I picked at my nail polish. Dad's words echoed in my brain. He was always telling me, quit it.

Quit picking at your nails. Quit biting your lip. Quit fidgeting. Quit whining. Quit looking at me like that, I'm just doing my job. I’m trying to provide for you.

Even though I was all alone in that waiting room, I narrowed my eyes and my nose crinkled.

Look where your job left me, Dad. You're dead and I'm still paying for 'your job.'

There was a heavy, screeching clink, and I glanced up at the guarded door. But the guard didn't look back at me, didn't move at all. He wasn't quite standing at attention, since he probably got paid all of $9 bucks an hour and had no training, but at least he was standing. His tongue rolled across his teeth, its path visible in the contortions of his lips. He sniffed.

I stopped cataloging the prison guard's every movement and looked at the folder in my hands.

It held a yellow legal pad (blank), a copy of my father's sentencing agreement, the letter that detailed his death, and an old photograph of him. He looked handsome in the photograph, which was faded in that late-70's way with all the colors muted. You must remind yourself that the people in the picture saw the world in as much vibrant color as you now see it, and not through a hazy patina.

He wore a jaunty-looking orange cap, like a beret, a striped shirt, and blue jeans tucked into a pair of boots. He leaned against the Chevy Bel Air, smiling like a proud papa. Until I was born, that car was the closest he got to fatherhood – it was, quite possibly, the closest he got to love.

The Bel Air was the very same car that I drove to the prison that day, three hours from Sorghum Bend. Take county route 45 down to the interstate, ride it straight to exit 78, and wind your way through the lushly forested, and occasionally pastoral, lowland.

If you kept going on the interstate, you'd get to the Smokies. If you went back the other way, you'd get to Memphis.

If you went the way I went, you wound up at Guvcheck Correctional Institution.

This was not the prison where my father died. That was in Georgia. But it was still my father who brought me here, one way or a-fucking-nother.

From somewhere beyond the door, there was a violent buzzing noise, and then the muffled but distinct sound of a human voice being pumped through an intercom.

The waiting room itself was nondescript. No pictures on the wall – just a poster that went over the rules for visiting hour. Dark red plastic chairs filled the space. They were the kind you had in high school, probably, where the plastic was bumpy and coarse to the touch. It was a design choice I couldn’t begin to understand.

I shared the room with a strikingly beautiful young woman. She had two children in tow and looked so very tired. The children were occupying themselves with a tablet, poking at the screen. There was also an elderly woman holding a tin box with Rudolph on it. It was March, but what did that matter? Time, I knew, was nebulous in there. My father told me as much before he died.

Before he was murdered. I thought to myself quietly.

“Alright,” a voice drew me from my distractions. “If you'll follow me...”

The door opened and a female guard gestured to us. I let the mother with her children go first, then waited for the other woman (also a mother, most likely) to pass before I rose and joined the procession. We'd all been searched already, and cleared to do our visiting with our incarcerated loved ones.

Or, in my case, to visit with a man I only knew from the briefest of memories – a man who had no idea why he'd been called to the visitation room. A man who probably didn't remember me. A man I could only hope would be grateful for the reprieve from his daily drudgery, no matter how brief.

I remembered him being handsome. First time I saw him I was only 14 and just beginning to think that men were handsome. He was just a strapping 18-year-old, but he certainly fit my idea of a man even when others would call him a boy. I tried to forget what he looked like back then… the eyes so dark they were almost black… the dirty-blonde hair that sat in a tousled drift on the top of his head… the dimples that deepened as he smiled whenever my father spoke his name.

I remembered he had dirty nails. For some reason, that it was very cool and sexy for a man to have dirty nails. I don't share that opinion with my 14-year-old self.

The last time I saw him I was 18, and he was still handsome. Even more so with the bloom of twenty-something swagger dancing behind those too-dark eyes. And he looked at me back. Actually looked at me. Like a man looks at a woman he’d pay to get to know.

I was prepared to encounter someone significantly different this time around. He had ten years to age, and four of them were spent behind bars. I was tense as we entered in a group. While the other women and children crowed and cooed and smiled their ways to their men, I stood and watched him watching me. His lips widened just a bit into a half-smile that didn't deepen his dimples. He had a gash on his forehead, and the lingering evidence of a black eye shadowed his near-black eyes into an even darker shade than I remembered. He was inked from his wrist to the beginning of his sleeve.

Somehow, he looked good in orange.

“You here for me, Misty-Lee?”