I took out the double stroller and put Tina in the back and Brenda in the front. It was forty minutes after leaving the Nassau County Jail, forty-five minutes after my visit with their father, my husband, Gene. 

I hoped the guard would allow him to look out onto Carman Avenue and get a glimpse of his girls. This was our once-a -week ritual since Gene had been arrested a year earlier. We knew that he would soon be transferred to an upstate prison, where our routine would have to change. 

How strange what eventually seems familiar. Going to the county jail twice a week was now pro forma. I knew the route; it was twenty minutes from the home we had shared and where the girls and I still lived. 

I knew the guards, and they knew and trusted me. They might have even liked me. I had gotten used to seeing Gene behind a Plexiglas window and speaking through a phone, discussing intimate details with someone to my left, someone to my right, and the knowledge that someone else might be listening to those calls. It wasn’t okay, but it was accepted. 

Tina and Brenda had not had any contact with their father for more than a year, not since a week before he was charged with murder. 

No one under the age of sixteen could visit at the Nassau County Jail. The girls were two-and-a-half and three-and-a-half. They could not speak to him or hear his voice; phone calls home were not permitted. They could not read his letters. The words were squiggly designs on a legal pad that meant nothing to them. It was up to me to keep him alive in their minds. But did I want to? Should I?