Red Hot Bikers, Rock Stars and Bad Boys

by Cassia Leo

  “You do it, sweetheart.”

  Clarice still held firm on Stella’s hand. “We talked to Dane’s caseworker, Maggie. In light of his wrongful suspension and the fact that tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, we got him a special dispensation to have a visitor tomorrow evening.”

  Bud leaned forward. “Normally it’s only for the married inmates, but we convinced them you were close enough.”

  Stella pulled her hand from Clarice. “But—you don’t know me.”

  “Joe told us all about you,” Clarice said. “He clearly adores you.”

  “Have you talked to Dane? Have you seen him?”

  Both Bud and Clarice looked down at the table.

  “You haven’t!” Stella slid away from Clarice. “He asked me not to come anymore. How can I go see him?”

  Bud rubbed his temple. “We only wanted to help. Of course you shouldn’t see him if you don’t feel like you should.”

  They both looked so disappointed that Stella could hardly stand it. They certainly weren’t pushy. Dane obviously got a lot of temperament from his father, even if he hadn’t been raised by him. She remembered Dane on the tower and his willingness to back away. Stella flooded with heat just remembering how he’d come up behind her, how powerful that had been. Suddenly the partial list in her drawer called to her. She wanted to finish it, to remember everything. “I’ll go,” she said. “I’ll see him.”

  The couple smiled so broadly that Stella couldn’t help but be happy for them. Clarice pulled a form from her purse. “Here’s the special paperwork. It will get you in. Tomorrow at seven.”

  Stella was glad she had traded Rennie for the night off. The older waitress had readily agreed, saying the young pups needed that day, not the old cows like her. She glanced over at the boys, all gazing up at Cayenne. She’d be spending her evening at the State Pen.

  “One thing,” Clarice said.

  Stella stiffened. She’d figured there would be strings attached.

  “Ryker isn’t on the list yet,” Clarice said. “Dane has to initiate the forms.”

  “Ryker? Where is he?” God, she’d love to see him.

  “Back in Texas. But he’s willing to come up.”

  “Have you talked to him, then?”

  Bud cleared his throat. “He won’t speak to me. But we tracked him down. If you give Dane his address, he can send a form to him to visit.”

  That Stella could do. “I will.”

  Clarice pointed to the paper. “And this is our address here in Jefferson City. We’re going to stay around a little while, to see if Dane will be willing to see Bud.” She squeezed Stella’s hand. “Don’t worry about putting in a good word or anything. Bud has been writing Dane, trying to soften him up.”

  “Has he written back?” Stella suddenly hungered for news of him, proof that he was okay.

  Bud shook his head. “No. I’m not sure he even reads them. He has cause to hate me. But I did get clearance to visit him, if he’ll just send me the form. Wasn’t easy.” He grimaced at Clarice.

  “What? Why?” Stella looked between them. They were hiding something.

  “Dane didn’t know that the reason his father didn’t contact him all those years was—” Clarice faltered. “He was in prison himself.”

  Stella shot out of the booth. “What? Does it run in the family?”

  Bud rested his head in his hands. “When I heard, I was devastated.”

  Clarice pushed the form back across the table. “Never mind about us, Stella. It’s not about us. It’s about Dane. We wanted to do something for him, anything we could. If this is all we can do, then it will be enough. We love him, and it doesn’t matter if he won’t see us. We’re still his family.”

  Stella picked up the form, folded it, and tucked it in her apron. Family. It had been a long set of holidays for her, even though Beatrice and Joe had come up to see her. She wondered if family was something she just wasn’t cut out for.

  ***

  46: Visitation

  THE door rattled as the guard slid back the lock. “Visitation.”

  Dane looked up from his book. “You got the wrong con.” He still had three months of suspension to go, and Stella was the only one on his list anyway. She had not contacted him after the letter, just as he’d asked.

  “Stand up for escort.”

  Dane turned the book upside-down on his bed. Apparently, he was going somewhere.

  They followed the rail of the Two Walk down. Other inmates watched from their cells as they passed. Someone leaving the unit at this hour was pretty rare. It usually meant something bad was going down. Maybe visitation was a code word for something else this time.

  But as they passed through the cage and out into the night, Dane could see a few other inmates led toward the administration building from other units. Light splashed on the walkways as they webbed toward the red-brick building.

  The other prisoners were jovial and bright, most holding cards or woodworking projects. Dane hadn’t earned hobby or craft privileges and had been moved from laundry to the plate factory only a few days prior.

  They lined up along the corridor he recognized from the failed visit with Stella. “What gives?” he whispered to the man in front of him, who clutched a papier-mâché heart that had been painted red.

  “Special privilege,” the man said. “First time? You’ll love it. The guards are all laid back at this one.” He ran his hand along the edge of the heart, smoothing a loose bit of newspaper.

  It was Valentine’s Day, Dane realized. He hadn’t kept up with the dates. He didn’t have anything to look forward to. His blood pressure rose a notch. This had to be a mistake. He couldn’t be given a special privilege. He was on suspension.

  The door to visitation opened, and the inmates were led inside without all the usual wanding and warnings. They walked inside, orderly despite the urgency he sensed among them. Four guards stood in the room, and each table had a woman at it. Only a few of them also had children. The scene was completely different from his last experience.

  The room erupted in hugs and brief kisses, then everyone settled into chairs. Dane hung near the door, not sure why he was there, then he saw her.

  Stella sat alone at a table in the center of the room, resting her chin on her hands and watching him. She wore the green Show-Me State T-shirt they’d bought at the truck stop and a pair of jeans. Her hair was longer, spilling over her arms to her elbows. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he was momentarily dumbstruck, wondering wildly if he’d been shanked in his cell and this was some sort of death dream.

  He forced his legs to move forward, and suddenly she was standing, waiting for him. He knew there were rules, and that he was really suspended, but that just meant he had even less to lose. He pulled her in an embrace so tight that he could feel every rib against his chest. He kept her close as long as he dared. She felt thinner, but good, so good, like he’d come home.

  She sobbed against him, and he knew what that meant. She’d been holding things in too. Emotion throbbed between them. He couldn’t believe he’d let her go. “I was wrong,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t have told you to go away.”

  She held on to his arms like a lifeline. “I shouldn’t have listened.”

  He pulled back and knew they would allow one kiss, and in it he had to say everything he wanted to say, that he loved her, which he’d never said, and that he hadn’t wanted to get angry, not at the bar, nor at her first visit, and that certainly he hadn’t wanted what happened to his father, to be forced into a cell and to think that it was better to drop out of someone’s life than to cause them any pain. He got it now. He understood completely how wrong his father had been, and how he’d been, and that something to lose was indeed better than nothing.

  But he couldn’t rely on the kiss. “I love you, Stella,” he said. “I don’t deserve you, not any part of you, but I love you.”

  She clutched at his shirt, that stupid convict’s uniform. “I have loved y
ou all along. I can’t love anyone else.”

  All around them men and women embraced, exchanging Valentines and happy laughter. He hadn’t wanted to feel this here, not now, but this was what life had dealt them. He’d see it out, if she would.

  The guards were looking elsewhere, so he kissed her and kissed her, lips on hers and hands on her neck and she seemed to understand, as she was crying, and Stella never cried, and by the time a guard finally cleared his throat, he could let her go. He could sit opposite her at that plastic table and hold her hands, her pale strong hands, rougher from hard work, but still hers, and the bracelet. She was wearing the bracelet. He felt swallowed up by everything he’d missed about her and allowed into his heart the thing he hadn’t let get to him in many long months. He felt hope.

  ***

  47: Wedding

  SPRING 1985

  The little girl in the white dress had gone far astray, flinging pink rose petals in wild chunks at everyone sitting along the aisle. Stella stifled the urge to run up behind her and set her straight, watching instead the photographer snap shot after shot, especially when a fistful of pink shot straight into Janine’s uptight mother’s face.

  The music changed, and Stella stepped forward, met by Nick’s brother, the best man, and together they walked along the carpet, trying not to laugh at the woman tugging errant petals from her ample cleavage. At the altar she blew a little kiss to Nick, looking nervous and red-faced as he waited for his bride to appear.

  Stella turned to face the back. The music surged, and the guests all stood. Two ushers opened the church doors wide, and Janine appeared in her flowing white gown, face covered in a shimmery veil, arm linked through her father’s.

  Stella bit her lip, hoping she wasn’t wrecking her makeup. Janine had eyes only for Nick. Stella glanced at the groom, amazed at the incredible smile that had erased his look of anxiety. They were both transformed in this moment, as happy as she’d ever seen them.

  Stella glanced down at the bracelet resting against the bone of her wrist. Gentle. Danger. Her in between.

  They’d both changed. She’d grown up. He’d calmed down. Dane had even allowed Bud in to see him—the father he’d hated so long. It seemed impossible, but their lives were still growing and changing even while Dane was imprisoned.

  The organ music wound down. The flower girl was tossing petals straight into the air. Stella had to work not to laugh.

  She would get this day. And now, after five wonderful visits with Dane, each Sunday when they talked and held hands and even joked a little, she knew this was the one thing she wanted. This kind of day. With him. None of those other boys had worked. Only Dane.

  As Janine’s father stepped away, and Nick lifted Janine’s veil, Stella realized what she had to do.

  Wait.

  ***

  Part 3: Decision

  48: Release

  FALL 1996

  Twelve years later

  Stella pushed aside the yellow curtain. Midday had already struck, and it was time to get up.

  She should have given up the night shift years ago, when Rennie retired with her bad leg and Corgie told Stella she could switch to days. But over the years, Dane had moved from one unit to another, and to make sure she could be home for his daily calls, she stuck with nights, glad for a job that more or less paid the bills.

  Dane’s parole hearing had already happened, and she’d slept right through it. They didn’t expect anything to go wrong, but she didn’t know exactly when he’d get out, either. Might be today. Might be a few days’ worth of paperwork. She told Corgie that when it happened, she was taking a vacation. He’d shaken a spatula at her, but he knew she was as good as gone. Once the work committee assigned Dane his first job, they’d be moving wherever that might be, and her years at the Sinners’ Cafe would end.

  She stretched, looking out the window at the covered bulge of Grandma Angie’s white Mustang. The old thing had given up the ghost three years ago, too much to fix. But she hadn’t let go of it. Dane could work on it in his spare time, and it meant a lot to them. Now she drove a little Ford Escort, easy on the gas and not hard to keep up with.

  But she had a big surprise for Dane. Bud had brought Dane’s old Harley by last week, cleaned up and ready. Stella wanted to look at it one more time, rushing to the door of the garage but leaving it open so she could hear the phone ring. Stella had gotten her own motorcycle license last year, practicing on Corgie’s beat-up Yamaha until she felt like she could handle the Harley. No other way to pick him up from prison than that.

  She skipped back through the house she’d been renting the past year, tucked onto a little street only a few blocks from the prison. She loved going out on the porch where she could see the watchtower on the corner closest to her, an area that Dane had explained included the lower yard. He sat there most afternoons, and some days she felt closer to him just by looking up at that glassed tower and knowing he was looking at it too.

  Bud and Clarice would be waiting to hear from her. Dane would call her with the news, then she’d relay it to them, then Beatrice, whom she still talked to every week to keep up with the gossip in Holly. After Janine had given birth to twins, they’d lost touch, although Stella always sent the babies gifts on their birthday. She patted her own stomach, still lean and firm at 34. She’d never been sucked into eating the grease-laden dishes at the cafe, which had turned poor Cayenne into a puffball before she’d finally quit around the time Rennie retired.

  With any luck, they’d have their own baby before too much more time passed. They planned their own simple wedding ceremony at a chapel nearby, just waiting on the date for Dane’s release. They could have done it while he was in, but in the end, Stella wanted to wait. She still remembered Janine’s wedding day, and she wanted something of her own, without the peeling walls and guards standing in the back.

  Just thinking of Dane being free to hold her without people watching loosened Stella inside, that part of herself she’d held so tightly reined for over a decade. A lot of catching up to do. The four times she and Dane had been together were moments she often pulled forward into her memory and held on to. The water tower, Ryker’s sofa, the woods, and the phone booth. She was ready to be an old lady now and try a real bed.

  The phone rang, and Stella tripped over the rug trying to lunge for it. She grasped the receiver, shaking her foot free. “Hello?”

  She expected the recorded message that she was receiving a call from an inmate, a system that had replaced the operator-controlled collect calls years ago, but instead, a curt woman came on the line. “Stella Ashton?”

  “Yes.” Stella freed her foot and sat on a chair, fear curdling in her.

  “This is Violet Humphrey from the Reentry Transition Team.”

  Stella breathed a little easier. “Hello, Violet.”

  “I have instructions for you for the release of Daniel Scoffield.”

  Stella snatched a note pad from the shelf. “I’m ready.”

  “He’ll be released from the administrative building at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon. He has indicated that you will be here to receive him.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. He must report to his new workplace, the Joplin Refinery, in three days, at eight o’clock on Monday, for training.”

  “Got it.”

  “You know the location?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s vitally important he make it on time.”

  “Will do.”

  The woman rustled some papers. “His parole officer will be in contact about his weekly check-ins. Those are also vitally important.”

  “I understand.”

  “Is this the phone number the officer should call?”

  “It is.”

  “And you’ll be at the prison gates tomorrow at two?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. That is all.”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  Stella hung up the phone. It was happening. Tomorrow,
Dane would be out. He’d be free.

  ***

  49: Fresh Start

  DECKER, one of the guards who had been on Unit 2 as long as Dane had, stepped up to the cell door. “You ready to get out of this cage?”

  Dane stood up, looked around one more time, and picked up the cardboard box that held the few things he had accumulated in twelve years. Some pictures. Letters. The hot-pink bit of fabric from Stella’s torn shirt.

  Having a cell to himself all this time had helped keep him isolated from the other prisoners. He had few friends on the inside, not that anyone could really be called friends. He learned to seek out the lifers, the older ones who’d weathered decades of hotshots, gangs, and thugs. By the time Dane had been moved from the plate factory to the garage, which was outside the walls, he had a congenial relationship with a couple of the more skilled tradesmen, and had been able to work on newer models of cars as well as the machinery and trucks that belonged to the prison. This helped keep him employable for when he got out.

  He never told Stella that his workplace was outside the gates. She wouldn’t do anything, but she didn’t realize that some of the regulars at the cafe were always seeking out the women of other inmates, pumping them for information, trying to see who might be an ally on the inside. His position in the garage, while a step up from the factories, made him vulnerable, and by extension, her too. Still, they had made it.

  Decker opened the iron door, slapping Dane on the back as he passed. “About time, old man, about time.”

  The other inmates on his walk came forward, waiting in their cells for the end of the midday count, to see him off.

  “Nice threads!” one called.

  “Your mama dress you?” asked another.