AS we were about to leave the prison that day, one of the guys asked, somewhat apologetically, if any of us would mind stopping at Trader Joe’s before heading back to New York. I had been going to the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Conn., for six months and had no idea there was a Trader Joe’s nearby.

Loading up on groceries sounded like a great idea to me, and I could tell that my friend David (who’d come with me to see my fiancée, Piper) and another husband in our Brooklyn-to-Danbury carpool (a New York professional whose wife was serving two years) were equally enthused about the prospect. He’d brought along his good-natured infant son, born a few months earlier in a hospital near the prison, who of course was up for anything.

And so it was that we bid goodbye to our women for another week and headed into the aisles, an oddball quintet in search of snacks.

None of us saw any reason that we shouldn’t indulge ourselves at Trader Joe’s while our women ate mystery meat in the prison cafeteria. Personally, it never occurred to me not to make the best of the situation. And my situation was this: Once a week, for 13 months, I visited my fiancée in prison, where she was serving her time for a nonviolent crime she’d committed 10 years earlier.