Penpals…Danny and I started off as pen pals.

I was just doing a favor for his mother, Monique.  It didn’t seem like an act that would have such far-reaching consequences at the time.  True…Danny was an inmate in a Montana state penitentiary, but he had only served seven of his twenty years.  Given the distance and the remaining sentence, it shouldn’t have ever been an issue. 

He was a friend.  Our letters never passed a certain boundary that could be construed as anything beyond that.  Occasionally, Danny would cross that line…but with a verbal smackdown, I’d send him flying back to the other side of it.  I couldn’t blame him really…seven years is an awful long time to go without female companionship.  If he hadn’t even made the attempt, I would have been surprised. 

As odd as it might seem, while I knew that Danny had committed a crime…I was never given the details of that crime.  Monique insisted that it should come from her son and I never asked.  Perhaps it should have been something I was concerned about…but given the limited interaction I had with this person and the fact that I totally dismissed him as ever having an important position in my life, it didn’t seem relevant. 

So what did we write about?  Well…my letters to him consisted of telling him about my current relationships, and when those didn’t work out I craftily hid my heartbreak behind fabricated stories of my man-eating ways.  I especially enjoyed letters where I was able to bash Danny’s tremendous ego into itty bitty pieces.  In other words…the woman in those letters was an aggressive, assertive person…everything I wasn’t at the time. 

In return, Danny wrote about his hopes and dreams for a future beyond prison walls.  Sometimes he drew pictures and I was amazed by the amount of talent he had.  But what impressed me most was that he never made excuses for what he had done.  He didn’t blame his family, his circumstances or liberal social influences.  Danny accepted that he had committed a crime and was paying for it.  He just wanted a chance to redeem himself one day…and if that day ever came, he wanted to be ready for it.

There were times when he was melancholy and I understood then why his mother had made the request of me.  Danny desperately needed a friend…somebody that wouldn’t let him quit.  For two years, I kept my promise to Danny’s mother.  In the beginning, it was an obligation…but I would be lying to you if I said that by the end of that time it still felt that way.  As much as I became Danny’s friend…he became mine as well.

Still, nobody was more shocked than I was when he was suddenly paroled and landed on my doorstep.  In fact, I didn’t like it one bit.  Who would I write to now?  I felt…as if I’d been robbed of something precious and then given a burden in its place.

Monique was not really the motherly type.  After a few weeks of sharing her small apartment with her twenty-something year old son, she was looking for a way out.  Danny had already made it quite clear that he was interested in pursuing me romantically and with her typical Gallic propensity for practicality, Monique pulled a neat little maneuver worthy of a mama cuckoo bird and dumped her son into my lap by kicking him out of her nest.

I’m a sucker for hard luck cases and if there was ever a hard luck case it was Danny.  He needed me and I was, unfortunately, his friend.  Probably the only real friend he had at the time.  Lucky me. 

Don’t misunderstand me, however.  Danny and I were at the stage where friendship was slowly developing into something more…but I wasn’t quite ready to commit myself to taking it to that level yet.  There were a lot of unknowns and I was still recovering from a rather bad break-up that had happened shortly before his arrival.  It sounds lame…but I was extremely vulnerable and it didn’t take a lot of effort for Danny to overcome my hesitation.

And as I’ve said before…he needed me.  Those three little words…”I need you”…and my resolve would fall apart.  How could I say no to somebody that needed me?  Being necessary to another person is a powerful feeling and gave me the security I craved.  Perhaps it wasn’t love…yet…but being needed was a pretty damn good start.  Or so I thought at the time…

The two of us began scouring the city for an apartment and as luck would have it, found one just a block away from Mama Monique.  Danny was given a job working for his uncle’s construction company and between the two of us, it was easily affordable.  We had nothing to start with and it was rather comical trying to furnish it.  Our kitchen table consisted of a milk crate and a sheet of plywood borrowed from a construction site…so we sat Indian style on the floor to dine.  I would often joke with friends that my home was decorated in “Early Garage Sale” and I absolutely loved it. 

Unlike most couples though, Danny and I had one small issue to deal with on the subject of living together and that was his parole officer, Bruce.  We had to have his blessing. 

Anticipating the upcoming interview I would have with his parole officer, Danny tried to prepare me ahead of time.  He had already told Bruce that I was aware of the crime he had committed…even though I wasn’t.  To be honest, I’d relegated the important fact that I lacked crucial knowledge to some dim corner of my brain and decided that perhaps it wasn’t necessary to know past history.  Evidently, I was wrong and Danny now sought to correct his error before somebody else did it for him…and probably in a less gentle fashion.

He sat quietly beside me on the park bench, holding my hand for a moment…took a deep breath and began…