Empty Promises

Jami’s other friends; she was outraged by the way he treated Jami. On the last Saturday of September, Jami confided to Lisa, “I’ve met someone who listens to me—who’s comforting me.”
    Lisa was glad for Jami. “I told her to leave Steven,” Lisa said, “that she should divorce him.”
    Lisa offered Jami a place to run to. Her own marriage wasn’t working well, and she and her husband were about to embark on a ninety-day trial separation. There was room in her Rose Hill home for Jami and Chris. This time, Jami said yes. She was enthusiastic about moving in with Lisa.
    Jami was finally ready to leave Steve. She knew he would be furious, but she felt strong enough to face him. If it meant leaving her house too, that was the price she would have to pay.
    Jami Sherer was playing a dangerous game, though. In order to spend Saturday, September 29, with Lew Adams, she told several untruths: She told her mother that Lisa had an advertising promotion event in Tacoma on Saturday, and she was going with her. She told Steve the same thing. She was lying to both of them, something that she had never done until she met Steve. Other things about her personality had changed; they were ways of surviving. Jami learned to be devious from a master, doing what she had to do to avoid violent fights, but she was ill equipped for deceit. She didn’t feel strong enough to face life alone, so she lied about her date with Lew. Steve had undermined her self-confidence to a point where she couldn’t leave him until she had another man to leap to.
    The old Jami would never have considered Lew Adams a safe jumping-off spot, but she no longer felt pretty or smart or interesting or lovable. Steve had chipped away at her self-esteem with his constant derogatory comments. If she had ever really been his “little rose,” he’d long since forgotten about that and all the promises he’d made to her.
    On Friday night, Jami visited her parents and left Chris with her mother. On Saturday, she spent the day with Lew Adams. Remarkably for her, when Jami found out that her mother had to work on Saturday morning until almost noon, Jami had agreed to leave Chris with Steve for a few hours. But Steve called Judy Hagel in a short time and said he had decided to go out himself and he was going to bring Chris to her.
    It was a fairly ordinary Saturday for the Hagels; they often had Chris on weekends. Steve picked him up at about five-thirty that evening, and Judy assumed Jami would be home at the Redmond house within half an hour. But Jami called her mother about seven and said that she would be a little bit late.
    “I told her to call and tell Steve that,” Judy remembered. “So she did and Steve brought Chris back over to our house and left him with us and went out.”
    Jami’s twin brothers, Rich and Rob, went out with Steve. They would remember later how angry he seemed and that he spoke again of what he would do to Jami if he ever caught her being unfaithful.
    At 2:00 A.M. , Judy Hagel answered her phone and it was Steve asking if Jami was at her house. She could tell he was on something, but didn’t comment on it. “I said, ‘No, Jami isn’t here,’ ” she recalled, “and then I didn’t hear from him again until he called one more time and asked for her.”
    Judy was concerned. She had never known Jami to stay out so late, but Jami knew that Chris was safe with Judy, so maybe she had gone to Lisa’s to sleep. Judy tried to tell herself that.
    Steve called Judy Hagel again at seven-thirty in the morning to tell her that Jami had come home and was on her way to the Hagels’.
    That was a relief for Judy, who felt that her worries of the night before had been silly. “I gave Jami a big hug, and she walked in and Jerry was sitting at the table. She crawled up on Jerry’s lap and she said, ‘Daddy, I want to come home.’ So we said, ‘Okay! Gladly!’ ”
    Judy could tell that Jami had something on her mind, so she asked her husband to take Chris downstairs so they could talk. “I asked her what was going on. I said, ‘Where were you last night?’ ”
    “I was with Lew—he’s a friend of Steve’s. We went out for a pizza.”
    “Why?”
    “Because he’s somebody to talk to. He understands what’s going on.”
    “Jami,” Judy sighed, “you’re not improving yourself any here. Where does he work?”
    Jami had mentioned “Costco, in Lynnwood,” but Judy wasn’t sure if Jami had said that Lew or his wife, Dru,