Sweet Hell on Fire by Sara Lunsford

my father. He worked eighteen-hour days with no time off, for months at a time, during what came to be called the Cuban Crisis. I don’t remember details, only that inmates were lighting their mattresses on fire and there were riots. They had to go on lockdown.
    Shortly after this, or at least shortly to my kid memory, an officer was killed. Not on The Job, though, but at home. He brought The Job home with him, they said, and he took it out on his family. He’d beat his wife almost to death. I remember overhearing my mother and the other wives talking about the night he chased her with a baseball bat and she was crying and pounding on doors to see if someone would let her in.
    His son had finally had enough and killed him with his own gun.
    It was one of the times I asked my dad about his job because I saw him on television behind yellow crime scene tape. Looking back on it now, it was like that scene from The Godfather where Al Pacino tells Diane Keaton not to ask him about his business. He told me he couldn’t and wouldn’t talk about it, that I didn’t need to know those things.
    There were many nights my father would come home and just sit silently in his chair. Sometimes, I don’t know how he did it. He didn’t go out with friends, he didn’t drink, and he didn’t do anything but work and come home. He did woodworking in his spare time, but that wasn’t really a hobby. It was like a second job. A little country-themed craft store in town sold his work and took orders for commissioned projects to help put food on the table.
    He had a good reputation as an honest man, but he was a hard-ass too.
    During my first stint working at the prison, the prison dentist picked me up in a bar. He’d worked both at the federal level and at the state. We were on our way back to his house and conversation turned to The Job, and when he found out who my dad was, he apologized profusely and asked me not to tell my dad that I’d met him and especially not that he’d tried to take me home.
    When I was a teenager and still in my rebellious fuck-you-all stage, I used to like to bring home the most inappropriate guys, but there was one line I wouldn’t cross. He couldn’t have done time. If he had, my father would have buried me in a shallow grave with lime in the crawl space. He pretty much kept his opinions about other guys to himself; he’d just give them that thousand-yard stare. By the time I was seventeen, he stopped bothering to learn their names.
    Until the guy I met at the biker bar.
    Everyone knew me down there and they’d serve me and my friends. My friend’s dad had taken us in there and bought us beers and smokes, so after that, they served us every time. We knew to put the beers down if they got raided and to say we were only there for the karaoke.
    This guy, he was all that a rebellious little antisocial like me could want. He had twenty tattoos, long hair, a Harley, a jaw like a brick, and his biceps were bigger than my head. He was also about six-foot-three. He read poetry and quoted Byron and Keats to me while we were dancing. He even got into a bar fight over my honor. Some guy had called me a slut and asked how much I’d cost him. This guy had been big too, as big as my biker. With just as many tattoos. He had more patches on his jacket though. Which I learned later meant he was higher up in his gang. But he got his ass handed to him in two pieces, and he was banned from the bar. My biker couldn’t have been any more perfect if his name had been Snot.
    He came to pick me up and my dad answered the door. By now, my dad had gotten used to the company I kept and knew the less he said, the more likely I’d get tired of them and they’d go away. But this one was different. I knew it as soon as my dad opened the door and the guy’s posture changed. His eyes narrowed and the badass biker started sniveling like a little bitch.
    “Lieutenant. SIR .”
    I didn’t even have to see my father’s face. I knew then