Don’t Look Behind You

rich. My family was very ordinary, and we lived in an ordinary house. We weren’t rich at all, but we were comfortable.”
    Asked if they ever suspected that their father had sexually molested their sister, neither Ty nor Nick is sure about that—but both have suspected it.
    When Kandy was eighteen and nominated for Miss Des Moines in the pageant that was part of the town’s Waterland Festival every summer, Bob beamed with pride.
    More persuasive that Bob Hansen was molesting Kandy Kay were her statements to the beauticians who worked with her in her pageant days. The wife of a man on Bob’s construction staff went to the same beauty parlor. When it was far too late to have helped Kandy, the hairdresserssaid Kandy had confided in them. She said her father
had
taken sexual advantage of her for many years.
    Bob Hansen dated a number of women. He was a man in his prime and well-to-do; his dark hair was thick and had no gray at all in it. He had never liked his large chin, and he had gone to a plastic surgeon who surgically broke Bob’s jaw, moved it back, and shortened it by about an inch. It made a big difference and Bob was now much handsomer. He was tall, in great shape, and tanned from being on construction sites or tromping through sun-washed fields in search of animals to shoot. And to the outside world, he seemed to be a perfect father to three adorable children. He had no trouble at all getting dates.
    But he had trouble keeping a relationship going. He wasn’t nice to women, and they sensed that beneath the surface he didn’t really like them. This sometimes led to no third date, and often to no second date.
    Although she no longer had anything to do with Bob Hansen, Patricia Martin learned about one of his longtime girlfriends when she attended a pinochle group she had belonged to for decades. She mentioned Bob Hansen that night, and the hostess’s husband overheard her comments and took her aside.
    “My first wife dated Bob Hansen,” he told Pat. “Marge and Bob really hit it off at first. They got along fine for a couple of years, and Bob was building a house for her. He bought her a huge rock—I don’t know howmany carats that diamond was—and things seemed to be going great.”
    But the host said it all blew up on one night. “She was at Bob’s house and they made dinner. She has a son from her marriage before ours, and he was fifteen then. Lonny* was down in the basement, and Marge called him to come up and eat. As kids will, he dawdled and she had to call him twice.
    “When he didn’t come right up, Bob went down there and beat the shit out of him.”
    Marge had been horrified. Her teenage son wasn’t a big kid; he was actually kind of scrawny, and he didn’t have a chance with Bob Hansen. Marge grabbed her battered son and left hurriedly.
    “She would never go out with him again, naturally. She saw what a bully Bob was. Bob tried hard to get her back, but she wouldn’t even consider it.
    “Funny thing happened, though. Somebody cut her brake line one night. Luckily, she didn’t get far before she realized it, or she could have been killed.”
    Not surprisingly, Bob’s own children suffered years of physical punishment. Bob knocked out a couple of Ty’s baby teeth when the little boy made him angry.
    Asked if his father spanked him hard, Ty laughs, but only slightly. “He hit me with his fists, threw me down the stairs and against walls. He was very violent, and I was the one who got hit eighty percent of the time. He hit me with belts and any object he got his hands on.
    “I’m still perplexed, all these years later. Why didn’t anyone ask us about our cuts, scratches, black eyes, andbroken teeth? We were young kids, and teachers and neighbors saw us—but no one ever asked us what had happened to us. The only person who noticed was once when I went to the dentist with my broken teeth.
    “He asked me, ‘Did your dad do this to you?’ And I said yes. I heard him arguing with my dad in another room later, but nothing changed.”
    Ty and Kandy Kay were very close, while Nick lost himself in studying and music. Bob gave his daughter almost everything she asked for. Nick didn’t get in his way, but Ty grated on Bob, and suffered for it.
    Although they got minimal affection at home, perhaps the saving grace for Nick, Kandy, and Ty was that they could depend on their friends. Barbara Snyder loved Kandy like a sister and Ty met a girl at Pacific Junior High who was shocked and