That Tuesday Lorraine Thomas waited by the phone, marking off another day of a strange kind of sentence. Already she’d served nearly a year, days that had seemed to last forever. And still—930 remained.
Aztec, New Mexico, where she lived, sits in the high desert of the Colorado Plateau, a vast, desolate, rocky expanse, and she felt locked up deep in the heart of it, with nothing outside her own personal cell but tumbleweeds and dust.
The phone call came every Tuesday morning, like clockwork. “An inmate from the Lea County Correctional Facility is attempting to reach you.” Her husband, Paul, calling from prison.
As an accountant for a tax and payroll company, he’d embezzled money from his clients. They’d trusted him. Just like she had. When he finally confessed to the crime, Lorraine could barely catch her breath.
This wasn’t the man she knew, the man she’d been married to for five years. How could he have done this? But she couldn’t leave him. Paul was a good man who’d made a terrible mistake. He was remorseful. “Now I’m paying the price,” he told her. “I am too,” Lorraine wanted to say.
She had her freedom, but it didn’t seem that way to her. There was no escape from the crushing loneliness. No one understood what she was going through.
Night after night, returning from her shift as a hospital receptionist, she ate dinner alone and went to bed alone. Punishment for a crime she didn’t commit. She couldn’t tell Paul, though. He had enough to worry about.
Her only confidant was her mother, a woman who had been raised on harder times than these.
“We’re never alone,” her mother assured her. She told Lorraine stories about growing up in a tiny adobe hut in the small town of Turley, New Mexico, home to only a few hundred poor farmers and sheepherders.
“From dawn to dusk I was out in the fields, breaking my back picking vegetables to support the family.” She didn’t have toys—she played with pinto beans, imagining they were horses, and built corrals out of matchsticks.
“God’s grace gave us what we needed,” her mother said. “He will bless you with what you need too. You’ll see.”
For a while, Lorraine was able to draw upon her mother’s strength, her faith—until that was taken away from her as well.
The Tuesday call after her mother’s death had been the hardest of all. “Paul…my mother, she died Thursday. We had the funeral this week….” The phone pressed to her ear wasn’t the same as a shoulder to cry on. But all she could do was sob.
This Tuesday was going to be another bad day. Lorraine knew it the second the phone rang.
“Hey, sweetheart,” Paul said. “I love you.” His voice sounded tinny and far away.
“I can’t believe it’s been almost a year,” she said, choking up. “I wish you were here. Next week’s my birthday, and we won’t be together….” That was it. She couldn’t hold back anymore.
“Honey, don’t cry,” Paul pleaded. “We’re gonna get through this. We have to be strong.”
But Lorraine broke down. “I miss you. I miss Mom,” she said, haltingly. “I don’t have anyone to talk to. No one understands.”
Paul didn’t know what to say. He felt awful. It was his fault they were in this mess. But what could he do? He’d just recently been transferred to this prison, 500 miles south of home.
Paul returned to his cell, trying to push down his emotions. His new cellmate, Leroy, wasn’t fooled.
“What’s eating you, man?” he asked.
“It’s my wife,” Paul said. “I wish I could help her. But I don’t know what to do.”
Leroy thought for a moment. “Where are you from again?”
Midafternoon, a beep from Lorraine’s cell phone stirred her from the couch. A text message. She grabbed the phone off the coffee table. Hi, the text read. Our husbands r cellmates. I just talked with Leroy and he said ur feeling down. I live nearby. Would you like to have lunch? Peggy.
Lorraine stared at her phone. Lunch with her husband’s new cellmate’s wife? Certainly not. Why was Paul talking about her to another convict? It made her uneasy.
She put the phone down on the couch. But she couldn’t stop glancing at it. Her mother’s words echoed in her head. God gives us what we need…
They met at a restaurant called Clancy’s and both ordered Reuben sandwiches, with extra sauerkraut. That broke the ice. Peggy was easy to talk to.
They spoke about their loneliness, how they prayed for strength, their families, growing up, where they’d gone to high school, how they met their husbands, their weddings, everything.
“My maiden name was Lobato,” Peggy said, dabbing the corner of her mouth with a napkin.
“Really?” Lorraine said. “I have a cousin who married someone named Carl Lobato.”
“That’s my brother!” Peggy said. “Hey, we’re practically related!”
I wish I could tell Mom about this, Lorraine thought. It was what her mother meant by God’s grace. Lorraine had enjoyed the afternoon, even if she did feel a twinge of sadness at the thought of going back home alone.
“I’m glad our husbands were put together,” Peggy said. “We never would have met otherwise.”
“Me too,” Lorraine said.
The next day, she got a call from Peggy with an odd request. “My mom would like to have you over for dinner Friday,” she said. “She’s really anxious to meet you.”
Anxious to meet me? “I guess that would be okay,” Lorraine said. She liked Peggy, but dinner with her mom? Still, she couldn’t think of an excuse not to go.
Friday night she drove to the address Peggy had given her. Peggy’s mom greeted Lorraine at the door. “I’m so glad you could come,” she said. “I haven’t seen you since your mother’s funeral. I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself then and I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“You knew my mother?” Lorraine stammered.
“I grew up in Turley, right next door,” the woman said. “We were so poor we played with pinto beans together. Pretended they were horses. Can you imagine? Still, God gave us what we needed.”
The three women talked for hours. By the end of dinner, Lorraine knew who she could lean on in the 927 days ahead. Not only did they understand what Lorraine was going through…they were going through it with her.
The Colorado Plateau is a forbidding place; the walls of the Lea County Correctional Facility are reinforced concrete topped with barbed wire. Yet sitting at the table with her new friends, Lorraine felt her own cell door swing open. The desolation lifted. She was free.
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