After getting those life-changing calls from Chez and her father, I spent the next couple of weeks searching for apartments and furniture. I found a one bedroom for about $400 a month. I then found a double-sized bed and a sleeper sofa that were both used, so I was able to get a good price on them. The last thing I needed to find was a crib. I looked all around all the used furniture stores in the North Park neighborhood. I went into a thrift store called "Safari Seconds." In the back was a wooden crib with a mattress. I asked the owner how much it was. I heard him say "$30." However, the store didn't take credit cards and my cash was in my apartment. (This was during a ten-year period in my life in which I didn't have a checking account.) I told him I would be back on Monday to try to buy the crib if it was still there. I went out to a couple of other places. I found another place that sold a similar crib for $120. I thought for a moment. Did the man say $30, or $130? He had an accent, so it was possible that I didn't hear him correctly. I had to worry about that for the entire weekend.
I showed up on Monday with the money. When I got there, the owner wasn't there. I had to wait a few minutes. When he came in, he confirmed that he had, indeed, said $30. I paid the money and told him I would be in that Saturday morning to pick it up. I had arranged with Tond to assist me in picking up the used bed and sleeper sofa I had found along with the crib.
All during this, Chez would call me collect every night I wasn't working. One of the things we had discussed was our future together as a couple and family. I asked her if she had the idea that we were going to get married right away. She said that we wouldn't get married before she came out, but that we would eventually have to. She wanted me to adopt Joad. I didn't see that as a problem, but I was glad that we weren't going to be husband and wife right off the bat. I was just barely getting used to the idea of having a family. I wasn't ready to plunge right in and make everything official.
She told me that she wished she had thought about naming me as the father when Joad was born. She thought that if she did, she'd never have to deal with Road. I told her I wouldn't have minded if she had done that. (I didn't know this at the time, but if she claimed I was the father and went on public assistance, they would have been coming after me for child support. I would have had to go back out to New Mexico to do a DNA test to prove I wasn't the father and she would have been back at square one with Road.)
She told me about the other women at the shelter. There was one woman who, even though the victims were only permitted to stay there one month, had been there for six. Chez said the other women were rather jealous of her because she had someplace to go when her month was up. They had no idea what was going to happen to them and they had to scramble to find some relative who would be willing to take them in.
She also told me about her caseworker at the shelter. Her name was Kijd. Kijd had been a victim of domestic violence herself and had been through the system before. Chez frequently would go on and on about how wonderful Kijd was and how much Joad really took to her. She told me about how she and some of the other women had gone out shopping one night and when she returned, Joad had fallen asleep on her while she was rocking him. She said Joad had never done that with anyone else.
One interesting tidbit I had found out about was Chez' ability to get on welfare once she came out to California. I had told Knod's mother what was going on. She worked as a nurse and told me that because Chez was a documented victim of domestic violence, she would not have to go through a waiting period before getting on welfare. She would immediately qualify for benefits. She would just have to bring documentation to the welfare office to support the claim. While I really didn't want her going on welfare in San Diego, I could see that trying to get her to work for a living was going to be pretty fruitless since she had refused to work up to this point.
This whole time, her parents had to constantly deal with Road coming over and bugging them about Chez' and Joad's whereabouts. For whatever reason, he didn't get arrested nor charged with any crime for throwing Chez up against the oven. They actually gave in to his demand that he see his son for Christmas. While this went against the wishes of the women in charge of the shelter, Chez agreed to it so that Road would hopefully get out of her parents' hair.
While everyone was apparently civil during that holiday get-together, Road did threaten to file a restraining order to keep Chez from leaving the state. Of course, I don't know why he thought that was going to do any good, considering a restraining order had been put out on him and he had no problem violating it, even at the risk of getting his son kicked to the curb from low-income housing (which eventually happened).
Chez and I continued to work on the details of me coming to get her and Joad. The plan was that I would be start driving toward New Mexico on Saturday, 01/02/93 after I got off work at 10pm. I would arrive in New Mexico the next evening. Her parents were going to drive her and Joad from Roswell to Clovis with all their stuff. I would then drive to Clovis and pick them up. We would go to Artesia so she could meet my parents before we went on to San Diego.
And I will be getting to that journey within the next couple of posts. You'll have to wait until then to see what happened with those plans.
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