Alice McMahon picked up the beige telephone lifelessly resting against the wall in the corner. Her nails glistened, the cherry-red polish desperately trying to distract from her aged and wrinkled hands. She wasn’t a happy woman, yet she wasn’t a sad one, though her frown lines might have said otherwise. She was perfectly contempt. The type that offered a slight smile on a birthday and gave only a bland, upset stare at a funeral.
She began, “How are they treating you?” She was afraid she might begin with a cliché like that as usual.
On the other side of the line and a thick glass window, fortified by chicken wire, sat her only son, Timothy, suffocated by an orange jumpsuit. The ruddy boy she once knew was gone. His boyish scruffy brown hair had been replaced with a short buzz cut.
She spoke, “You’ve lost weight.” She offered a more concerned look than usual.
Timothy shrugged off his mother’s worries. “Still a no-show, huh?” he stared at his mother’s lowering eyes.
“You know him.” she urged, “First he wouldn’t believe you did it. Now, he won’t come because he doesn’t want to believe any of this is real.”
“Well, tell him to start believing it!” his rapidly raising voice caused wary looks from multiple officers. “I’m sorry, I know this isn’t you’re fault. I just—”
She cut him off, hoping to suffocate anymore hostile talk of his father. “I know. I tried to convince him.”
Next to them sat a tall tattooed man quietly speaking to a woman. Upon hearing Timothy raise his voice he looked over and smiled, exposing several gold teeth.
“How is the food? Is your officer still telling you the Yankee scores?” his mother was not concealing the fact that she desperately wanted to change the subject.
“Is he still doing that thing where he tells people that he only has a daughter?” asked Tim, not giving in to his mother’s attempt.
“I don’t know, honey,” she said with an exasperated tone, “you have to let him have his time.”
“His time?” Tim raised his voice again. “I’m the one with the time. Yeah, and I’ve got fifty years of it too!”
Tears welled in his mother’s eyes. She hated that phrase. “Fifty years,” she woke up saying sometimes. She did the math over and over. “How old will he be when he gets out? What about good behavior? I will be one-hundred and twenty when he is free. When he is seventy-five will he have children?” She used to think that she would be so much happier without him getting the death penalty. Now, she almost wished it could’ve all have been over.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Underneath his orange jumpsuit and hardened personality, he still loved his mother and hated upsetting her.
  “I have to run,” she said, wiping her running mascara from her cheeks. “Your sister is pitching in her teams final game.” She tried to muster a smile.
“Cheer her on for me and send my love.”
“I always do.”
His lips were curved upward in the shape of a smile, but his eyes were dark and he didn’t stare at his mother through the screen, but at the chicken wire within it. His fingers now only loosely held the phone. He loved to hear about the outside of the prison, but it made him feel like a caged animal. An officer yelled “Time!” The sound of the phones clicking simultaneously rang throughout the room. Prisoner #228690 joined the multitude of orange clad men shuffling out the doors, and in came a new group, each one’s loved one sat waiting, concerned for their beloveds and devastated to have to see them through the glass with the chicken wire.