Anyone who is dumb enough to live on one side of Lake
Washington and work on the other is automatically doomed
to spend lots of time stuck in bridge traffic. Such was
the case one January morning as I headed for my job as an
investigator for the Washington State Attorney's Special
Homicide Investigation Team, known fondly to all of us who
work there by that unfortunate moniker, the SHIT squad.
I live in Belltown Terrace, a condo at the upper end of
Second Avenue in downtown Seattle. My office is sixteen
miles away in a south Bellevue neighborhood called
Eastgate. That morning's commute was hampered by two
separate phenomena, both of which were related to a mid-
January blast of arctic air that had come swooping down on
western Washington from the Gulf of Alaska. The first
traffic hazard was black ice, which had turned most of the
minor side streets into skating rinks. Unfortunately, I'm
a world-class procrastinator, and the winter weather had
snuck up on me while my Porsche 928 was still decked out
in summer-performance tires.
The other major traffic hazard was mountains--not driving
over them, but seeing them. For nine months of the year,
the mountains around Seattle are mostly invisible. Hidden
by cloud cover, they sit there minding their own business,
but when the "mountains are out," as we say around here,
and Mount Rainier emerges in all its snow-clad splendor,
trouble is bound to follow. Unwary drivers, entranced by
the unaccustomed view, slam into the fenders of the cars
in front of them, and traffic comes to a dead stop. The
frigid air had left the snowcapped mountains vividly
beautiful against a clear blue sky. As a result, I-90 was
littered with pieces of scattered sheet metal, chrome-trim
pieces, and speeding tow trucks.
Between ice- and gawker-related accidents, my normal
twentyminute commute had turned into an hour-long
endurance test. Adding insult to injury was the fact that
this was my first morning back at work after a weeklong
stay in Hawaii. You'll notice I said stay, not vacation,
because it wasn't. I was there as father of the groom.
Anyone who's been down that road knows it's no cakewalk.
The wedding had come up suddenly when Scott telephoned the
day after Christmas to say that he and Cherisse were
giving up their long-planned, no-holds-barred, late-summer
extravaganza of a wedding in favor of a hastily arranged
and low-key affair that would take place on a private
beach near Waikiki the second week in January. As plans
for the summer wedding had burgeoned out of control, I had
been less than thrilled about the way things were going. A
lowattendance affair that would consist of bride and
groom, best people, and an assortment of parental units
was much more to my liking.
I did wonder briefly if a misstep in birth-control
planning had accounted for this sudden change in plans.
That certainly had been the case when I had masterminded
my daughter's hasty marriage to her husband, Jeremy. Now,
several years and 1.6 kids later, Kelly and Jeremy were
doing just fine, and I had no doubt Scott and Cherisse
would do the same. So I rented a tux, booked my hotel room
and plane tickets, and was on my way. I didn't find out
that I was wrong about the unwed pregnancy bit until after
I checked into my hotel room outside Honolulu.
I had just finished stowing my luggage when Dave
Livingston stopped by my room to give me the real story.
Dave, by the way, is my first wife's second husband and
her official widower. He's also Scott's stepfather and a
hell of a nice guy. Right after Karen died, Dave and I
both made an extra effort to get along--for the kids'
sake. It may have been a phony act to begin with, but over
time it's turned real enough. As far as parental units go,
Dave and I are all Scott Beaumont has. Dave had flown in
from L.A. the night before and had eaten dinner with
Cherisse's folks, Helene and Pierre Madrigal, who had
arrived on a flight from France the previous day.
There are a number of things I didn't learn about Dave
Livingston until the occasion of Scott's wedding. For one
thing, he speaks French. I have no idea why an accountant
from Southern California would be, or would even need to
be, fluent in French, but he was and is. In the course of
that initial dinner he had sussed out that Pierre, age
fiftyseven, had recently been diagnosed with a recurrence
of prostate cancer. He and his wife had decided to
postpone his next round of treatment until after the
wedding. This bit of bad news no doubt accounted for the
sudden change in wedding plans, and rightly so. In my
opinion, postponing cancer treatment for any reason is
never a good idea. Scott and Cherisse were obviously
concerned that by summertime his condition might have
deteriorated to the point where traveling to their wedding
would be impossible.
And so I found myself in the middle of a wedding event
that was complicated by a family health crisis and
confounded by limited communication skills. Unlike Dave, I
am not fluent in French. My daughter had thoughtfully sent
along a French/English phrase book that she thought might
be useful. Unfortunately the usual tourist-focused
contents made zero mention of PSA counts or prostate
difficulties, so I couldn't have talked to Pierre about
his situation even if I had wanted ...
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