’re not, and other
     events and other people just enhance the angel or devil, the winner or the loser in you. It’s all about the spinning of the
     wheel, whether it’s hitting the winning home run in the World Series or being raped. Decided for you, and forget undoing it. You’re a scientist. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know about genetics. I’m sure you agree you can’t change nature.”
    “What people experience also has significant impact,” I reply.
    “You can see it with the dogs,” Kathleen continues, not interested
     in my opinions unless she tells me what they are. “You get a greyhound that was mistreated, and it’s going to react to certain
     things a certain way and have its sensitivities. But it’s either a good dog or a bad dog. It was either a winner on the track
     or wasn’t. It’s either trainable or not. I