Page 42 of Don't Tell Me How to Die

The hands stayed high.

“And who started sharing in the profits when there finally was a profit?”

Same hands.

“McCormick’s is a family business,” my father said. “But a lot of people not named McCormick are part of this family. So now you know why we celebrate Thanksgiving together. And why we say, ‘God bless Black Monday.’”

The room cheered.

“One more thing. This is the first year Kate isn’t running around the room, giving hugs, kissing the kids, and packing doggie bags for you all to take home. But she’s still with us.” He raised his glass. “To Kate.”

Everyone drank. And someone, probably Lizzie, hit play on the sound system and the room filled with the Dubliners singing “Whiskey in the Jar.” Grandpa Mike grabbed Dotty Briggs and twirled her onto the makeshift dance floor. The party was just getting started.

I walked Johnny over to our quiet little corner of the room. “What did you think?” I said.

“You’re a lucky girl, Maggie,” he said. “You’ve got a great family.”

“No, I mean about Connie.”

“What do you know about her?” he asked.

I told him the little she had told us.

“I think she left something out,” he said. “Something big. You’d never pick up on it, but me coming from where I come from, she couldn’t hide it from me.”

“What do you mean you coming from where you come from?” I said.

“Maggie, my father did a six-year bid at Sing Sing. Then he did five more in Dannemora, not to mention county jail three or four times.”

I nodded. I’d known that.

“Over the years, at least half a dozen of his prison buddies would swing by to keep my mothercompany... if you catch my drift. A couple Black, a couple white, but they all had one thing in common. No matter how long they’d been out, they couldn’t shake their mess hall eating habits. Did you see how Connie grabbed Felipe’s hand when he reached across her plate to get the salt?”

“Yeah, I caught that. She said he startled her.”

“He didn’t startle her. She was guarding her food. Did you see how fast she ate? She inhaled it before I even got my hands on the mashed potatoes. She’s conditioned.”

I gave him a blank stare. “Conditioned to what?”

“Institutional dining,” he said. “That move she made on Felipe was a classic jailhouse tell.”

He paused to see if I made sense of the words. And then he left no room for doubt.

“Trust me, Maggie,” he said. “That woman did prison time.”

TWENTY-FIVE

I stood there, the sounds of fiddles, pipes, tin whistles, banjos, and bodhran drums in my ears, mixed with the cacophony of handclapping, foot stomping, well-lubricated revelers, and I was sure I’d heard Johnny wrong.

“Prison?” I said.

“I know,” he said. “She’s pretty slick, but I was eyeing her at dinner. She hunches over when she eats, and she uses her elbows and arms to block her plate.” He mimicked the action.

“So?”

“So, Felipe is lucky she didn’t stab him with a fork. Protecting your food is a big thing when you’re locked up. So is eating fast. Some chow lines give you six minutes to hoover it all down before they rotate. You do that three meals a day for a couple of years, and it’s a hard habit to shake.”

“You think she was in foryears?”

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