Chapter 68
Callie
That first visit with Asa was the hardest. I cried the entire way back to the hotel with Gram holding my hand. She didn’t speak; she just wrapped my hand in hers the minute I sat down, and drove.
I didn’t remember much of the next few hours, but eventually I got my shit together, and we left for Sacramento the next morning.
After that, both arriving at the prison and leaving again got—if not easier—at least bearable. I knew each time that Will and I would be back, and it gave me something to look forward to. Sometimes we’d bring Gram or Cody during school breaks, but mostly, it was just me and Will. We needed that time, just our little family.
Farrah and I started school and she was freaking fantastic at everything. While I had to study and practice until I thought my brain was going to ooze out my ears, she just seemed to pick up everything the first time, without even trying. It was frustrating, but I couldn’t be too pissed about it—she loved it. She’d obviously found something that made her happy, and after all she’d been through, she deserved it.
Gram took care of Will, even though it left her exhausted by the end of the day. She never complained, but I was always relieved when Cody was home from school and could help her out. She refused to let me look into getting a different babysitter, but sometimes I felt guilty for leaving him with her all day. Leaving him at all was so much harder than I’d imagined, but the look of pride on Gram’s face when we’d arrive home from school was like an affirmation that I was doing the right thing.
Will grew like a weed. His hair took forever to grow in, but he never lost the little Mohawk he was born with, and I freaking loved it. He was my little rocker baby, and some of my favorite memories are of Farrah and me dancing him around the house while he giggled hysterically, his little mouth pouring drool all over the front of our t-shirts.
He was a ham, grinning in almost every photo we took, and he looked like Asa more each day. His little body was sturdy, usually measuring in the ninety-fifth percentile at his appointments, and it was a chore just keeping the poor boy in clothes that fit. I loved it. Every minute of every day, I was thankful for the little person that got into my makeup bag and poured out all of my loose powder, then stayed up until all hours of the night when I had tests the next day. When I looked into his face I saw a perfect mixture of his father and me, and I couldn’t imagine my life without him.
We recorded every milestone, no matter how small, with video and photographs and I sent the photos to Asa weekly, keeping him updated on what our son was up to. I knew that he hated missing so many things, so I tried to keep him as involved as possible. It wasn’t easy.
Sometimes, I just wanted to enjoy the moment, without feeling panicked when I couldn’t find the camera. But I never stopped the video diary. If I was feeling frustrated, I knew Asa was feeling a thousand times worse.
My resentment over our circumstances grew with every passing day, burning and churning inside me until I felt ready to erupt. It was the club’s fault that our son barely knew his father. It was their fault that I was sleeping alone every night and that Asa was stuck behind bars in a prison full of murderers and rapists and God knew what else. My loathing for the Aces fed me, it kept me focused and calm when I felt the opposite, and it reinforced the wall between me and anything that I knew would be too much for me to handle.
It kept me safe from my memories by giving me something else to focus on while Asa was gone.
We were only able to visit Asa around my school schedule, which sometimes left us without face to face contact for months. Those were the hardest times. I lived for the moments that I could see him smiling at Will—watching as Will sat up for the first time on the little visitor’s table, or seeing him stumble into the room for the first time on his own two feet. In those moments, we were like any other family in the world.
Will’s first birthday passed with little fanfare—Gram’s homemade pineapple upside-down cake, and a trip to the prison for a visit. That seemed to be our life in a nutshell.
Six months later, Farrah and I graduated from cosmetology school and found jobs in a little salon at the mall. The pay wasn’t great, but they let us make our own hours and we were always able to work together, which helped when my car died for good and we had to carpool until I could get a new one.
We were riding in my new car, a cheap used Toyota that was easy to finance, when Will said his first word. He’d been mumbling and saying Mama and Dada, Fawa and Gram for months, but it was the first word that wasn’t a name. He pointed out the window at the semi driving next to us on the freeway and said “truck” as if he’d always known how to say it.
I cried the entire way home, while I clapped and cheered him on, because I hadn’t brought my camera with us to the grocery store and Asa had missed it.
Some days I didn’t know how I would keep going without Asa, and others felt as if he’d never been there to begin with. I’d begin to feel as if I’d always lived without him, and it would scare me so much that I’d slide back into missing him to the point of madness. It was a cycle that repeated itself over and over again until I felt exhausted from it, but one thing was certain: there wasn’t a minute that I didn’t wish he were beside me.
Life passed slowly in some moments, and quickly in others, leaving a bittersweet sensation behind. As hard as I wished for time to pass quickly, I also begged it to slow down. I missed Asa, but Will was growing so fast that I could barely stand it.
And then, after twenty-five months of waiting, he was out.