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with the days and weeks and months all mashed together in his brain the way they were, he wasn’t even sure he was remembering the thing right to begin with.
    At 6:00 A.M. , when the shift changed, the guards woke everybody up again, to call out names and numbers, then moved down the hallway with the laundry bags to swap out boxers and socks. This meant today was a Friday. Carter didn’t get a chance to shower but once a week or see the barber except every sixty days, so it was good to have clean clothes. The sticky feeling of his skin was worse in summer, when you sweated all day onto yourself even if you lay still as a stone, but from what his lawyer had told him in the letter he’d sent six months ago, he wouldn’t have to go through another Texas summer in his life. The second of June would be the end of it.
    His thoughts were broken by two hard bangs on the door. “Carter. Anthony Carter.” The voice belonged to Pincher, head of the shift.
    “Aw, come on, Pincher,” Anthony said from his bunk. “Who’d you think was in here?”
    “Present for cuffs, Tone.”
    “Ain’t time for rec. Ain’t my day for the shower neither.”
    “You think I got all morning to stand here talking about it?”
    Carter eased himself off the bunk, where he’d been looking at the ceiling and thinking about the woman, that glass of iced tea on the tray. Hisbody felt achy and slow, and with effort he lowered himself onto his knees with his back facing the door. He’d done this a thousand times but still didn’t like it. Keeping your balance was the tricky part. Once he was kneeling, he pulled his shoulder blades inward, twisted his arms around, and guided his hands, palms up, through the slot that the food came through. He felt the cold bite of the metal as Pincher cuffed his wrists. Everybody called him Pincher on account of how tight he did the cuffs.
    “Stand back now, Carter.”
    Carter pushed one foot forward, his left knee making a grinding sound as he shifted his center of gravity, then rose carefully to his feet, simultaneously withdrawing his cuffed hands from the slot. From the far side of the door came the clanking of Pincher’s big ring of keys, and then the door opened to show him Pincher and the guard they called Dennis the Menace, on account of his hair, which looked like the kid’s in the cartoon, and the fact that he liked to menace you with the stick. He had a way of finding spots on your body that you never knew could hurt so bad with just a little poke of wood.
    “Seems like somebody’s come to see you, Carter,” Pincher said. “And it isn’t your mother or your lawyer.” He didn’t smile or anything, but Dennis looked to be enjoying himself. He gave that stick of his a twirl like a majorette.
    “My mom’s been with Jesus since I was ten years old,” Carter told him. “You know that, Pincher, I told you that about a hundred times. Who is it wants me?”
    “Can’t say. Warden set it up. I’m just supposed to take you to the cages.”
    Carter supposed this was no good. It’d been so long since the woman’s husband had come to visit; maybe he’d come to say goodbye, or else to tell him I changed my mind, I don’t forgive you after all, go straight to hell, Anthony Carter. Either way Carter didn’t have anything else to say to the man. He’d said sorry to everyone over and over and felt done with it.
    “Come on with you then,” Pincher said.
    They led him down the corridor, Pincher gripping him hard by an elbow to steer him like a kid through a crowd, or a girl he was dancing with. This was how they took you anywhere, even to the shower. Part of you got used to people’s hands being on you this way, and part of you didn’t. Dennis led the way, opening the door that sealed administrative segregation from the rest of H-Wing and then the outer, second door that took them down the hall through general population to the cages. It’d been almost two years since Carter had been off H-Wing—H for