My cellmate for nine years was a man named Reuben Pike, in for armed robbery, guilty, and the first person to ever say that out loud to me without flinching. He was sixty-one when they put him in with me and seventy when he died of a heart thing on a Tuesday morning in the yard.
Reuben used to say hope was a tax, and the longer you paid it, the less you had left.
He was the one who told me to keep counting the days anyway.
I said that sounded like hope to him.
He said no. He said hope is about tomorrow. Counting is about today. Counting says I was here, I was a person on this date, somebody was alive in this body.
So I counted. Eight thousand four hundred and thirty-nine days, if you want the number. I have it written in the back of a Bible I don’t believe in, in pencil, in handwriting that got worse as I got older.
