The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls - Hardcover

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Anissa Gray is a Senior Editor at CNN Worldwide and a contributor to Emmy and DuPont-Columbia award-winning coverage of some of the most consequential stories of our time. She began her career at Reuters as a reporter, based in New York, covering business news and international finance. Born in St. Joseph, Michigan, Gray studied English and American literature at New York University. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her wife.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2018 Anissa Gray

Althea

You do a lot of thinking in jail. Especially when you’re locked in the box that’s your cell. Mine is about as big as the walk-in closet I had back at home, but in place of leather bags and slingbacks and racks of clothes, I’ve got bunk beds, a stainless-steel sink-and-toilet combo, and a compact, padlocked cabinet. The cabinet’s where you keep your valuables, like family pictures, commissary, and letters, including the one from your daughter that’s not addressed to you. The letter that, truth be told, you just can’t bring yourself to read, so you’ve got it tucked inside the Bible that belonged to your dead mother.

The Bible’s the one thing you read religiously, but not for scripture. You read it for the notes written in the margins. Then, when it’s lights out and you can’t read anymore, you lock the Bible up in the cabinet and crawl in your bunk. The top bunk, which you’re still scared of falling out of. You’d still be in the bottom bunk, if it was up to you, but your new crazy-quiet cellmate asked for that bunk in a way that made you feel like she might kill you as you slept on it, if you said no.

Now you lie here, wide awake, with the compact cabinet across the way and the sink-and-toilet combo near the foot of the bed, thinking and remembering because that’s all you’ve got here in the dark when sleep won’t come. And it hardly ever comes. I’m usually up thinking about getting out or what it was like before I came in or why I did what I did and how what I did compares to the next woman’s crime.

It’s always me versus Inmate X: I did this, but at least I didn’t do that.

I used to meet with the chaplain, somebody who’s seen everything. We’d sit in a little room that had a view to the outside, with him in his metal chair, black shirted, white collared, but casual in jeans. The type who probably plays guitar to youth groups in parks. He’d sit with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward with his back to the window while I stared past his pink, freckled bald spot to the jail’s front lawn and the flagpole.

“Don’t go comparing crimes like that,” the chaplain would say. “There’s no good in it, Althea. What you’ve done doesn’t have to define you.”

“Then what does?”

“Only you know that. No one can tell you who you are.”

I stopped meeting with him.

Who am I?

I ask myself that question every night I lay my head down in here. Althea Marie Butler-Cochran: round, dimpled face; rounding, dimpled body; smooth, light brown skin. There was a definition of me that went with that name, face, and body, but it’s hard to see it now, even though I still look pretty much the same, except for the jailhouse weight gain.

I used to think I was like a river. A mighty force of nature. A real river that I used to watch and dip my feet in, sitting out on the dock behind my house. You can’t see the river from the jail, but it’s out there past the barred-up windows. Past the recreation yard with the basketball court and beyond the patches of gravel and dry grass you got to cross before getting to the fence. Go over the razor wire, go out past the woods about twenty miles or so, as the crow flies. Touch down on the two-lane road underneath you. That barrenness on either side of you is farmland waiting for its season.

This road, beyond that fence and miles away as the crow flies, looks like it goes on forever because it’s flat and straight and all you can see are the miles in front of you. But you’re not far now. You’ll see the river I’m talking about. The Saint Joseph. I got baptized in that river. I got proposed to there. There’s a tree on the riverbank that has, or at least used to have, me and my husband’s initials: P+A Forever.

That river runs through the place where I was easier to define. The place that made me who I used to be. Althea Marie Butler-Cochran: round, dimpled face; rounding, dimpled body; smooth, light brown skin; wife; mother; daughter; sister; mighty force of nature.

The meeting of the Saint Joseph and the Portage Rivers gives the place I’m from its name: New River Junction.

“One river for each of my girls,” is how my mama put it. “Ya’ll two will run together,” she said. That was right after my sister Viola was born.

“Boys and men are earth and stone,” my mama used to say. “But you girls, us women, we’re water. We can wear away earth and stone, if it comes to it.”

I believed her.

And I believed I’d never leave New River Junction. I made promises to her that kept me bound there. But ever since that day the police came, I’ve been moving further and further away from home. It was a Friday afternoon, two Septembers ago. The leaves had just started to turn. I remember the turning leaves not so much because I’m the type to notice things like that, but because my husband, Proctor, is. That morning, on the way into our restaurant, he grabbed my hand and stopped me midstride.

“Look at that, Al,” he said, stringing his fingers through mine. “It’s here.”

He pointed over my head to the big, opened-armed oak in the yard. Up there, among the rustling green leaves, there was a burst of gold and burnt orange, the first sign of his favorite season. The promise of hayrides and haunted houses and the Halloween candy that he hoarded, always winking and saying, “Don’t worry. I’ll put it away for the kids.”

It was later that day that they came for us.

Me and Proctor were sitting at the long mahogany bar at the back of the restaurant, splitting a turkey sandwich and a beer. The red leather booths and the polished dark wood tables at the front of the restaurant were empty, just like always.

“Do you think this’ll be the night?”

Our dare-to-hope question about dinner service, not about getting arrested, was being asked. “Do you think this’ll be the night” our dining room fills up again? Even though we knew the answer to that question, it seemed like we’d make our bad luck worse if one of us didn’t ask it. We’d been asking “the question” for some three years, going back to when the paper mill started going under. Anchored on the shores of the Saint Joseph for more than a century, the paper mill was a sprawl of red brick and concrete with smokestacks belching into the sky. The rotten-egg stink was the life’s breath of the economy. “The smell of money,” everybody used to say.

But then came the layoffs and the loss of our regulars. Summer tourists from other lake and river towns disappearing. Other restaurants, stores, and small businesses trimming hours, cutting workers, or closing up.

“What’ve you heard, Althea? Who else is in trouble?” The few customers we had left would ask me that, as I let them have their pick of the empty red leather booths. “I don’t know how y’all are getting by with business being what it is,” they’d say, “but I’m glad to see you holding on and still being such a help to people, too. We need that now.”

“Do you think this’ll be the night?”

I was the one asking our dare-to-hope question in our empty restaurant on that Friday afternoon of the changing leaves two Septembers ago, when we heard the welcome bell jingle out on the door.

“You guys want to grab a table?” I said, looking in the mirror behind the bar...