“I should have told you sooner,” he said. “It was kind of disgusting, so I didn't want to say anything.”
Tandy Mattson studied the contents of the letter.
“Did she ever do anything to you?” she finally asked her son, who had transferred into room 39 after Christmas.
“No.”
“Okay,” she said.
The age difference between Mary Letourneau and Vili Fualaau did indeed disturb Tandy Mattson, but she had a hard time seeing what happened between teacher and student as a terrible crime. It wasn't as though such things hadn't happened before. Tandy had known of teacher-and-student flings from her own days as a teenager. It wasn't out there in the open, but it was known.
“When I was in high school I knew plenty of girls messing with the football coach,” she reminded her husband.
Nick Mattson had a different take. He didn't buy that kind of thirty-something justification. He also refused to see what had transpired as a love story or a “mistake,” and because of their stubborn positions he and Tandy went round and round about it.
“It's child rape,” Nick said as his wife reached over to hit the “mute” button on their giant television set. “The boy is a child. I don't care if it was a woman molesting a boy or an older guy molesting young girls. She's a sick woman.”
Tandy didn't feel that way at all. She thought that it was within the realm of possibility, maybe even probability, that Mary and Vili loved each other.
“But,” she conceded while her husband held to his hard line, “it may be puppy love, though. And I can't say it was his first time. I heard he's in a gang.”
Danelle Johnson's twins were among those who just couldn't see that anything that happened between Mary Letourneau and Vili Fualaau was wrong. Vili was a gentle soul, an artist. Mary was the beautiful and wise love of his life. For Danelle, there was no getting through to her son and daughter. It was a love affair, not a crime.
“Whatever illness she's got, she's got a pretty good illness,” she said later. “She actually convinced him, and them too, that she was in love with him. Then when they got in her way of using him—even though I don't think she thought she was using him—then she started turning on them, trying to get rid of them so they wouldn't be in her way.”
Drew told his mother that she was wrong. He knew that Vili was in love, but Danelle dismissed the idea.
“He's too young to decide what he wants. And she's of an age where she should know that even if she did want it she should wait.”
Not everyone was mortified, disgusted, or outraged when word went beyond Shorewood school grounds that Mary Letourneau and her former sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau had been having sexual relations.
Katie Hogden nearly jumped out of her skin with joy when the first layers of secrecy began to peel away. The dark-haired teen with braces, the budding writer, the girl who never had a cross word for anyone, responded with euphoria.
Oh, my gosh! she thought. Two of my closest friends have found each other. That's so cool.
The idea that there might be dire consequences didn't hit her,
“The age thing didn't click,” she said later. “When you hear that your friends are starting a relationship and they have liked each other for so long… they are just perfect for each other.”
To Katie, it was beautiful, right, and romantic. It wasn't until she saw the news reports that cast it as a crime that she could acknowledge that it might have been wrong.
It had been a year and a half since Kate Stewart had seen Mary Kay Letourneau. The break in their face-to-face contact had been the longest since their friendship started at Arizona State in 1982, but it was not an estrangement. Both chalked up the lapse to marriages, careers, but mostly to the responsibilities of running households with small children. Mary Kay and Steve had four children, and Kate and her doctor husband were right behind them with a son and two daughters.
When a friend considered moving to Seattle, Kate suggested looking up Mary Kay for the scoop on the city's neighborhoods and schools. When the woman returned to Chicago, she told Kate that she had better call Mary Kay. There was urgency to her suggestion.
“Your friend is in trouble,” she said. “She's about to break.”
Kate suspected marital problems and, frankly, wasn't all that concerned if that was the cause. Mary Kay could get past that, and, Kate thought, it was certainly high time for a divorce.
“How are you?” she asked over the phone.
“We-ell.” Mary Kay hesitated, drawing out the one-syllable word to two. “There's a lot going on.”
“What's going on? You're getting divorced?”
“Yes.”