Don’t Look Behind You

he’d raise the hatchet. He’d stop just before he hit them,but they were scared to death. So was I—afraid he would miss and actually cut a hand or some fingers off.”
    Milosevich also saw Bob discipline the boys at home. If they watched too much television, or it was something he didn’t want to watch, he simply cut the power cords in two, and the screen went black.
    One positive thing Ty says about his father is that Bob Hansen was an honest businessman. “He never cheated anyone, he built good houses and buildings, and he didn’t cut corners.”
    Nick agrees. Whatever his father might have kept hidden, or however cruel he could be, Nick, too, says Bob Hansen delivered solid buildings for a fair price.
    It’s interesting—but sad—that both of his sons tried for a long time to please him, to somehow have a father who was proud of them, even though he took “tough love” to extremes. Eventually, they realized there
was
no pleasing Bob Hansen.
    Until they finally walked away from him, they kept trying.
    There was the summer of 1980 when Bob spent three months with Nick building a house in Westport, Washington. It was a plain one-story house that was more a cabin than a house with frills—but it was solid. Bob wanted it for himself—so he would have his own place at the ocean.
    He and Nick had time to fish while they were building the cabin. Westport, in Grays Harbor County, is one of Washington State’s top harbors for deep-sea fishermen.
    “It wasn’t a bad summer,” Nick remembers, “and I learned a lot about building—but I didn’t see my futurethere. In the end, my father accepted that I wasn’t cut out to be a blue-collar worker; I was probably more white collar, and he dealt with that.”
    Nick Hansen had so much going for him, just as Ty and Kandy Kay did. All of them were very intelligent and physically attractive. They were fairly adept at hiding the wounded places inside them. Nick graduated third in his class at Kent-Meridian High School, he was working toward a degree in math at the University of Washington, and his naval career drew many accolades. He was a handsome young man, and he had a pretty blond girlfriend, Melissa.
    But Nick knew he was living a lie. And it ate at him like acid.
    Still, there was no one he could talk to, no one to help him sort out his life. From about the age of five, he had more secrets than Bob Hansen or his siblings knew, and he had lived in torment trying to deal with his confusing emotions. His dilemma began—probably more than coincidentally—when his mother vanished. Nick cannot recall a time when he didn’t want to be a girl instead of a boy.
    It was a secret he felt he couldn’t reveal to anyone.
    Nick wasn’t attracted to men; he was intrigued with what women thought and did. At parties, Nick always gravitated to circles where women were holding conversations.
    Bob Hansen may have suspected what was going on with Nick—but he refused to acknowledge it. Of all men, Bob Hansen was the last one who could accept that his son was what was referred to as a “sissy boy.”
    Bob was all man, strong, virile, powerful. But he once caught his elder son trying on some female clothes. And he was enraged.
    Ty recalls seeing his father burn a dress when he and Nick were in junior high, but he knew better than to ask questions.
    Although Nick didn’t suffer from beatings nearly as much as Ty did, this incident brought him a bruising.
    Bob Hansen wanted sons who were athletes, sportsmen, and hunters. He wanted them to be womanizers, as he was, and took every opportunity to impress upon them that women weren’t as good as men and never could be. He would have preferred to have both Ty and Nick follow him into the construction business. Neither of them did, despite all the years that he trained them in every aspect of buying land, carpentry, painting, and how to treat tenants.
    Bob had also wanted his daughter to be Miss America. But, tragically, when she failed to get to the top of the pageants she entered, Kandy Kay had turned to drugs.
    In the end, Bob Hansen’s determination to have absolute control over his offspring only drove them away from him.
    He had expected them to burnish
his
image, and found that they had dreams of their own.

Chapter Eleven
COSTA RICA
    The part of the marital estate Joann had been awarded in the divorce proceedings where she had never appeared was supposed to be kept in trust for her children. It would have helped all of