And the one I learned myself, on a bunk, with a pencil.
Write it down.
All of it.
Every time.
Because someday a woman in a navy dress might ask you what happened, and you’ll want to be able to answer her with more than your word.
Last Thursday, a woman in the back row — twenty-six, eleven months in, a bookkeeping conviction she says she didn’t earn and I believe her — raised her hand.
“Ms. Cooper. When you got out. Who picked you up?”
“Nobody.”
“Nobody?”
“Nobody. I took the bus.”
“That’s a shame,” she said. “You seem like somebody who’d have people.”
I had to look at the whiteboard for a second.
“I do now,” I said.
“It took nineteen days.”
“And an old woman with a shoebox full of receipts.”
Dorothy is seventy-five.
I still live in the room with the window over the backyard.
I pay rent now.
