Don’t Look Behind You

weatherproof/bee-proof house. He was a hero to Flory’s family, and she felt she owed him a great deal for being so generous with her parents.
    When Bob asked Flory to marry him, she agreed. Despite his age, he was a tall, well-muscled man, but his thick hair was now snow white and his mouth hung half-open most of the time, a mien that old men often have.
    Bob may have smuggled Flory into the U.S. from Canada, possibly using a bribe to get her out of Costa Rica. Once they arrived in Vancouver, British Columbia—years before 9/11 made border patrols more suspicious—it was fairly easy to drive across the northern Washington State border carrying a hidden passenger.
    Bob’s neighbors in Auburn, Washington, noticed the newest girl in Bob’s house. She was very petite and had long dark hair, delicate features, a sweet smile, and a perfect body. She was, of course, young enough to be his granddaughter.
    But nearby homeowners rarely saw Flory outside Bob’s house, and when she was, Bob was always with her. Flory and Bob went hunting and fishing, and he taught her how to smoke salmon and dress game. She was lithe and limber,while Bob was stiff with arthritis, and age now forced him to walk stooped over.
    Even so, Flory was loyal, and she was keeping her promise to pay Bob back for giving her family a livable house. If she longed for friends her own age or for some scintilla of personal freedom, no one knew. She really had no one to tell.
    Once, an English couple who lived across the street invited Flory to go to the Washington State Fair with them. Bob was away for the day, and Flory shyly said yes. She wanted to go and enjoyed the fair tremendously. But Bob was outraged when he learned that Flory had gone to the fair without his permission.
    “I own her,” he shouted at his neighbors. “She belongs to me, and I say where she can go and who with!”
    The neighbors knew better than to ask Flory to go anywhere with them again.
    Surprisingly, Bob had notes in one of his many journals where he wrote about Flory’s application for admission to Green River Community College’s summer quarter, 1998. It is unknown if she ever went there.

Chapter Fourteen
AN EMPTY LIFE
    Bob Hansen no longer saw his sons. Unaware of Nick’s struggle with his sexual identity, he had been pleased when his older son married Melissa. As a kind of wedding present, Bob had offered to buy them a house down the street from his yellow rambler in Auburn.
    It sounded too good to be true to Nick, and he was wary. Still, he and Melissa talked it over and decided to accept. Bob was gone in Costa Rica most of the time, and they could keep an eye on his place, and they couldn’t really afford to pay for a house of their own at the time.
    But there was a catch. They were on the verge of moving in when Bob informed them that there would be stipulations and “rules” they would have to follow if they accepted his “gift.”
    Nick and Melissa had two cats that they doted on, but Bob insisted that the cats would have to go. He wouldn’t have them in
his
house. When he said that, Nick knew that his father had never meant to give them title to the house.
    Bob Hansen’s extended list of dos and don’ts was much more controlling than the rules he had once set for his Montana hunting party buddies. He had the same overriding need for absolute control that he’d always had.
    “We walked away,” Nick says. “We weren’t going to give up our pets, and it was pretty clear that the house wouldn’t truly be ours, anyway. When he was in the States, living two doors down the street from him would be impossible.”
    That was the last time Nick and Melissa saw Bob. When their girls were born, they sent pictures of his granddaughters to Bob, but he returned the envelopes unopened.
    Kandy Kay had been dead for about fifteen years when another of Joann and Bob’s children shocked Bob Hansen. If Bob even suspected how determined Nick was to live another life in another body, he would have been furious and surely cut Nick out of his life forever. As it was, by the early nineties Nick was the only one of Bob’s offspring who had any interaction at all with him, and that ended, of course, when he turned down his father’s offer of a house.
    Ty knew about Nick’s longing to be a woman, but he hoped his brother would get past all that.
    Just before Christmas, sometime shortly after the century turned, Nick Hansen called Ty. He wanted Ty to know that he was going to