Empty Promises

worked there or if she’d said that both of them worked there. All in all, it didn’t sound good to her. Why on earth would Jami go out for a pizza and stay out all night with some friend of Steve’s? Why hadn’t Jami talked to Dru about her worries? If anyone understood how awful Jami’s marriage was, Judy thought it would be Dru.
    Jami never got a chance to explain the situation to her mother because the phone began to ring. “It was him [Steve] calling for her, and I said, ‘Give us time to talk,’ and I hung up. We didn’t even get to sit down at the table before he was on the phone again, and she kept saying ‘I don’t want to talk to him—I don’t want to talk to him,’ and it just kept on ringing. I finally said, ‘Jami, you’ve got to talk to him, just for a minute.’ ”
    Judy was surprised to finally hear Jami say, “Steve, it’s over. I don’t love you anymore. I want a divorce. It’s over.”
    But as flatly insistent as Jami was, Judy could tell that Steve was wearing her down, begging for a meeting.
    “Finally,” Judy remembered, “she says, ‘Okay. I’ll meet you down the hill at the Samena Club.’ I asked her not to go, and she went to get Chris, but Chris was still in his jammies, so she left him with me. I said, ‘Well, Jami, I don’t want you to go.’ She walked out the door, and she said, ‘All he can do is kill me, Mom.’ ”
    Judy ran after Jami, calling, “I’m going to give you twenty minutes, and then I’m going to be down there.”
    The house was quiet, as the clock ticked way past twenty minutes. Frantic, Judy called Jerry and asked him to go down to the Samena Club. “Please go over there!”
    And then it was all right again. At 8:40, before Jerry could even run to their car, the phone rang, and it was Jami. She told her mother she was at home. She was a little upset because when she drove up to meet Steve, he jumped into her car, grabbed her purse, and ran off with it. Jami said she knew he’d taken it to their house, so she drove there to get it back and to pack a few clothes for herself and Chris.
    “Jami,” Judy said with frustration, “You can’t keep going back to him. If you’re going to leave him, you’re going to leave him. You can’t say you’re going to do it and keep going back.”
    “Mom,” Jami said firmly, “this time I mean it.”
    “And I knew she did,” Judy said later. “I knew she meant it. She went and got clothes for Chris. I asked her to please hurry and come home. She said, ‘I’m just going to jump in the shower and change clothes and I’ll be there.’ ”
    It was a morning suspended in time, where every event would be frozen in Judy Hagel’s mind. She was frightened, but she kept telling herself there was no need to be. At last Jami was coming back to them. Judy stayed close to the phone all morning, holding her breath as she waited for Jami to call.
    “I didn’t hear from her again until a quarter to twelve,” Judy said. “She called me and said, ‘Hi Mom! I’m on my way; I’m going to be stopping at Taco Time,’ because she always used to stop by Taco Time and bring the food to the house and eat it there…. She said, ‘I’ll be there.’
    “And she never came.”
    Jami should have been in and out of Taco Time within a few minutes, and the drive from her house in Redmond to her parents’ home in Bellevue shouldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes. Judy told herself that Jami must have run some other errand on the way. She looked after Chris and armed herself for a typical barrage of phone calls from Steve. Sure enough, he called at 12:15 and asked for Jami. Told she wasn’t there yet, he hung up, only to call again at 12:30. Jami still wasn’t there, and Judy told him so.
    She expected him to follow his usual pattern and call every fifteen minutes until Jami got there, but he didn’t. Steve didn’t call the Hagels again until 6:30 that evening. Judy’s heart sank; that surely meant that he had found Jami and the two of them were together, with Steve begging Jami to forget all the nonsense about leaving him. He was so good at talking circles around Jami.
    Or maybe Jami was with Lisa Cryder, working out the details of their plan to move in together, or with someone else. Judy just didn’t know.
    Steve had said he was coming to get Chris, but when he got there, Judy smelled alcohol on his breath. He wasn’t supposed to be drinking. She didn’t want him driving like that with Chris in