Mary's lack of urgency mystified the man.
She's a sweet lady, but only by the grace of God has that little boy made it as far as he has, Joe thought.
Years later he still wondered about it. Oddly enough, he never doubted that Mary loved Steven or her other children. She was a good mother, except for losing track of her progeny.
“This kid was three or so and running around this complex,” Joe recalled. “My next-door neighbor and I would freak out. There was a busy street and they were building some apartments. We'd find him watching the heavy equipment on the edge of the construction site. They could have squashed him like a bug. It really shocked me.”
If ever someone needed a new beginning, it was Teri Simmons. The daughter of Fran Bendix, who lived across the Carriage Row complex from the Letourneaus, was fighting a secret disease that in time would nearly take her life. Bulimia had been her secret hell since her parents split up when she was just twelve. Fran went off to flight attendant school and eventually married Joe Bendix, also a flight attendant. The two worked at Alaska Airlines with Steve Letourneau. Teri, a soft-voiced young woman from Texas with a little bit of the Lone Star State in her accent, came to Seattle to start over, finish her degree at the University of Washington, reconnect with her mother, and, God willing, get better.
Almost immediately, the young woman across the complex caught her eye.
“When you first see her she is so stylish, so striking, and such a beautiful woman and so precious that I was a little put off,” Teri Simmons said later. “I thought maybe she was a little, for lack of a better term, snobby. I got to know her a little bit at a time, then all of a sudden we were great friends. Once you get past that facade.”
Though Mary Kay was a mother and wife, she and Teri were at similar places in their professional lives. Mary Kay was trying to finish up her degree at Seattle University, following it with a student teaching stint at a Catholic school in Seattle. Teri was enrolled at the University of Washington. Both women had let things slow them in their plans to complete their education. For Mary Kay, it was motherhood. For Teri, it was her bulimia.
“We were like those little fishin' bobbers,” Teri remembered some time later. “We were all by ourselves and we happened to bump into each other and we stuck. Neither one of us had any other friends. We were very fortunate to have found each other.”
The Letourneaus were a family that was focused on the future. There didn't seem to be much affection between Mary Kay and Steve Letourneau. Their lives were a routine. A marriage more like a business deal than an affair of the heart. The love between them barely showed. But, Teri and others wondered, how could it? Mary Kay was going to school and Steve was always working or taking the odd classes at Highline Community College. Steve was hardly ever home.
“He worked his ass off,” Teri said later. “He worked so hard for that family. They were a family that had a mission that was bent on both of them getting their education and doing what they wanted to do.”
Years later, when his supporters would be few and far between, Teri Simmons would stand up for her old friend and neighbor, Steve Letourneau.
“He never got to finish [his education]. He never got to do what he wanted to do. And Mary Kay did. She got what she wanted and she blew it. If I were Steve I would feel so badly about that.”
The weeks and months flew by. Mary Kay and Teri carpooled to class with little Steven in tow. They clipped coupons for grocery shopping at Albertson's and they hung around the town house, joking and laughing like a couple of teenagers, and sharing their dreams for the future sprawled out on towels at Seattle's Alki Beach. Throughout all of it, Mary Kay had a singular focus.
Now pregnant with her second child, Mary Kay told Teri that she had wanted nothing more in her life than to be a teacher. And she gave the endeavor her all. It was not uncommon to look across the way late at night to see the lights still on at the Letourneau town house. At two, three, four, five A.M. the lights would shine. Somehow Mary Kay could tap into energy sources unknown to most as she cut pieces of construction paper into pretty shapes for her classroom assignments. She was determined to be the best.
In the summer of 1987, Mary Kay, twenty-five, delivered her first daughter at Seattle's Swedish Hospital. The blond-haired baby resembled Steve's side of the family. When Mary Kay held her infant, she looked down on the most beautiful baby girl in the world. In keeping with eight generations of Irish tradition, like her mother before her, she named her first baby girl Mary—Mary Claire. She cuddled her little one as though she wanted the moment to last forever, as though she couldn't let her go. She wanted a closeness with her babies.