Practice to Deceive

with Doris, her parents long since divorced.
    Tragically, Jimmie and his third wife, Terry, lost her son—Josh—when he, too, was twenty-one. Jimmie had raised Josh since he was in fifth or sixth grade and loved him as he did his biological sons. Josh was killed in a fiery car crash in Salt Lake City in 1995.
    Jimmie’s red hair turned stark white as he tried to deal with losing so many people he cared about to violence.
    And the world moved on.
    * * *
    A MY HAD MARRIED IN 1978, Rhonda in 1980, Lana in 1981, Brenda, Mike, and Sue in 1987, and Tom in 1989. Several of Jimmie’s children would go on to happier second marriages, although Amy Alton DeBoer’s marriage lasted. Lana Galbraith never remarried after she divorced Steve Galbraith. Peggy Sue married Tony Harris, a preacher in a somewhat different religion than her Baptist roots, but it didn’t last long. Tony was black and, jokingly, Peggy told her half sisters that she married Tony just to get her father’s goat. They believed her. She had always said she was going to marry a black man just to “bug” her father. Jimmie Stackhouse had always hung both an American and a Rebel flag on his property.
    It was getting more difficult to keep the family together, although all the Stackhouse daughters worked hard at it. Rob was gone, of course, and Tom and Mike married and drifted far away—Tom to California and Mike to Connecticut and then Virginia. For a time, Tom seemed to disconnect from his father and siblings. After he helped Jimmie build his first log house in Idaho, many years passed between Tom’s visits home to the Northwest. He would reconnect one day when his family was in chaos. Mike tried to call Jimmie once a week.
    Most of the girls—now women—stayed close, and family photo albums filled up with pictures of them and their husbands and many children.
    Peggy Sue followed in her father’s footsteps; she joined the navy in 1988. She had always done well at whatever she chose to do. Once more, she played basketball in the navy, and also became a highly skilled aircraft mechanic before she was honorably discharged in 1992.
    Peggy Sue had met and married Kelvin Thomas in 1991 while she was still in the navy. Kelvin, too, was African American, but he wasn’t anything like Tony. Compared to Peggy’s first husband, Kelvin was a nice, normal guy, who was well respected on Whidbey Island. He and Peggy talked of having a family, and tried to find a way to have more than a paycheck-to-paycheck financial situation. They hoped to have a lot of money one day, and they tried various avenues to get there.
    While Kelvin got a job as a cook in a Denny’s restaurant, they once joined a class-action suit to sue Denny’s for racial discrimination, and Kelvin probably got a modest settlement. The couple were living in Jacksonville, Florida, but they applied for jobs at B.F. Goodrich in Washington, and they were both hired. They moved home to Whidbey Island just after Mariah was born.
    Kelvin Thomas’s business as a personal trainer was going well. They were both athletically inclined. Peggy still worked out at Langley High School, exercising and both playing and coaching basketball with girls much younger than she was. Many of her glory days as a teenager had revolved around her skill at that sport.
    Peggy was no longer fragile; she had grown to be a very large woman, standing over six feet tall in her bare feet, but she was perfectly proportioned as long as she watched her weight carefully. She was Amazonian—and extremely attractive to most men who met her.
    Peggy and Kelvin had one daughter—and then a second—and they proved to be good parents to Mariah and Taylor, both of whom had red-blondish curly hair, adorable faces, and high intelligence.
    Peggy Sue told her half sisters that a photo of Mariah reading a book, her chin propped on her hands, was chosen by Oprah Winfrey herself as the model for a statue she had commissioned to encourage children to read.
    They didn’t know if that was true or not.
    But that was Peggy; she was a chameleon—both in her life and her looks. In some photographs, she had a slender figure and a sculptured, perfect face. In others, particularly her pregnancy pictures, her features appeared bloated and her midsection big enough to carry triplets.
    Peggy did put on a lot of weight during her pregnancies, expanding so much that she didn’t look at all like the “fiery red” woman who would emerge later as glamour