Mary Kay had always been interested in her students. But Michelle had never heard such extreme concern for and awareness of a particular individual. From what she gathered, Vili Fualaau seemed deserving of the interest. Mary Kay described him as boy from a troubled home, being raised by a single mother in poverty with a father in prison. His prospects were bleak and she saw his future in his art. Her help could be his ticket out of poverty, she said.
“It is ironic,” Michael Jarvis, Michelle's husband, said later. “It was his ticket out of poverty. Not how she planned it. Not what she had in mind.”
In October, Mary Kay called Michelle now living in Costa Mesa to tell her that she had fallen in love. In fact, she was in love like she had never been in love before. She practically gushed into the phone, spewing out adjectives and descriptions of the most wonderful person in the world. He was the person that she had been searching for her entire life. She was not going to settle for a life without love anymore. She'd found the perfect love. There hadn't been any sex, but they were considering it.
“He's so wonderful. We talk about everything. He's my soul mate… ”
Oddly, for a woman who showed no compunction about sharing intimate aspects of her love life when she and Michelle were teenagers, Mary Kay didn't provide many concrete details about the wonderful new guy in her life. She offered nothing about his job or his social status. Not even the subject of his ever-important appearance was broached. Nothing much beyond the fact that he was wonderful and she was in love.
“She told me he was a student and she had a class with him over the summer,” Michelle recalled. “I was thinking he was a student in college that she had met through taking this class. So without coming right out and saying who he was, she led me to believe that he was a college student. In my mind I was thinking he was about twenty or so,” she said later. “But she never really said an age.”
But she was so happy that Michelle didn't pry.
I wonder what took her so long to find someone to love? she thought.
A few weeks later, more news came in another phone call from Mary Kay.
“I'm pregnant,” she said, “and it's not Steve's.”
Michelle didn't condemn. She was happy about it. Mary Kay seemed overjoyed and after all the years with Steve she certainly was entitled to some shred of joy. Mary Kay said that the father was the same person, the student, she had fallen in love with over the summer. Of course, there would be no abortion. She was going to divorce Steve and have the baby.
“Does Steve know?” Michelle wondered.
“No,” she said, adding that she had recently slept with Steve to buy some time while she figured out what she was going to do. There was no love lost between them and getting him into bed hadn't been easy, but the mission was accomplished. Intercourse had allowed the possibility that the baby was her husband's.
Michelle didn't fault her childhood friend for the deception.
“Will Steve believe that it's his baby?” she asked.
Mary Kay doubted it. “The baby will have black hair,” she said.
At that point, Mary Kay said she was biding her time. Things were tense enough and adding a baby from her affair to the mix would be trouble. Steve was agitated and suspicious enough.
“Mary Kay, I'm very afraid for you,” Michelle said. “I'm afraid of how he will react to this.”
Her friend told her not to worry. Cake was sure she could handle it.
* * *
Whatever was going on at the Letourneaus' house had to be pretty bad. Scott Douglas came home very upset one afternoon and told his mother that Steven's parents were not going to have a party for his twelfth birthday. Ellen Douglas wasted no time in telling her son that they'd celebrate his friend's birthday by inviting Steven over for pizza and videos. The words ran through her mind: “Just because your family is falling apart, doesn't mean your friends don't love you.”
Later Steve Letourneau talked with Ellen and the subject of the stress in his family came up. Steve said that big trouble had, in fact, been in the offing for a while. He refused to elaborate.
“I can't tell you now. But you're not going to believe it.”
Ellen didn't push, though the grade-school teacher was certainly intrigued.
Don't give me a little bit of the story…. it's like licking the spoon without eating the cookie, she thought later.
Chapter 28
GRANDMA NADINE KNEW that something was up with her grandson and his wife, but she had no idea how bad it would get. No marriage was perfect and the rumblings she'd heard about Steve and Mary Kay seemed like more of the same. Instead of brooding about something over which she had no control, she looked forward to filling her mobile home with children and grandchildren for the holidays. Holidays, she knew, were stressful enough without worrying about someone else's marriage.