Part 2: A 35-Year-Old Biker Who Dropped Out in 7th Grade Read “Charlotte’s Web” to His 7-Year-Old Son Every Night for 6 Months — On the Last Page, the Boy Said One Sentence That Sent His Father into the Bathroom for 30 Minutes.
PART 2
I want to tell you about Wade McCallister and his wife Emma, because the rest of this story does not work without her.
I am Wade’s older sister by six years. I have known him his entire life. He was born in Ames, Iowa on March 14, 1990, the second of two children in a family that fell apart by the time he was eight. Our father had walked out the door for the last time in December of 1998. Our mother had worked three jobs to keep us in the small house off Twelfth Street where we grew up. She had worked herself into a heart attack at age forty-seven in 2003. She had not survived it.
I had been seventeen.
Wade had been eleven.
We had been raised, after that, by our maternal grandmother — a 64-year-old retired Iowa State University custodial worker named Margaret who had loved us hard but had not been able to keep up with a grieving 11-year-old boy who had started skipping school in the seventh grade and had finally, in May of 2002 at thirteen years old, told his middle-school guidance counselor that he was not coming back.
He had not come back.
He had worked, for the next four years, every odd job a 13-to-17-year-old boy in central Iowa could legally and semi-legally do — bagging groceries at the local Hy-Vee on University Avenue, sweeping floors at a tire shop, mowing lawns, delivering pizzas — and had handed every paycheck he earned to our grandmother for household expenses.
He had enlisted in the U.S. Army on his eighteenth birthday in March of 2008.
He had served six years active duty, including two combat deployments in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division. He had come home in 2014 with three combat ribbons, a partial GI Bill he never used, the small 82nd ABN tattoo on the side of his neck, and the kind of hard silence men come home with when they have decided not to talk about a thing.
He had met Emma Hartwick eleven months later, in February of 2015, at the small Ames Public Library on Lincoln Way.
Emma had been twenty-six years old at the time. She had been a first-grade teacher at Northwood Elementary in Ames. Slim build, soft pale skin, short wavy auburn hair pulled into a low loose ponytail, kind warm hazel-green eyes the exact color and shape that Caleb’s eyes would inherit, and a small scattered handful of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
She had been at the library that February afternoon to return a stack of children’s picture books for her first-grade classroom.
Wade had been there because the heat had gone out in our grandmother’s house and he had needed somewhere warm to sit for a few hours with a coffee.
Emma had been at the return desk in front of him in line. He had been holding his coffee. She had dropped one of her picture books. He had bent down to pick it up.
He had handed it back to her.
They had talked for twenty minutes at the return desk.
He had asked her out for coffee on her lunch break the following Wednesday.
They had been together every weekend after that for the next nine months. They had married in November of 2015 at the small Methodist church on Sixth Street in Ames. I had been the maid of honor. Wade had been twenty-five. Emma had been twenty-six.
They had bought, with a small VA-backed mortgage in January of 2016, the same two-bedroom rental house off Lincoln Way where Wade and Caleb still live.
Emma had wanted a baby immediately.
She had conceived in October of 2016.
She had been pregnant through the entire fall and winter and spring.
She had gone into labor on the morning of June 14, 2017, at thirty-three weeks pregnant, at home, with a sudden complication that turned out to be an eclamptic seizure followed by a placental abruption.
I will not write what happened next in clinical detail. I will say only that the paramedics had reached the house in eleven minutes, that the Mary Greeley Medical Center trauma OB team had done absolutely everything that could have been done, that Caleb had been delivered alive at 11:47 a.m. by emergency C-section weighing four pounds and nine ounces, and that Emma had died in the same operating room at 12:23 p.m.
Wade had been twenty-seven years old.
He had been a father for thirty-six minutes by the time he was a widower.
He had spent the next eleven days in the NICU with Caleb in a small chair beside the incubator, holding his son’s tiny three-fingered grip with his enormous tattooed pinky, not eating, not sleeping, while I and our grandmother had taken turns bringing him food he did not touch.
He had taken Caleb home on June 25, 2017.
He had been a single father since that morning.
I want to seed something here that matters: Wade had told me, on the porch of the rental house in the fall of 2017 when Caleb was three months old, in a low voice that did not work properly: Sis. I do not know how to do this without her. I do not know what kind of man I am supposed to be for this kid. I am not educated. I am not smart. I am not soft like Emma was. I am gonna do my best. But sis. I do not think my best is gonna be enough for him.
I had told him: Wade. You will figure it out. He will love you because you are his dad.
He had not believed me.
He had not believed me for the entire seven and a half years that followed.
He had also, in those seven and a half years, become a different man than I had ever expected my baby brother to be.
He had stopped drinking in October of 2018 when Caleb was sixteen months old, after one bad weekend he later refused to talk about. He had been sober every day since.
He had joined the Iron Hollow Riders MC in 2019 — a small Story County chapter of mostly post-incarcerated combat-veteran working-class men in central Iowa. He had earned his patch in 2020. He had been the chapter prospect master since 2022.
He had been working, since 2018, as the lead heavy-truck mechanic at a diesel-and-equipment shop called Boone County Diesel on Highway 30 west of Ames.
He had been making — for the seven and a half years since Emma died — Caleb’s breakfast at 5:45 a.m. every weekday morning, brushing the boy’s hair before school every morning with his enormous tattooed hands, packing a small careful lunch box with a handwritten note in block printing every weekday, picking Caleb up from after-school care at 5:45 p.m. every weekday evening, cooking dinner together every weeknight, and reading aloud to him at bedtime — picture books at first, then early-reader chapter books — every single night since Caleb was four years old.
Wade had not, until the Sunday afternoon in January when Caleb came home from the school book fair with Charlotte’s Web, ever read a book to his son that he himself could not comfortably read.
That had been the day everything changed.
PART 3
What Wade did in private over the next six months, I learned about only because I happened to be staying overnight at the house on the second weekend in February to help with Caleb while Wade was out of town for a chapter funeral in Cedar Rapids.
I had been sleeping on the couch in the small living room.
I had woken up at 1:14 a.m. to use the bathroom.
I had heard a small low voice coming from the half-open door of Caleb’s bedroom.
I had assumed Caleb was talking in his sleep.
I had walked over to check on him.
I had found, when I looked through the half-open door of Caleb’s room, Caleb himself fast asleep in his small twin bed with his teddy bear tucked against his cheek and his Spider-Man comforter pulled up to his chin.
I had found, sitting on the floor beside the foot of Caleb’s bed in the soft yellow light of a small nightstand reading lamp, my baby brother Wade — who was supposed to be in Cedar Rapids — at home, on the carpet, with the library hardcover of Charlotte’s Web open in his enormous tattooed hands.
He was reading aloud to himself, in a low careful whisper, with his hard pale grey eyes following every line and his weathered mouth carefully shaping every word.
He was on chapter ten.
I had stood frozen at the half-open door for almost a full minute, watching him.
I had watched him stumble over the word bewilderment.
I had watched him stop. Lift his finger. Set it under the word. Sound it out — be-WIL-der-ment — twice. Try the whole word again. Get it. Move on.
I had watched him do the same thing with the word gosling sixty seconds later.
I had watched him quietly read his way through the entire chapter, alone, on the carpet beside his sleeping son’s bed, at 1:14 a.m. on a Sunday morning.
When the chapter was finished, I had watched him gently close the book, set it carefully on Caleb’s nightstand, lean over, kiss his son’s small forehead, switch off the lamp, and walk out of the room.
He had not noticed me at the door.
I had quietly walked back to the couch.
I had cried into the throw pillow for approximately twenty minutes.
I had not, by the morning, said a single word to my brother about what I had seen.
I had not said a word to him for the entire six months that followed.
I had figured out, in the days after — by asking Caleb very carefully and casually one afternoon what books his dad had been reading him at bedtime — that Wade had been reading aloud to himself, on the floor of Caleb’s room, from approximately 9:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., every single weeknight, for the previous three weeks.
By April, by my discreet count, he had been doing it for three months.
By June, he had been doing it for five months.
He had also, I would learn from him later, been reading aloud from approximately 11:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. on weekends — when he had two hours instead of one before he had to be at his shop at 6 a.m.
He had been doing this for two reasons.
The first reason was that he wanted to be able to read the rest of Charlotte’s Web to his son without stumbling.
The second reason — by his own careful private admission to me on his back porch a year later — was: Sis. I figured if I learned to read better in private, the boy would never have to know his dad had to teach himself.
He had been wrong about the second reason.
Caleb had figured it out within the first week.
Caleb had not said a word about it to his father.
Caleb had also, in his own absolutely serious 7-year-old determination — by his own private account to me on the back porch much later — quietly started doing two things of his own, in private, every night.
He had started leaving the library hardcover of Charlotte’s Web on the nightstand on the side closer to where his father sat — instead of putting it back in his school backpack as he had originally done — so that Wade would not have to reach across the bed to get it after Caleb fell asleep.
And he had, in his own small careful 7-year-old handwriting, started keeping a single spiral-bound notebook hidden under his pillow with a careful list at the top.
The title of the list said: WORDS DAD HAS PRACTICED. (DO NOT TELL HIM I KNOW.)
By June, the list was four pages long.
PART 4
The final night of Charlotte’s Web was Tuesday, July 22nd.
Wade had reached the last chapter on Monday night, July 21st. He had read approximately two-thirds of it. He had decided, by his own quiet account to me later, to stop and save the final section for the following night — because, by every parent’s intuitive understanding of Charlotte’s death, that part of the book needed to be its own night.
He had been right about that.
On Tuesday night, July 22nd, at 8:14 p.m., Wade sat cross-legged on the carpet beside Caleb’s twin bed in the soft yellow light of the small reading lamp, with the library hardcover of Charlotte’s Web open in his enormous tattooed hands, and he read aloud the last fifteen pages of the book to his 7-year-old son.
He read the part where Charlotte explains to Wilbur that she will not be going back to the barn.
He read the part where Wilbur stays beside her at the fair grounds because she is too weak to make the journey home.
He read the part where Wilbur takes Charlotte’s egg sac home in his mouth, carefully, so it will be safe.
He read the part where Charlotte dies alone at the empty fair grounds, with no one beside her.
He read the final paragraph slowly, carefully, with his weathered father’s voice that had — over six months of nightly two-hour private practice on the floor of his son’s bedroom — finally become a voice that could read a children’s chapter book the way it was meant to be read.
He read, as the final words: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”
He closed the book.
He set it carefully on the nightstand.
He looked at his son.
Caleb Hartwick — 7 years old, slim, in his Spider-Man pajamas, holding his small worn brown teddy bear against his chest — had silent tears running freely down both small freckled cheeks.
The 7-year-old had been crying for the last two pages.
He had not made a sound.
Wade said, in his low rumbling voice: “Hey, partner. Hey. C’mere.”
Caleb sat up in the bed. He climbed across the blanket. He crawled onto his father’s lap on the floor.
He pressed his small thin face into the worn black leather of his father’s cut, against the Iron Hollow Riders MC patch over Wade’s heart.
He cried — quietly, the way 7-year-old boys cry — for almost four full minutes.
Wade did not say anything.
He just held him, with both his enormous tattooed forearms wrapped carefully around his son’s small thin shoulders, the way a 230-pound combat-veteran 7th-grade-dropout single father holds the only child he has left of the wife he buried at twenty-seven.
When Caleb finally lifted his small wet face off his father’s chest, he looked up at Wade with absolute serious 7-year-old earnestness.
He said: “Dad. You read so good. You can read anything.”
Wade did not respond for a second.
He could not.
He kissed the top of his son’s head. He carefully lifted Caleb back into bed. He pulled the Spider-Man comforter up to Caleb’s chin. He tucked the small teddy bear back into the crook of Caleb’s arm. He turned off the small nightstand reading lamp.
He said: “Sleep, partner. I love you. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Caleb said: “Love you, Dad.”
Wade walked out of the room.
He walked down the small hallway of the small two-bedroom rental house off Lincoln Way.
He walked into the bathroom.
He closed the door.
He turned on the bathroom fan to cover the sound.
He sat down on the cold tile floor of the bathroom with his back against the side of the bathtub, with both his enormous tattooed hands pressed flat over his face — and the 230-pound 7th-grade-dropout combat-veteran single father who had not let himself cry publicly since the morning of June 14, 2017 when his wife died on the operating room table at Mary Greeley Medical Center, finally let the tears go.
He cried, silently, on the bathroom floor of his small Lincoln Way rental house, for thirty straight minutes.
I know it was thirty minutes because I was on the phone with him at 8:50 p.m. that same Tuesday night — I had been planning to ask him whether he and Caleb wanted to come over for dinner on Saturday — and the call had gone to voicemail. I had called back at 9:14 p.m. The call had gone to voicemail again. I had finally driven over to the house at 9:34 p.m. because something in my older-sister gut had told me something was happening.
I had let myself in with my spare key.
I had heard the bathroom fan running.
I had checked on Caleb first. He had been asleep, with his cheek on his teddy bear.
I had walked down the hall to the bathroom.
I had knocked softly on the door.
I had said: “Wade. It’s me. Open the door.”
Wade had opened the door at 9:37 p.m. with his face red and his eyes streaming and his salt-and-pepper beard wet.
He had let me in.
He had let me sit down on the cold tile beside him.
He had told me, in his cracked low voice, what Caleb had said.
Dad. You read so good. You can read anything.
I had said: “Wade. He’s right. You can.”
Wade had said: “Sis. Tonight is the first night I think I am actually his dad.”
I had not known what to say to that.
I had just put my arm around his enormous shoulders.
We had sat on the bathroom floor together for another twenty minutes.
PART 5
The seeds were everywhere, and I have spent the last five and a half years putting them together.
The library hardcover. Caleb’s choice of Charlotte’s Web from the school book fair in January had not been a random pick. Caleb had told me, on his father’s back porch the summer he was nine years old, that he had picked Charlotte’s Web on purpose because it had been the only chapter book on the book-fair table that he had seen his late mother’s third-grade students reading at Northwood Elementary in a faded school photograph hanging in the upstairs hallway of their grandmother’s house.
He had wanted, by his own quiet 7-year-old account, to read the book his mother had read to her own students.
He had also, by his own quiet 7-year-old account, picked it because I figured if Dad and I read it together, it would be like Mom was still teaching me.
He had not told Wade this for three more years.
When Caleb finally told him, on the back porch in the summer of 2022 when Caleb was ten years old, Wade had quietly excused himself, walked into the garage, and sat on the cold floor beside his Harley with his head in his hands for forty minutes.
He had come back inside.
He had not said anything about it.
He had simply, the following weekend, taken Caleb to the Ames Public Library and quietly asked the children’s librarian — a 62-year-old woman named Mrs. Patterson who had personally known Emma McCallister as a regular library patron from 2010 to 2017 — for a list of every chapter book Emma had ever checked out for her own first-grade classroom.
Mrs. Patterson had cried at the desk.
She had pulled the records.
The list had been ninety-seven titles long.
Wade and Caleb had been reading their way through Emma’s list together, one book per month, for the three years since.
The reading-aloud-to-himself-in-private practice. Wade had continued that nightly two-hour practice — even after he finished Charlotte’s Web on July 22nd of 2018 — for the entire seven years that followed. He had read his way through Emma’s ninety-seven-title list privately first, every night between 9:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. on the floor of Caleb’s bedroom, before reading each title aloud to his son.
He had also, in the spring of 2019, quietly enrolled himself in a low-key adult basic literacy program at Des Moines Area Community College in Ankeny, twenty-eight miles south of Ames. The program met on Saturday mornings from 9 a.m. to noon. Wade had attended every single Saturday morning for the next four years and three months, missing only two — both for chapter funerals.
He had quietly transitioned from the adult basic literacy program to a GED preparation program at the same DMACC campus in the fall of 2023.
He had quietly, on Saturday morning, May 10th of this year — five years and ten months after the night on the bathroom floor — taken the four official GED exam sections at the DMACC Boone Campus test center.
He had passed all four sections on his first attempt.
He had received the official Iowa State High School Equivalency Diploma in the mail on Tuesday, May 27th of this year.
He had told no one, by his own quiet account to me later, except his sponsor at AA, the chapter president of the Iron Hollow Riders, and Caleb.
Caleb had been twelve years old.
Caleb had read the Iowa State Department of Education diploma silently at the kitchen table for almost a full minute.
He had handed it back to his father.
He had said, in his absolute serious 12-year-old voice: “Dad. We are going to the ceremony. The whole family is coming. I am calling Aunt Diane right now.”
He had called me at 6:47 p.m. that Tuesday evening.
He had said: “Aunt Diane. Dad graduated from high school today. There is a ceremony on May 31st. I need you to come. I need to give a speech.”
I had said: “Caleb. What kind of speech?”
He had said: “Aunt Diane. The kind a son gives at his dad’s graduation. I have been writing it for two years. It is ready.”
PART 6
The Iowa High School Equivalency graduation ceremony at the Des Moines Area Community College Boone Campus auditorium on Saturday morning, May 31st, of this year took place at 10:14 a.m.
There were one hundred and seventy-two graduates that day. Most were adults between the ages of twenty-four and fifty-five. Many of them had children in the audience.
Wade McCallister, 35 years old, dropped out in the seventh grade at thirteen, sat in the third row of graduates wearing a borrowed navy-blue cap and gown and the white tassel of the GED program. He looked, by my own honest sister’s assessment from the front row of the family section, profoundly uncomfortable in academic regalia.
He looked like a 230-pound bald biker in a borrowed gown.
He looked, also, like the proudest man in the auditorium.
In the front row of the family section, in pressed clothes, sat: me on the right, our grandmother Margaret — now eighty-four years old and on a walker — in the middle, and Caleb Hartwick, age twelve, in a clean navy-blue collared shirt and dark slacks and small dress shoes, on the left.
Caleb was holding a small folded sheet of paper in his small hand.
When the graduate class had crossed the stage and the diplomas had been distributed, the program coordinator — a 56-year-old white American woman named Dr. Rebecca Lindgren — had walked back to the podium and announced, in her warm professional voice: “Before we close, we have one short remark from a family member of a graduate. Caleb Hartwick, would you please come to the microphone.”
Caleb walked up to the stage.
He climbed the small set of steps in his clean navy collared shirt.
He walked to the podium.
He was twelve years old. He was four-foot-eleven. His chin barely cleared the microphone.
He unfolded his small piece of paper.
He read, in his careful clear twelve-year-old voice that was being broadcast through the auditorium’s speaker system to the audience of approximately four hundred people:
“My name is Caleb Hartwick. My dad is Wade McCallister. He graduated today. I want to tell you why he graduated today. When I was seven years old, I asked my dad to read me Charlotte’s Web at bedtime. He said yes. He didn’t tell me that he had dropped out of school in seventh grade. He didn’t tell me that he didn’t know if he could read it. I figured it out on the third night. So I started leaving the book on his side of the nightstand so he wouldn’t have to reach for it. He started reading the book to himself on the floor of my room every night after I fell asleep — for two hours, for six months — to practice. He thought I didn’t know. I knew. I kept a list of every word I heard him sound out. The list was four pages long by the end. On the last night of the book, when Charlotte died, I cried. My dad held me. I told him, ‘Dad, you read so good. You can read anything.’ He went into the bathroom and cried for thirty minutes. I know because Aunt Diane told me three years later. He thought I didn’t know that either. My dad learned to read better — for me. He went back to school — for me. Today he graduated from high school. Today, I am telling all of you: my dad learned because of me. From now on, I am learning because of him. I am twelve years old. I am in sixth grade. I am on the honor roll. I am going to go to college. And every weeknight at nine o’clock, my dad and I sit together at the kitchen table. He does his community college homework. I do my middle school homework. Our classroom is our living room. Our teacher is each other. My dad is the best dad on earth. Thank you.”
Caleb folded his paper.
He stepped down from the podium.
He walked down off the stage.
He walked, alone, all the way across the auditorium floor between the rows of graduating adult students, and he stopped in front of his father in the third row.
Wade stood up in his borrowed navy cap and gown.
The 230-pound 7th-grade-dropout combat-veteran bald biker in academic regalia opened both his enormous tattooed arms.
The 12-year-old climbed into them.
The auditorium of four hundred people stood up.
They applauded for one minute and forty-seven seconds.
PART 7
That was six months ago.
Wade is thirty-six now. He is currently enrolled in a part-time associate-of-applied-science degree program in diesel-and-heavy-equipment technology at the same Des Moines Area Community College campus. He attends Saturday morning and one weekday-evening class per week. He plans to graduate in the spring of 2028.
He has been promoted at Boone County Diesel to lead shop foreman as of October of this year. The promotion came with a small raise. He used the first month’s extra check to buy Caleb a new laptop for middle school.
Caleb is twelve and a half. He is in seventh grade at Ames Middle School. He is on the honor roll for the third consecutive quarter. He is the captain of the seventh-grade student council. He has informed me, in absolute serious twelve-year-old determination at our last family dinner, that he is planning to apply to the University of Iowa pre-law program in the fall of 2030, and that — because his mother was a teacher and his father is a mechanic — he wants to be a labor and education lawyer who represents working families.
Every weeknight at exactly 9:00 p.m., in the small living room of the rental house off Lincoln Way, a 230-pound bald biker in a clean grey t-shirt and a 12-year-old boy in his pajamas sit side by side at the kitchen table with their homework spread out between them.
They read together quietly.
When one of them hits a word the other does not know, they look it up.
There is a small worn red dictionary on the table between them.
It was Emma’s.
The library copy of Charlotte’s Web, by the way, was returned to the Ames Public Library on July 24, 2018, two days after Wade finished reading it.
Wade went back and purchased a brand-new hardcover copy two days later for $14.97.
That hardcover sits on the small bookshelf in the living room.
It will go with Caleb to college someday.
I drove past the rental house on Lincoln Way last Tuesday at 9:14 p.m.
The kitchen light was on.
Through the kitchen window I could see two heads bent close together over a wooden table — one bald, one sandy-blond — and a small worn red dictionary between them.
Some men, you don’t measure by their education.
Some, you measure by what they were willing to do at midnight.
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