Katie wondered about that later.
“I know she loved her kids, just like she loved every single kid in that whole entire class, but I don't know if they had as strong a bond with their mom. I don't know if they felt as close to her as she felt to them,” she said.
Katie remembered meeting Steven Letourneau for the first time. Though he was just a year younger, he wasn't connected to his mother like so many others in the class were.
“He just looked at her like a mom. Like, this is my mom. It wasn't like a friendship thing. This is my mom. She loves me and takes care of me, but there isn't a strong friendship.”
Katie's mother, Judy, mulled it over.
“She felt closer to her students than her own children. God knows, she spent more time with them.”
Calls or visits from her husband to Shorewood Elementary during that time frequently meant tears and a knotted stomach for Mary Letourneau. Often she'd just let Steve wait on the phone whenever the office secretary announced a call over the classroom intercom.
“It was like, I'll talk to you when I damn well please,” said a friend from the school.
The kids could see the stress, and at times, members of the Round Table group were sought for comfort. From what Katie could see—and what little Mary had told her—the Letourneau marriage was failing. Katie remembered one time when Steve came to school and starting yelling at Mary in the hallway in front of the classroom. Mary just stood there. When it was over she reached out for her student.
“I just need a hug,” she said. “I'm having a really hard time.”
Katie hugged her tightly. “Yeah, you are,” the student said.
Nothing more was said about what happened in the hallway that day. Nothing needed to be said. Whatever it was, it most likely had been Steve's fault. Students in Mrs. Letourneau's class loved her—Steve Letourneau was a man who lived with their teacher. It was true he was her husband, and she lived with him, but she didn't have much to do with the man. Steve was all wrong for his wife anyway.
“Steve didn't match Mary Letourneau at all,” Katie said later. “His personality from what I could see was completely different from hers. I can understand why she wasn't happy with him. It wasn't a meant-to-be situation. I think she tried to build on it, but it ended up not working.”
Steve didn't make a good impression on his wife's class.
“He always seemed rude to me,” Katie said later. “He wasn't welcoming to our class. He'd bring Jackie in, 'Hi, class!' No hug for Mary. 'Just come out in the hall because I need to talk to you.' He didn't seem like he was very friendly.”
Mary Kay Letourneau was coming undone. Most considered it the result of a faltering marriage made worse by stress and money matters, or it could have been that she had too many children to mother. She was on overload all the time. She looked wan. Things weren't getting better. But how much worse could they get? Mary Kay suffered her third miscarriage—though many didn't know until later that she and Steve had, in fact, been expecting a fifth child.
Mary Kay's reaction to losing the baby was peculiar to the Shorewood teacher who had known her for more than four years. The miscarriage had not brought tears or even much concern.
“It's for the best,” Mary Kay said, seemingly detached from what she had been through a few days before. “I'm not staying with Steve anyway.”
The comment struck the colleague, not because she was going to leave Steve Letourneau, but because having babies was so much a part of Mary Kay and her core values. Teaching, art, and having babies were the world to her.
Former Shorewood principal Patricia Watson was very concerned the last time she saw Mary Kay and her children. During a visit to her old school, Patricia saw the Letourneaus in the parking lot behind the school. Their windshield was cracked and the windows couldn't be raised or lowered. May Kay looked disheveled, far from the impeccably neat woman she'd always been. Her children didn't look quite right, either. They weren't scrubbed and Mary Claire wasn't wearing any shoes.
“All of them were less well kept,” she said. “Unkempt even.”
My goodness sakes, she thought, something has gone awry here.
Chapter 26
IN THE SPRING of 1996, Mary Kay Letourneau told neighbor and teacher Ellen Douglas that she was planning on taking art courses at nearby Highline Community College in order to earn credits necessary to keep her teaching certificate current. Ellen thought it was a good idea, a necessary plan. Mary Kay had often delayed getting the credits and it had reached do-or-die time. If she didn't get them that summer there was a good chance her teaching certificate would be in jeopardy.
It surprised Ellen when Mary Kay said she was thinking about spending the summer with her folks back in D.C. instead. Her mother said she'd pay for her to pick up the classes after the summer. It seemed reckless.