"Yes, sir," said Taft. "Ms. Reddick runs the program. Your son's been one of her companions since, uh," he checked, "2019."
Neal knew about the program. Of course he knew about the program. Sean had written about it in letter after letter, at first in two or three sentences tucked at the end after the weather and the Patriots and was Mom's hip any better, and then in whole pages. They have us do forty hours of training before we sit with anybody. They teach you how to turn a man so he doesn't get sores. They teach you you're not there to fix it. Ms. R. says that's the hardest part for guys like us, that we've spent our whole lives either breaking things or getting told to fix them. Sean had talked about Ms. R. in the visiting room for six years. Ms. R. says. Ms. R. would kill me. Ms. R. brought in lotion that smells like oranges, Dad, you should see these guys, they've been inside forty years and they put it on their hands like it's gold.
Neal had pictured her, without ever knowing he had pictured her, as white. Older. Some kind of church lady from Walpole or Sharon with a cardigan and a cross. He had pictured someone who would be, in the hearing room, on his side of something.
He looked down at the license in his hand. Antoinette L. Reddick. Randolph. He held it out to her. She took it back, between the same two fingers, and slid it into the brown wallet and the wallet into the tote, and laid her hand back on the envelope.
"Thank you, Mr. Taft," she said. "That order's fine."
"Great. Great. There's coffee," Taft said, to both of them, and to the room in general, and went back through the inner door, and it closed behind him on its slow hydraulic arm with a hiss and a click.
The lobby was very quiet. The coffee urn hummed. Across the room Sandoval sat back down, but he did not pick up his paperback.
Neal put the badge wallet away. It took him two tries to find the inside pocket.
"Ms. Reddick," he said.
She was looking at him with no expression that he could read at all, and he had been reading faces for a living since before she was old enough to drive.