GOOD TIMES
It was Thursday, August 12, and Leann Fletcher wasn't sure if she should be happy or not. Her instinct was for joy. She had just administered a home pregnancy test and it came back positive, and there was nothing she loved more in life than parenthood and her only child, Hannah, who had turned three just weeks earlier. If there one thing in the world she was truly gifted at, it was motherhood.
But her marriage had been a struggle the last two years, and while she and Mick had never been happier—he'd been everything she wanted since his last return at Easter—it was still too soon. Better to wait a year or so and make sure she and her husband were going to make it, make sure the judge she suspected of being his lover was really out of the picture.
Maternal instincts gained sway over rational thought. She was pregnant, again! Yes! She couldn't wait to tell Mick when he got home from work.
*
Though Lindy was her oldest sister, fully ten years her senior, she was Leann's best friend. Facially, they were nearly identical. They looked nothing like their other sisters, Lori and Lisa. They talked on the phone every day and they and their husbands socialized, as well.
Tonight, Saturday, August 14, they were double-dating, going out to dinner, then catching a movie. But this was going to be a special night. She hadn't told Lindy about the baby, yet, and couldn't wait.
This Saturday night movie thing was going to be fun, too. The week before, she and Mick, Lindy and her husband, Mark Termarsch, and a close friend, Jeni Hughes, and her husband, Jeff, had gone out to the movies and promised each other they'd start doing this regularly. Jeni had never really been close to Mick but he was so much nicer now since moving back in April.
Leann called Jeni to ask her if they were coming. They couldn't. Jeff had to work.
"Come on, you can come without him," said Leann. "Please." "Nah, I don't want to go without Jeff."
"Come on, please?"
"No, I really can't. I'm waiting for my sister, Wendy." "Well, she can come."
"No, she's gonna be here later. I really can't."
They said their goodbyes. It was the last time Jeni would ever talk to Leann. She would tell a courtroom more than nine months later that she had never forgiven herself for saying no to Leann, for missing out on seeing her one last time.
*
Lindy and Leann talked on the phone and looked at the movie guides. The Sixth Sense was playing at the Oakland Mall, a few miles away. People'd been raving about that. There was a Red Robin, there, too, where they could eat. It was set.
Lindy and Mark, Mick, Leann and Hannah all met at the Red Robin. "Tell her, Hannah," said Leann after they'd been seated awhile. "Go on, Hannah, tell her."
Hannah, a round-faced cutie, sharp as a tack, with a big vocabulary and an endearing way of substituting her "R's" with "W's," had been coached ahead of time to break the news. "I'm going to have a baby bwothuh oh sistuh."
Lindy squealed. She and Leann stood up and hugged. Mark congratulated Mick.
She'd found out Thursday, she told them. It was early, just three or four weeks along, but there was no way she could hold the news and wait till the pregnancy was past its most dangerous stage.
"I just asked Mick if we could move from Hazel Park by the time the new baby comes," said Leann, referring to the need for a larger, more suburban house.
"I might have to get a second job," said Mick. It was no secret his law practice hadn't exactly taken off. He was doing okay, but that was about it. Still, he was making some contacts and applying for high-paid assistant prosecutor
positions around the area.
After the meal, Mick and Leann took Hannah in his truck to the Miseners', just a couple of miles up the road, then returned for the movie, which they loved. The movies shocking trick ending surprised the heck out of all of them. It was a night for surprises, and Leann had one more in store.
Out in the parking lot, Leann asked Lindy and Mark to swing by the Miseners'. She couldn't wait to break the news to her parents. The Termarsches wanted to head home, instead.
"You don't need me."
"Ple-ease," said Leann, stretching the word out. Since the time she'd come home from the hospital, she'd had her siblings wrapped around whatever finger she chose. She gave Lindy that special, pleading, so-cute look that always worked. "Come on. Please."
"All right," said Lindy.
When they got there, it was Mick's turn to prod Hannah as they all sat around the family room in the back of the house. Jack was in his La-Z-Boy chair, as usual. The Miseners' only son, Chris, was there, too. "Come on, Princess, tell Grandma and Grandpa. Tell Grandma and Grandpa."
Hannah said her lines. Jack and Gloria were elated. There were hugs, handshakes, words of congratulations. Jack couldn't stop beaming. He'd traded in his beloved Taurus for a van just so he could haul his grandkids around, and now he was going to have another one. Leann said she had planned on waiting till Hannah was five, but she was really happy it happened, anyway.
"Leann was a great mother and it was nice to see she was going to have another one," Jack would say later. "That's all she wanted in life, to get married and stay home and have a family."
Before they left, the Fletchers made plans to stretch this happy day into two. How about if the Miseners and Fletchers went to church together in the morning
—a rarity for the family—and then went out to dinner Sunday night? The Outback, our treat, said Mick. The Miseners hadn't been there, but had heard it was something special. That was the place with the line out the door, wasn't it? And that fancy thing they did with the onion and those big steaks? Yep, that was
the place.
*
If Sunday dinner on Mick was a surprise, there was an even bigger one before they left. Leann had a habit of borrowing money from her parents in dribs and drabs to pay for bills. She was only working part-time at Incognito, a hair and nail salon, and Mick's invoices for his work at court could be really slow in getting processed. They had, in fact, built up a little more than $2,500 in debt to the Miseners in the last year or two, doled out in a series of small checks. It included $500 Jack had given Leann for her attorney when Mick had filed for divorce in January, but once she took Mick back, instead of figuring it was a gift, he added it to the debt. Jack had no real expectation of ever getting any of it back.
But—holy cow!—there on the kitchen table, Gloria found an envelope Leann had slyly set down when they arrived. When Gloria opened it, there was a check inside, paying them back for the entire amount. And a note, reading: "Dinner comes with this." Mick had sold his old clunker of a truck and Leann said it had been his idea. "Let's pay your parents off," he said.
Jack drove the five of them in his van to the Outback, near the huge Lakeside Mall, one of the nation's first monster malls, built in the middle of a cornfield twenty years ago and now surrounded by other malls, strip centers, restaurants and office buildings. They got there about 5 p.m., peak time. There was a line, as usual, and the place didn't take reservations, but Leann, ever outgoing, went in and was able to get them a table in the bar right off, no waiting. Jack ordered a beer, a Bud or Miller, something American. Mick ordered something Jack had never heard of; he didn't even know if it was a beer or not. A Foster's, he called it. It was a beer, a huge, blue-canned Australian beer.
They ate their steaks. Good as the reputation. Mick had another one of the giant beers.
They got back to the Miseners' about 7 p.m. Half an hour later, the Fletchers got ready to go. Hannah got in the back seat of the Dakota truck, Mick got behind the wheel, and Leann went back in the house with Gloria to get Hannah
something to drink for the ride home. Jack stood at the passenger door, which was open.
Mick leaned over and said, "Are you going to be home tomorrow?" "Yeah, I suppose we are."
"I'd like you to babysit for one hour while Lee and I go to the firing range.
Just an hour."
Leann by now had returned to the truck and Jack turned to her and looked quizzically. She didn't like guns. It seemed odd she'd be going to the range to shoot one.
Leann looked at him, according to Jack's later testimony at Fletcher's arraignment, "just kind of meeky, like, 'cause I knew my daughter didn't like weapons."
Jack said sure, he'd babysit. Leann got in and the Dakota pulled out of the driveway and took off. Hmm, thought Jack, that was odd. Odd she'd go shooting. And odd Mick would ask. In six years, he had never asked the Miseners to babysit. It was always Leann who asked. They babysat every Wednesday and Friday regularly, and other days as the need arose, and never once had Mick done the asking.
Jack went back in, turned on the TV and sat back in his La-Z-Boy.
*
Twenty minutes later, the Fletchers pulled into their driveway on Hazelwood. The sun was still high in the sky—Michigan is at the far western edge of the Eastern time zone, really ought to be in the Central zone, and gets the latest light in the continental United States.
There was another surprise left in the weekend. Mick told Leann he had some work at the office that he really needed to wrap up. He had a hearing at the court in Warren first thing in the morning that required his attention. He wouldn't be long. Leann went inside with Hannah and Mick drove off. He didn't go to his office in Center Line, though—he went to Judge Chrzanowski's house in Warren, had sex with her and told her he loved her.