Atonement
By Marietta Calvanico It seemed I always walked in just as he was squeezing his coffee sock. I don’t feel like explaining what that means; it’s enough to say that the inmate method of coffee brewing utilizes a microwave and a sock. I guess even a drip coffee machine could somehow be used as a weapon, so they’re not allowed. But it was disconcerting to me when I would walk into the kitchen at three AM and find him squeezing his sock. He’d been free (except for his reporting to parole) for three months and he was still squeezing his sock. Neither one of us had been sleeping very well, but for entirely different reasons. Jerry and I have been friends since high school, but in the last dozen years or so we haven’t really seen each other very much, except at tax time because he has always done my returns. He got sent up for a white-collar crime that he never one hundred percent explained to me, but I felt sorry for him because that’s the way I am. When all of his fat cat clients, fr
