Halfway Home by Reuben Jonathan Miller

Author:Reuben Jonathan Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

“When was the last time you saw your mother?” I asked Jimmy as I sat across the table from him at Coney Island.

“I don’t really come around like that,” he replied. Jimmy certainly needed his mother. He was homeless. He was in drug treatment, doing his best to stay clean and sober. And Jimmy was Ruth’s baby, the youngest of her five children. She would have taken him in. But he and Ruth both knew that she would be evicted if she did. He’d decided to avoid her because she wanted to help.

“I understand,” I said. I asked about Cynthia again.

“Too much drama,” he told me.

We finished the meal as he talked about his job hunt and his relationship with his parole officer and how his treatment was going and how it felt to be “free.” I paid the bill and handed Jimmy the bus card and the forty dollars I gave him at the completion of each interview. I dropped Jimmy off at the construction site and made my way home.

The next time we connected, Jimmy had changed his tune about Cynthia. He was sleeping at her house more often, away from the drafty, sometimes damp, almost always too hot or too cold buildings he gutted. And he told me that her sister had stopped insulting him. They got along better. I wondered why. It turned out Cynthia had had a stroke, her fifth, and was in what Jimmy called a convalescent home. This made him sad. He was no more attracted to her than he had been a few months before, but now they were making plans to get married, and Yolanda said it was a good idea. Marriage, he said, was the only way he could secure an apartment. He also said he wanted to help Cynthia make decisions about her medical care. But Jimmy wasn’t happy. He described the upcoming marriage as a debt. “She stuck with me in prison. I’ll stick with her now.”

In a moment of reflection about his life and his relationships, Jimmy said, “I feel needy.” I asked if he thought his relationships would have been the same had he not gone to prison. Jimmy sipped the last of his weak diner coffee and finished chewing his toast. “No,” he said, signaling the end of our conversation.

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