Empty Promises

both she and Jami were screaming and hysterical.
    Jami talked to the police. They found Steve, put him in an ambulance, and took him away.
    Sally Kirwin was so shocked that all she could think of was getting away from the madness. She went to a friend’s house. “I came back in the wee hours of the morning,” she recalled. “No one was there.”
    Now she could see the damage. The bedroom door was broken, and she could see that Steve had knocked the glass out of several windows. The desert wind blew through the mobile home, the only sound left after all the crashing and splintering of glass and wood.
    Sally didn’t know Steve Sherer well enough to know if he’d had some kind of psychotic break or if this was how he behaved when he was drunk or mad, or both. One minute they had been having a routine conversation and the next, he was white with rage.
    Around dawn, Jami came home. She had dark circles under her swollen eyes, and she seemed very contrite. “This wouldn’t have happened,” she told Sally, “if Steve didn’t love me so much.”
    Sally stared at Jami, dumbfounded. “Aren’t you going to leave him?” she asked.
    Jami shook her head. “He just loves me so much—we can work it out. It will never happen again.”
    Sally tried to reason with Jami, and she suggested places she could go where she would be safe. Sally said her friend had volunteered to take Jami in until she could get home to her family. Jami looked at her as if Sally didn’t understand. She was adamant that she could never leave Steve, because he needed her. She was sure that things were going to be fine. He wasn’t badly hurt, but he had shown her how devastated he would be if Jami ever left him, and she could never do that to him. People just didn’t understand how sensitive he was.
    Jami and Steve spent Christmas 1986 in Washington. On Christmas Eve, he was arrested by a Snohomish County sheriff’s deputy for driving under the influence, driving with no valid license, and violating a protection order from his old girlfriend, Bettina.
    Sally flew home to Wisconsin and spent Christmas with her family. Her friend fed her cat while she was gone. When she returned to Palm Desert a week later, Sally saw the mobile home at 99 Portola Road for the last time. She was “too afraid of Steve” to press charges for her financial loss. By the time she got back, neither Jami nor Steve was at the mobile home. They were still in Washington when she moved her things out, and that was fine with her. She never expected to see them again.
    Steve’s temper tantrums over the holiday season had been expensive. Beyond the new fines he’d racked up in Washington, the mobile home on Portola was heavily damaged. He had broken four wall panels so badly they had to be replaced and other walls had to be repainted. That came to $981.40. He had shattered the bedroom and closet doors trying to get to Jami with a knife. That cost another $497.00. And then there were all the broken windows. The landlord was not happy.
    Jami was the one who kept track of their expenses. She saved every estimate, receipt, bank statement, and stub from the bills she paid each month. Years later it would be easy to look at her life with Steve simply by thumbing through her meticulous records.

3
    S teve’s attempts to make big money in California didn’t work out. The money from the insurance payoff on their burglary was dwindling. Once again he headed back to Washington State. The Hagels were relieved to know that Jami was going to be living close to them again, although they continued to be stunned at how she had changed, as were Jami’s friends. She wasn’t the dark-haired bundle of energy they all remembered. She was very thin and very blond. “Steve likes me blond,” Jami confided. “And he likes me really thin.”
    Shortly after they came back to Washington, Steve told Jami that she was too flat-chested to really please him. He had always preferred women with very large breasts, and he insisted that Jami agree to breast augmentation surgery. She went along with it reluctantly. Her mother took care of her after the surgery, which was much more painful than Jami had expected.
    Jami regretted the plastic surgery almost at once. The implants left her top-heavy and out of proportion for a woman as petite as she was. Steve, however, was delighted with the results and made a point of showing her off. Where Jami had always worn clothes with clean, sporty lines, she now