Or: Incorporate All the Words You Guessed for That Day’s Wordle

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“My dad’s a lifer. He went in when I was three, so I don’t remember him well.” Madeline takes a sip of water from the red diner cup. A crack runs through the L of the white COCA COLA logo; Henry fixes his gaze on it.

Taking a sip of his decaf, he rolls the bitterness around his tongue. Madeline is talking to another woman, Tay, whose father is also in for life. The waitress drops off two plates of fries and a burger for the others at the booth. Henry rubs his paper napkin between his thumb and forefinger until it pills and shreds in layers; then he rolls the pills between his fingertips and wills his concentration there.

“I guess the hardest part is just that he misses so much,” Tay says. “I used to think all the time about him not being able to give me away, but I guess I’ve had a while to work through that.” The other two women at the table sigh and nod empathetically.

Henry thinks about his own dad. He thinks about being eight, and his dad helping him set up a lemonade stand at the curb. He thinks about being sixteen, his dad straightening his tie on the way out the door to pick up his homecoming date. As Tay and Madeline and Emmy detail the moments they’ve missed with their fathers, Henry replays his memories from each example.

He’s never shared at these groups. Every time he thinks of speaking, something steals his voice. Instead he sits and listens, stewing in the guilt of having known his father through much of his formative life. When he’s surrounded by the people who didn’t have it, it feels like a privilege.

He thinks about his mother: the yellow and purple marks that would appear around her upper arm and the way she would lean into the mirror while she pressed concealer around her eye. Henry thinks about the wreck, about the way his heart pounded in his throat and how he hardly had time to brace. He thinks about the red liquid that coated his hand when he brought it away from his head, and the way his mother clutched her side, and the red and blue reflections on the snow.

“I don’t visit him as often as I’d like to,” Emmy says, stirring her black coffee with one of the wooden sticks from the dispenser. “It’s just so depressing, and they make you wait, and I have sensory issues around the static from the phone. If they let us talk face-to-face that’d be one thing, but the static just grates on me.”

“So expensive, too,” says Tay with a frown. “They make them work all day and pay them nothing, and then we have to pay to call or video chat or make sure they have enough for the commissary.”

“There’s no rhyme or reason to the criminal justice system,” says Madeline. “Get them in, keep them in. Just another function of capitalism.”

Henry takes another sip of his coffee. He’s never gone to visit. He wonders if it would give him some sense of peace around the subject — closure, maybe, or validation. He agrees with the others at the table about the system. As unfair, as cruel, as inhumane as it is, relief burdens a small, stalwart part of him. He holds the two truths at once: it is a broken, awful, sadistic system; because of it, he and his mother are safe.