The principal let Maggie take afternoons to visit Jack. It was only three days before the execution. Tom said a few words about how much Jack meant to her and the prison being only an hour away.

Maggie and Jack talked. They decided neither of them knew what life meant when they thought about it. She told Jack she didn’t know what to do about Phil. She’d tried everything to get him to say what she meant to him and he wouldn’t. She wasn’t sure whether she would stay with him but thought she might go to Ireland this summer to think about it. She didn’t know where she’d get the money but she thought she might find some answers about her own life if she went.

Sometimes she thinks about her father who got drunk and then sat silent in his chair the next day and she the little child reeled around him trying to get his attention, terrified he didn’t love her. What does all this mean?

Jack said living it must be the meaning, living as if life meant something, but not too much because then you take everything seriously. Life’s not worth the bother if you can’t laugh at yourself but then again some things really aren’t funny, are they. At least you can get some meaning out of it even then and live your life better for the things you did that you should’ve. You can sort of make up for the terrible things you did if you are going to go on to living the way Maggie was. Jack said there’s so much in life to celebrate.

Maggie said she had done some terrible things like not talk to her father for years because he got drunk so much and then would be a slobbering fool yelling where’s the chow at her mother who cooked him up a steak and fried potatoes and the steak well done the way she didn’t like it and then passing out on the living room floor, even coming home drunk one winter day when her two best friends were at her house and he was supposed to have worked that day and he didn’t work. He got laid off because bricklayers didn’t have much work in the winter.

Jack said he could never make up for the killing he did. Maggie said you never killed anybody. You didn’t kill that boy they convicted you for.