Don’t Look Behind You

rolling wheat fields of the Palouse on the far eastern side of the Cascade Mountains. A distant cousin grew acres of wheat, and Bob was enthralled by the giant threshing machines needed to harvest it. Ty and Nick also enjoyed driving the combines in the golden fields.
    Bob Hansen seemed somehow to be starting over, trying to create an extended family where he actually belonged, perhaps even trying to draw his children closer as they struggled to be free of him. They had been burdens for him, but now he was facing old age and he had no one close to him.
    Marv Milosevich was the closest person Bob knew in terms of friendship, although Marv didn’t realize it at the time. He himself had dozens of good friends and family members. It would be a long time before Marv came tothe realization that he was probably Bob’s
best
friend. He hadn’t known how isolated the older man was.
    Marv tried to see a good side to Bob because he was grateful for all that Bob had taught him.
    “Some of the things he told me,” Marv says with a laugh, “I didn’t want to emulate. LaVonne and I had about fifty-two rentals by then and they were quite a bit nicer than Bob’s rentals. He told me, ‘Don’t get close with your renters! Don’t be friends with them, whatever you do.’ But we chose to treat our renters well, and it worked out fine.”
    Bob was dealing with being alone. Nick was far away in the navy, Ty was selling used cars on Old 99, and Kandy was living with Tom Yarbrough in Wendover, Utah. Bob Hansen didn’t hear from any of them very often.
    He’d lost his brother to kidney cancer in February 1981, when Ken died in his sleep. Ken Hansen was only fifty-eight and his death made Bob realize that life was shorter than it had seemed when he’d been a young man.
    Nick Hansen had gone to see his uncle Ken less than a week before he’d died. The retired police officer advised him to do and be what he wanted in life, and it made an impression on Nick. Ken Hansen had had a fulfilling life with his law enforcement career, and Aunt Lorene and Nick’s cousins had made Ken’s home life happy, too.
    Nick wanted so much to live the life he only imagined, and Ken’s kindness helped him.
    Bob Hansen continued his travels throughout the eighties, searching for a place where he could live in the sun; he was tired of the rain that fell on Seattle most of the winter. He looked for a country where his money would last longer, as well as a place where he could find a lovely, docile woman to live with. He informed Ty that he would keep a small “pad” in the Northwest, but he didn’t intend to spend much time there.
    After all his searching for a spot he could truly call home, it was Costa Rica that called out the most seductive siren song to Bob Hansen. He found it was indeed true that many young women there wanted to be married to wealthy Americans.
    And so, in the mideighties in Costa Rica, Bob Hansen discovered what, for him, was paradise.
    He met a number of beautiful, dark-haired women in their late teens and early twenties.
    “He brought home a different girl every year for four years,” LaVonne Milosevich says. “They were very young and pretty. I remember there were
two
Cecilias.”
    Most of the young women chose to return to Costa Rica, but Bob eventually settled on the second Cecilia, who was twenty-one, slender and petite, and quite lovely. They were married and he took her home with him. They traveled extensively in America: to Alaska, Montana, Glacier National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and scores of attractions in Washington State. Everywhere they went, Bob had Cecilia pose in front of whatever oddity or scenic view was displayed—from looking at livestock at the state fair in Puyallup to standing high atop the windmill onBob’s barn. He rarely identified her by name, but when he did write something in the scrapbook of Cecilia’s era, he scribbled simply “MY Beauty.”
    Cecilia was so tiny that even with her black hair piled atop her head, she could stand under Bob’s outstretched arm.
    There are few people who can give details about what happened to Bob’s second marriage. It lasted only a few years, and Cecilia returned to Costa Rica. She divorced Bob.

Chapter Twelve
THINGS FALL APART
    In the spring of 1986, Kandy began to dabble in prescription drugs, thinking that she was in no danger of sliding back into addiction. She told herself that amphetamines and tranquilizers couldn’t hook her the way