“Then you can’t visit till you are.”
Kate wanted to argue with him, but she knew there was no point. Frustrated, she turned to go.
“Wait,” the guard said. “Katharine Woodward?”
“Yes.”
“You’re on here.” He handed her a pass and directed her to Garth’s cellblock.
She swallowed hard, walking through the metal detector. She hadn’t visited, written, or called for twenty-three years, but he’d kept her name on his list. She and the other women walked through a series of metal doors, one clanging shut behind them before the next opened. Correctional officers inspected the grocery bags, rifling through them. Kate heard potato chips crunch and break as one guard pawed through a woman’s bag roughly.
“Hey,” the woman said. “Don’t bust them.”
“What’s the difference? He’s going to eat them anyway.”
The woman turned to Kate, anger in her eyes.
“No respect here, none.”
“No talking!” a different guard barked.
It took thirty minutes to get from the prison’s front entrance to the last metal door.
A massive guard stood in the middle of the corridor, making the women go around him. He had the neck of a bodybuilder and the gut of a lazy slob. His brown hair was slicked back, his complexion sallow. He watched the women pass with half-lidded eyes, like a frog waiting to lap up a fly. His left thumb was hooked into his belt, his fingers dangling down the front of his pants.
The visiting room was full. Prisoners in bright-yellow uniforms sat facing their visitors across long tables that reminded Kate of the soup kitchen. Many of the men had tattooed arms and necks. Kate wondered what they had done to land here. She felt sick at the idea of a criminal from Ainsworth worming his way into Beth’s life.
Guards were stationed around the room, keeping watch. The door guard had followed the women in. Kate could barely breathe. She looked at all the faces, wondering if she’d even recognize her father. She thought maybe he was still in his cell, but in the half hour since she’d signed in, she saw the guards had gotten him.
He saw her approach and stood.
She held back a gasp. He was old. Her tall, handsome father was stooped and gray. His skin was pale; he had a white scar on his forehead. But he was beaming, his smile at the sight of her as delighted as ever. When she got close, she had to hold herself back from crashing into him with a hug.
“I never thought you’d come,” he said.
“Neither did I,” she said.
They stood facing each other for a minute, till a guard approached them and gestured to keep a distance apart, sit down on opposite sides of the table. Kate tried to keep her face from crumpling, but it was a losing battle. She felt like a little kid whose heart had been broken. She stared into her father’s hazel eyes, saw all the love and pride he’d always felt for her, thought of all the years he’d stolen from them.
“My name was on your list,” she said.
“I know, Katy. I never gave up hoping.”
“You probably should have,” she said.
“But I didn’t.”
She looked at his hands. Gnarled and veined, they were flat on the table, as if he wanted to reach across and take hers, reassure her like he used to when she was a little girl, let her know that everything would be all right. He’d been the best father ever, until he wasn’t.
“What happened to your forehead?” she asked.
“A fight,” he said. “Years ago, when I first arrived.”
“You fight in here?” she asked harshly.
“No,” he said. “I got beaten for what I did to you and Beth. People here don’t like fathers hurting their children.”
She braced herself, her whole body shaking, remembering the ropes around her wrists, the weight of her mother’s body.
