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AFTER HIS FIRST WIFE left him and returned to San Diego, he’d begun to look for female companionship. He was in his early twenties then as he cruised “the loop” in Renton, a Boeing town about seven miles east of Burien and Tukwila where he grew up. On weekend nights, the loop was filled with cars that circled past the high school and the theaters again and again, cruising with windows down and music blasting. The crowd was mostly made up of students, but some of the drivers were a little older. It was a casual place to meet someone.
He met a woman named Dana Brown* when he saw her and pulled close to her car on the Renton Loop. They exchanged names and phone numbers. She was quite different from his ex-wife. Dana was short and very, very heavy. She had a sweet face, but she’d never really dated when she went to Mount Tahoma High School in Maple Valley because the boys all wanted cheerleader types. She was very nice to him, and thrilled that he was so interested in her.
She found him fun and fu
Since he was old enough, he’d always had a job, and he had begun to work at the Kenworth Truck Company. He wasn’t making much money, but he was learning a lot about painting the mammoth rigs that could sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. His ten-mile commute over country roads from Maple Valley was easy in the early seventies; it was long before builders began to carve wide swaths out of the evergreen forests surrounding Seattle to accommodate housing developments with names like Firwood Heights and Cedar Mist Estates.
Marya
Dana and her family had moved to Washington State from one of the southern states where they had a little farm. Marya
After she graduated from Mount Tahoma, Marya
Dana said she was married now and was calling to tell Marya
Chad was in Children’s Orthopedic Hospital in Seattle in an incubator, and Dana said she had no transportation to visit him. Her husband was working nights, and they had only one car. Marya
As Dana led her toward the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) nursery, she warned her friend, “He’s a little small.”
“He was so small,” Marya
But Chad did live, and he finally weighed enough so that his parents could take him home. Marya
Marya
It seemed to Marya
The two couples often got together on weekends for potluck di
The two couples went to church together, too. There was a minister who was trying to start a new Southern Baptist congregation, and he was a dynamic speaker and ambitious proselytizer, knocking on doors to bring new worshippers into his church. There was no actual church building yet, so they held their Sunday and Wednesday services in the Aqua Barn, a compound in Maple Valley that featured both a swimming pool and a stable that rented horses.
Dana’s husband often stood to read the scriptures aloud to the congregation. “He was so ski
Their pastor’s views were truly archaic in a world where women’s rights were begi