The day before when I had encountered him in front of the Kelseys’ house, I had very much doubted the veracity of his claim of family friendship, but there in that suffocatingly hot living room, with unchecked tears rolling down his pudgy cheeks and dripping from the ends of his sagging mustache, the depth of Maxwell Cole’s grief was undeniable. As Max’s story spilled out, I found myself missing the old familiar antagonism. His friend’s death had taken all the fight out of him, and in spite of myself, I felt a certain grudging sympathy toward the man.
“From fifth grade,” he added brokenly. “That’s how long we were friends. Her family came to Seattle from southern Utah, someplace around St. George, I believe. They moved to the Hill the summer Marcia and I were between fourth and fifth grades. She liked to read and so did I. We met at the library branch up on Garfield Street. We both had permission to check books out of the adult section. All summer long we passed books back and forth. Marcia always turned down the corners of the sexy parts. She was a lot better at finding them than I was.”
He smiled sadly, tugging with both hands on the wispy ends of his drooping mustache as though hoping to massage them into some kind of order. It didn’t work.
“We were like that,” he went on. Max crossed two fingers and held them out in front of him for a moment to show me what he meant before letting them fall limply back into his lap.
“I never had a sister,” he said, “and Marcia never had a brother. We were both only children. She was like a sister to me.”
“You stayed friends from then on?” I asked.
“More or less. You know how kids are. We had a big fight during eighth grade. I can’t even remember now what it was about, but we didn’t speak for most of that year. We patched things up once we got to high school, though. We were in journalism together, and our senior year we were coeditors of the KUAY.”
“That what?”
“The KUAY,” he repeated. “Queen Anne High’s weekly newspaper. That’s where I first got interested in journalism. Chris was there too. He did sports.”
“Chris?” I asked. “Who’s he?”
“Chris McLaughlin. Her first husband. You didn’t know about him?”
“No.”
“Well,” Max said firmly. “Christopher McLaughlin was a creep, the absolute scum of the earth as far as I’m concerned. I never could see what she saw in him other than sex maybe. He seduced her early on, the night of the junior/senior prom, as a matter of fact. She told me about it at the time, we were that close, and I worried that maybe she’d get knocked up. Of course, that was long before anyone knew she was a Downwinder.”
“A what?”
“A Downwinder. Haven’t you ever heard of them?”
I shook my head. “They’re the people who lived downwind from the Nevada Test Site during the late fifties, when they were still doing aboveground nuclear testing,” he said.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Marcia was staying out on her grandparents’ ranch when they set off a particularly dirty test. Unexpected winds blew the radioactive crap right across her grandparents’ land. Both grandparents eventually died of cancer. The doctors later attributed Marcia’s sterility as well as her female difficulties to that, although nobody’s ever proven it in court. You know how that goes.”
Max paused for a moment, then hurried on. “Anyway, that’s why it was so wonderful when Pete showed up with a ready-made family.”
“You said Chris McLaughlin was her first husband. What ever happened to him?”
Maxwell Cole snorted derisively. “Who knows? Who cares? Marcia left him in Canada and came back home. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned. Her folks were absolutely delighted to think she had finally come to her senses and left the creep. They helped her get an annulment-that cost them a pretty penny-and they also helped Marcia get back into school at the university. They weren’t wild about Pete to begin with, but they got along fine with him eventually. If it hadn’t been for him, they probably would have missed being grandparents altogether.”
While Max was speaking, I began putting together a rough chronology. Max and I were almost the same age. That meant Marcia Kelsey and Chris McLaughlin were too. Back then there had been only one reason why someone of my generation would disappear into the wilds of Canada and stay there-the Vietnam War.
“So Chris McLaughlin was a conscientious objector?” I asked.
Max nodded. “So he claimed. How’d you guess?”
“It figures,” I said.
“Chris was one of the very early models,” Max continued. “He took off for Canada in 1967 and dragged Marcia along up there with him. He married her on the way, just to put a good face on it, I guess, but her folks were heartbroken.
“I still don’t know everything that went on while they were up there. Marcia and I were always close, very close. We told each other secrets that we wouldn’t share with another living human being, but she never talked to me about those years in Canada, not the details anyway. It must have been pretty bad. She hinted around about drugs and some kind of commune living arrangement. I’ll say this much for him. When it came to scuzzy low-life stuff, Chris McLaughlin was always ahead of his time.”
“So how did she meet up with Pete Kelsey?”
Max shrugged. “Kismet. Fate. Whatever you want to call it. I hadn’t seen her for almost three years when she just happened to drop by the house to say hello and to tell me that her annulment had been granted. She came by to say she was a ”free woman.“ Pete Kelsey was there that afternoon, giving my mother an estimate for a remodeling job she wanted done. As soon as they laid eyes on one another, Pete and Marcia hit it off. I’ve never seen anything like it, and Marcia was wild about Erin. You’ve heard of whirlwind courtships? Theirs took the cake. They got married three weeks to the day from the time they met. A justice of the peace married them right in this very room, here in front of the fireplace. I was the best man, and my mother was the matron of honor. We took care of Erin while they were off on their honeymoon.”
“It sounds almost too good to be true.”
“I think that’s what the Riggs thought at first, that Marcia had screwed up again.”
“Who are the Riggs?”
“Marcia’s folks. LaDonna and George Riggs. He’s retired now. They spend their winters in Arizona and their summers in Gig Harbor. Like I said, to begin with, they weren’t wild about the idea. For one thing, Pete wasn’t Mormon, and Marcia was, in name at least. She was always way too wild for her own good. She’s what they call a Jack Mormon. Much to her folks’ surprise, though, after the wedding, Pete didn’t raise the least objection to George and LaDonna taking Erin along to church with them. They ended up with a good Mormon grandchild after all. Erin is quite devout. She takes it all very seriously. She’s all set to go on a mission next year after she finishes her degree.”
“What can you tell me about their marriage?”
Max eyed me speculatively. “What did Pete tell you?”
“That it wasn’t all a bed of roses.”
“No, I suppose not,” Max agreed. “They’ve had their troubles just like everybody else, but what can you expect? They come from such different backgrounds.”
“What exactly is Pete’s background?”
“His folks divorced when he was very young. He was on his own by the time he was sixteen, so you can see how he and Marcia would be coming from opposite ends of the spectrum, with her family solid and stable, and his anything but. Anyway, they were both a little on the wild side when they got married, and I think maybe they both fooled around some on the side-Marcia more than Pete, perhaps-but that was always just surface stuff. Those were meaningless relationships. There was never anything that came close to breaking them up. Those two shared something very special between them, a real bond. I always envied them that.”