27

AFTER HIS FIRST WIFE left him and returned to San Diego, he’d begun to look for female companionship. He was in his early twenties then as he cruised “the loop” in Renton, a Boeing town about seven miles east of Burien and Tukwila where he grew up. On weekend nights, the loop was filled with cars that circled past the high school and the theaters again and again, cruising with windows down and music blasting. The crowd was mostly made up of students, but some of the drivers were a little older. It was a casual place to meet someone.

He met a woman named Dana Brown* when he saw her and pulled close to her car on the Renton Loop. They exchanged names and phone numbers. She was quite different from his ex-wife. Dana was short and very, very heavy. She had a sweet face, but she’d never really dated when she went to Mount Tahoma High School in Maple Valley because the boys all wanted cheerleader types. She was very nice to him, and thrilled that he was so interested in her.

She found him fun and funny, and he liked her because she acted as if he were wonderful. She didn’t seem to notice that he wasn’t particularly intelligent. Once he was out of school and out of the service, most people seemed to accept him as a regular person, and not someone to be left behind. His ego needed the attention he got from Dana after what had happened in his marriage. It wasn’t very long before they had moved in together in his tiny house in Maple Valley Heights. It was isolated and power lines zinged over the backyard, making a lot of people veer away from it, especially when the television news said that scientists warned that living too close to power lines could cause cancer.

Since he was old enough, he’d always had a job, and he had begun to work at the Kenworth Truck Company. He wasn’t making much money, but he was learning a lot about painting the mammoth rigs that could sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. His ten-mile commute over country roads from Maple Valley was easy in the early seventies; it was long before builders began to carve wide swaths out of the evergreen forests surrounding Seattle to accommodate housing developments with names like Firwood Heights and Cedar Mist Estates.

Maryann Hepburn* hadn’t seen Dana for years, although she remembered her from high school. Maryann’s last name was Carlson then and she was a senior at Tahoma, two years older than Dana. “You know how younger girls will kind of attach themselves to you in high school?” she asks. “Well, I was Girls’ Club president, and I was overweight. These two sophomores—Dana and Carol—were fat, too, and every time I turned around, there they were, my chubby sophomore groupies. I guess I was proving to them that you could be chubby and popular at the same time. So I got to know them, and was friendly with them, but there’s a big difference between sophomores and seniors in high school.”

Dana and her family had moved to Washington State from one of the southern states where they had a little farm. Maryann went home with Dana once in a while and she could see that the Browns were totally into country-western music. “Her dad, who was a lot older than her mother, played the fiddle and Dana played the guitar. They belonged to some group called Country Fiddlers or something like that, and they used to play songs on the radio sometimes, and go to hoedowns, or whatever, where the fiddlers competed.”

After she graduated from Mount Tahoma, Maryann Hepburn went to business school in downtown Seattle, and lost touch with Dana. “I met my husband on a blind date, and he was from Miami, so we moved there for a while,” she said. “I hated everything about it. It was flat and hot and humid. I was so glad to get back to Washington. It was a little after that when Dana called me.”

Dana said she was married now and was calling to tell Maryann that she had just had a baby boy: Chad.* “He was way, way premature,” Dana said, “and I had to have an emergency C-section because he wasn’t breathing right or his heart was too slow, or something like that.”

Chad was in Children’s Orthopedic Hospital in Seattle in an incubator, and Dana said she had no transportation to visit him. Her husband was working nights, and they had only one car. Maryann, who had had a baby girl herself six months earlier, felt sorry for Dana and volunteered to drive her.

As Dana led her toward the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) nursery, she warned her friend, “He’s a little small.”

“He was so small,” Maryann remembered, “I don’t think he weighed even two pounds. I’d never seen a baby so tiny. It was a miracle that he lived at all.”

But Chad did live, and he finally weighed enough so that his parents could take him home. Maryann and Dana, reunited, found they had a lot more in common than they had in high school. Their husbands worked for companies that were practically next door to each other, and they were outdoor guys who liked to cut wood together or fish while the wives visited.

Maryann was never sure just when Dana married her husband, but she knew that she was his second wife. She had the impression that they got married after Dana became pregnant, but it didn’t matter because they seemed happy together. “I liked him,” Maryann said. “His eyes twinkled and he had a great smile. What is the word? Charismatic. He was charismatic. He really wanted people to like him—so much so that he went out of his way to charm them. He was the kind of guy who would stop and help if your car broke down beside the road, always anxious to lend a hand. Dana was the same way, wanting friends.”

It seemed to Maryann that Dana’s husband made jokes about things most people wanted to hide. He turned his defeats into funny stories. She always remembered standing next to him in his backyard in Maple Valley Heights when he laughed and said, “Well, I married a thin blonde and that didn’t work out, so this time I married a fat brunette to change my luck.”

The two couples often got together on weekends for potluck dinners. None of them had much money, so they ate a lot of spaghetti and hamburger casseroles. They didn’t drink much either, but they sometimes had a glass of cheap wine. The women would laugh and say they got along so well because they were both overweight and had such skinny husbands. What had hurt so much in high school didn’t seem to matter anymore.

The two couples went to church together, too. There was a minister who was trying to start a new Southern Baptist congregation, and he was a dynamic speaker and ambitious proselytizer, knocking on doors to bring new worshippers into his church. There was no actual church building yet, so they held their Sunday and Wednesday services in the Aqua Barn, a compound in Maple Valley that featured both a swimming pool and a stable that rented horses.

Dana’s husband often stood to read the scriptures aloud to the congregation. “He was so skinny,” Maryann Hepburn recalled. “He had his hair combed down over his forehead and he looked like a boy wearing a man’s suit, but he was very serious in church.”

Their pastor’s views were truly archaic in a world where women’s rights were beginning to emerge. He preached that wives and daughters would be barred from Heaven if they didn’t obey their husbands. They were not allowed to wear the color red, or to cut their long hair. “Women were nothing in his eyes,” Maryann said. “We were not allowed to teach Sunday school or be choir directors or do any job where we had any authority. Dana’s husband believed everything that Pastor said, but my husband took issue with it. When Pastor told us that we were ‘Sunday Morning Christians’ because we didn’t go to every function they offered, that was pretty much the end for us.”