“They had no money, but they paid for lawn care. But if you're broke, you mow it and just let it go brown and you don't care,” Ellen said later. “We knew all along they weren't good at handling whatever money they did make.”
To a few, it still seemed that Mary Kay and Steve Letourneau were a team. The focus appeared to be on their family. Steve worked nights so that he could be home when Mary Kay was teaching at school. When she returned to work after her babies were born, she'd pump her breast milk in the classroom and Steve would make milk runs throughout the day.
“Steve was her best friend,” Principal Patricia Watson said later.
At times, the principal worried about Mary Letourneau, the person. Mary the teacher always gave one hundred percent and more—but that was a problem.
“Even before I left Shorewood,” Patricia Watson said years later, “I had some concerns about her stability.”
She talked with Mary about focusing her priorities. She was staying up too late, and running herself ragged. The principal worried that the teacher's own children were not getting enough of their mother's time.
“Mary,” Patricia said more than once, “you need to get some things in control. You got to set your priorities because you can't do it all.”
Mary would promise to give it consideration, come up with a plan, a compromise that allowed her to be the best teacher and the best mother she could be. She'd come back to Patricia and they'd talk some more. She was sincere in her understanding that something wasn't working.
“She was just really a perfectionist,” Patricia recalled. “When you are a perfectionist you see every place that is not working for you. She could look at her children and figure out what wasn't right and beat herself up about it.”
In the fall of 1993, Mary Kay Letourneau moved into the annex, a cluster of Shorewood classrooms joined to the main part of the school by a narrow covered walkway, to teach sixth grade—at her request. She was pregnant with her fourth child, and after Christmas she delivered another beautiful daughter, Jacqueline. Mary Kay Letourneau was doing what she was born to do, being a mother and a teacher.
In time, toddler Jackie would join her mother and big sister as they sang the songs from the Bette Midler movie Beaches, and danced around the house. Like her father, Mary Kay would twist the lyrics and make them her own. She sang “Happy Sunshine” instead of “You Are My Sunshine.” Her children loved it.
Chapter 21
IN SAD REALITY, the Steve and Mary Kay Letourneau marriage was a gorgeous package with nothing inside. They seemed to want the world to see them for what they had a right to be—pretty, handsome, and with money to spare. Flight benefits from Steve's job at Alaska Airlines allowed for a big part of the charade by giving them next-to-nothing airfare to anywhere they desired. Nordstrom credit cards and creative bookkeeping did the rest. Steve would later say he didn't want to know that he was in so deep and that his wife was a spendthrift extraordinare. He didn't want anyone to know how bad it was.
It was true. One of Steve's relatives recalled a cousin's wedding and how Steve and Mary arrived late, though not as late as usual. They looked beautiful. Better than the bride and groom. Their children were equally well decked out.
“The kids were all dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy, you know, knickers. They dressed like they thought they were the Kennedys or something,” the relative said later.
Steve and Mary were the gorgeous golden couple. She was the California girl with the stylish hair and the figure of a model. He was the square-jawed Dudley Do-Right; all blond and broad shouldered. Mary Kay even called him Dudley Do-Right and teasingly gave him a bathtub toy depicting the cartoon Canadian Mountie. Their children were perfect, too. A balanced grouping for the family Christmas card.
But as Steve and other family members learned, it was not so lovely after all. The Letourneaus' money problems escalated after they moved to Normandy Park. Even with family help, things were speeding from bad to worse. They were behind in their payments for the van given to them by Steve's father in Alaska. Even the money given by a wealthy aunt and uncle for part of the down payment on the house in Normandy Park had not been enough to provide a cushion in their overwhelmed checking account. The mortgage payments had been too high and the house was headed for foreclosure. The month before Steve and Mary Kay celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary, they filed Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Student loans of more than $27,000, medical bills, and assorted credit cards had overwhelmed them. They still owed the IRS more than $10,000. The total unsecured debt was almost $50,000. For assets, they listed a 1985 VW Jetta and a 1969 Buick. Steve had $25 cash on hand.