The day of Henry Toivo’s memorial service Kirsten Langenderfer did the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life – she took off Henry’s engagement ring. But she kept it, just in case.

Kirsten first fell in love with Henry when she was in the eighth grade, and she could never quite explain what had hit her that night, although it was no secret what happened.

It was back in the winter of ’65. Kirsten had been friends with Betsy Toivo since early in grade school, and had known her brother, Henry, for at least as long.

It wasn’t exactly a party that the girls were having out at the Amboy Township home of the Toivos that February Saturday evening; just some girls had gotten together to play some records, and talk some girl talk, and giggle a lot, like any eighth grader. The winter’s day had been short; Henry, his brother, Jody and a couple of friends, Steve Augsberg and Mark Gravengood, had been out rabbit hunting, and wound up at the house with the girls along about dark, rather stiff from the cold, and rabbitless, to boot.

“You need a sauna to warm you up,” Mr. Toivo said. “Why don’t you go cut a hole and light it off while you’re still dressed?”

Henry agreed, and soon the girls could hear the sound of a chain saw down by the lake. After a while, the boys came back into the house, and peeled off their coats. While the result still couldn’t be called a party, it was a gathering of friends, and soon all were having a good time.

After a while, Mr. Toivo stuck his head back into the room. “Sauna ought to be about hot enough,” he said.

The boys got back up and headed for the door, without bothering to put on their coats. “Want us to come and join you?” Betsy smirked.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” one of the other boys said.

After they’d left, Betsy commented, “You know, we ought to go out and sauna with them, just to see what they’d say.”

“Yeah, let’s do it,” another girl chimed in.

“Let’s give them a few minutes to get settled in,” Linda Caserowski, one of Kirsten’s friends, smirked.

“I don’t know . . .” Kirsten said. She was, after all, a Spearfish Lake girl, and she knew about saunas, but knowing about it and doing it were two different things.

“Oh, come on,” Linda giggled. “It’ll be fun.”

Kirsten wasn’t sure she wanted to go along with her friends, but she didn’t want to be a spoilsport, either. Besides, what could happen?

It was a cold, clear night, as the girls trooped through the snow to the Toivo family sauna, out back of the house near the river. It was dark inside the changing room, with only enough light to see as the four giggling girls peeled their clothes off, then opened the door into the heated sauna proper.

For fifty years and more, the more “proper” types around Spearfish Lake had been having nightmares at the thought of the orgies that had to happen in a situation where eight teenagers, four girls and four boys, found themselves naked in a dimly-lighted eight-by-eight foot room. The actual reality, as Kirsten discovered that evening, was a little different, for the “proper” types neglected to consider what the 180-degree temperature and rolling sweat could do to teenage drives.

It actually wasn’t bad, Kirsten discovered, if you kept down on the bottom seat, where the air wasn’t quite as hot, but the temperature certainly wasn’t conducive to fooling around. In the dim light of the single bulb, what she saw was actually rather interesting – for example, Linda’s big chest, that she liked to show off with tight sweaters, proved to be mostly cotton; she was flatter than Betsy was.

But, it was hot. After the initial embarrassment slipped by – not much, since it was nothing new for most of the participants – they fell to being just a bunch of friends, talking and gossiping and giggling just like they had been in the Toivo living room.

After a while, Henry wiped the sweat from his face once again and said, “I think I’m about ready for what comes next.”

“Me, too. I’ll race you,” Betsy said, heading for the door. All of a sudden, there was a pileup of hot, naked bodies at the door; Kirsten found herself getting pushed outside about fourth in line, with Betsy and Linda leading, and Henry bringing up the rear.

Leading the pack, the two naked, steaming girls raced down through the snow and the darkened woods to the river, with Kirsten following along, already dreading what she knew was to come. Betsy cannonballed into the hole cut in the ice of the river, with Linda right behind her, ahead of Kirsten, with one of the boys joining them. Kirsten put on her brakes just short of the hole, not quite sure she could go through with it; two more people pressed past her, joining the crowd in the icy water.

“Come on,” Kirsten heard Henry say; then, she felt his arm around her naked waist . . . felt herself being lifted into the air . . . felt herself half falling, half being carried . . . and screamed at the top of her lungs at the s-h-o-c-k of the icy water.

She was only in the shallow water for a few seconds before she and Henry were climbing out, but the feeling was indescribable; all of a sudden, for just an instant, the world took on a different shape.

Others were climbing out of the water by now, and heading back up through the woods. Taking her by the hand, Henry helped her out of the water, then led her quickly back up the path to the sauna for another baking.

Somehow, the experience built a bond between them that was hard to describe. From then on, they were steady dates, even closer than that, all through high school, and it was common knowledge that a wedding would soon follow Kirsten’s graduation. To say Kirsten was upset by Henry’s rather unilateral decision to join the Army right after he graduated would be to put it mildly, and Henry tried to mollify her by giving her the long-anticipated engagement ring. It didn’t work very well, she’d really rather have been married to him, and pregnant by him, especially if he didn’t come back, and she knew there was that chance. She tried very hard to accomplish it in the last days before he left for basic training in July of ’69, and tried hard again at Christmas that year, when he came home on leave for the last time.

In the first months that Henry was gone, she counted the days, and waited for his frequent letters; she knew he should be home again the following January, and this time he wasn’t going to get away without a wedding. There wasn’t a letter every day – they tended to come in bunches, every few days, and she knew he was out in the field a lot although he never said much in the letters about that.

There was one letter where Henry said he’d asked Steve Augsberg to take her to the Senior Prom for him, since he couldn’t do it, and she danced with Steve that night, dreaming it was really Henry. Not long after that Kirsten and Steve graduated, and Kirsten planned to go on to the Community College down in Moffat, just to wait for Henry, a second best to the wedding she’d long dreamed of for that June.

Then the letters stopped coming, and shortly after that came the tearful visit from Mr. and Mrs. Toivo.

Kirsten had come to know them well over a period of several years. The Finnish couple was almost like a second set of parents to her, and they were as kind to her as they could be, but she was still devastated. Kirsten didn’t carry many memories of the next month or so, and those that remained were of an overwhelming depression; it turned out that she lost twenty pounds that month just out of sheer disinterest in eating.

Two things pulled her out of the worst of the black days – her parents got her on antidepressants, and Mr. Toivo came over to pass along what he’d gotten from Gil Evachevski. He may have overstated it a little, or Kirsten may not have gotten the right impression, but somehow she got the idea there was maybe one chance in ten that Henry was a POW, where Gil had thought maybe a chance in a thousand. In any case, it gave her a little hope where there had been none before.

As the summer wound down, Kirsten started to realize the change in scenery due to going off to college had a chance of being good for her, and although she was far from being back to normal, she was at least operational.

It didn’t work. The community college was down in Moffatt, a long drive from Spearfish Lake, and she didn’t know many people when she got there. Even though she was commuting, it was lonely as hell. She got passing grades, but barely, that first semester, and didn’t go back for the next one.

In simple terms, Kirsten didn’t do much of anything for the next year and a half. She sat at home, at her parents’ house, watched a lot of TV, read a bit – science fiction and westerns that belonged to her father, mostly, since there wasn’t a lot of romance in them. In the spring of 1970, a neighbor, Marjorie Freckelton, had a baby, and asked if Kirsten could watch it while she went back to work. Kirsten agreed, but it proved to not be a good idea, because the kid only reminded her of the baby of Henry’s that she’d tried and failed to conceive, and after a few weeks, told Marjorie she couldn’t handle it any more. In that period, she may have made it into town from the Langenderfer farm half a dozen times.

Eventually, time and boredom began to do its job. In the fall of ’72 she re-enrolled at Moffatt Community College, and had a little more interest in it this time. Her grades weren’t spectacular, and she didn’t get to know anybody very well, but it was a little more interesting than Days of our Lives, and enrolled for the second semester. That was a little more exciting – the Paris Peace Talks had been going on for a long time, but after the holidays it seemed that there was some chance they’d actually get somewhere. At the end of January, they did – a treaty was signed that would allow for the return of the American Prisoners of War. By this time, Gil Evachevski was home, and he and Heikki Toivo warned her specifically not to get her hopes up too far – it was still a very, very long shot that Henry might be among them.

Still, when the first of the POWs were released in mid-February, Kirsten watched the TV very carefully, looked at the papers, and, of course, there was no sign of PFC Henry Toivo. As the days passed, her joy sunk back into depression again, a blackness nearly as deep as she’d been in when she’d first heard the news of Henry’s disappearance. At the end of March, it was announced that the last of the known American POWs had been released. Numb with the realization that her hopes had come to nothing, Kirsten and Mr. and Mrs. Toivo agreed the time had come to give up hope and hold the memorial service.

The memorial service marked something of a watershed for Kirsten. Any number of people told her it was time to get on with her life. However reluctant to admit it she was, she agreed. Whatever her heart felt, she knew in her head that she could only hope and grieve for so long, and she took off Henry’s ring not because she loved him any less but as a sign that she was trying to put the episode behind her.

Although Gil had met Kirsten two or three times, and once had given her a somewhat more limited and less profane version of the report on Henry’s disappearance than he’d given at the Spearfish Lake Bar and Grill, she didn’t really know him that well, but at the memorial service Kirsten met Carrie Evachevski for the first time.

Carrie’s heart went out to Kirsten from the moment she met her. She’d come so close to having the same experience . . . closer, in fact, than she knew, and she knew it had been close. It could easily have been her walking in those shoes of Kirsten’s, and she knew it.

One of the things that helped to draw the two of them together was that Carrie didn’t know Henry or the family. Although a Spearfish Lake girl herself, she was just enough older and ran in just enough different circles that he was only a name and not a very clear one. To Kirsten, Carrie seemed like the gateway to a new world.

One day along in the summer of 1973, Carrie happened to mention in passing that they were looking for a new ad salesperson at the Record-Herald. It wasn’t aimed at Kirsten, and in fact had been totally unrelated, but somehow it struck Kirsten that it might be something to look into – something new to do, a way to meet new people. She went down to the Record-Herald and had a talk with Harry Bailey and Homer Sanderson, and she got the job.

Kirsten was slow taking hold of the job – she was still a little in her shell after the bleak years – but it was a job that required being bright and chipper and personable, and she tried. Especially in the beginning it was pretty much an act, but she began to grow into the role, and in a year was handling the majority of the retail accounts for the paper, and bringing in a lot of ads.

But there was a side effect in acting like she was bright and chipper and personable – she began to become just that, but it was a thin, shallow layer over an unplumbed depth that still missed Henry, and missed the future he’d represented. The layer of salesperson over the underlying Kirsten was uneven and shallow in spots, and sometimes it was possible to say the wrong thing and dump her into a deep depression.

Getting out around the town and meeting people was good; it opened up her world a little. She began to date, but never very successfully. She was desperate to find someone to take the spot in her heart that Henry still filled, but unwilling to let them. Given the fact that she was still fairly unstable, it pretty well made sure that there was a limit to how far a relationship could go. Unfortunately, it gave her a reputation as being a flighty tease, and there was some truth to that reputation.

Over a period of about two and a half years, Kirsten went through a lot of boyfriends. Some never managed more than a date or two before she broke it off, but some got farther. Years later, she told Mike that she was ashamed of how much she’d slept around, and Mike, having heard it before, asked just how much it had been. The answer, to his surprise, was – not that much. Two guys, over a course of three years. In that day and age of sexual liberation, that almost counted as sheer chastity in his eyes, but Kirsten thought she’d overdone it by a wide margin.

Her friendship with Gil and Carrie was one of the things that provided some stability all through that period. Carrie came to realize that while Kirsten had tried to put Henry’s loss behind her, she hadn’t been very successful. She suspected that Kirsten’s subconscious refused to give up hope at all, and that was the main reason she’d been unable to even start a serious relationship since. It was as if her head said, “Go ahead and do it,” but when she tried, her heart said, “Better wait for him.”

Having been a Matson and a former Army wife, Carrie knew Kirsten needed to have her butt kicked and brought up to reality, but she didn’t have the heart to do it. There was no reason, she thought, that the girl couldn’t have a serious relationship; she would be better off for it, and could stop living in the past.

It was something that Carrie had thought about many times, and she thought about it again one Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1975, when Kirsten was out at the Evachevski cottage at West Turtle Lake, just hanging around and being friends. It was a couple months after Mike McMahon had gone to work at the Record-Herald, and just at the point where Kirsten’s extended two-week infatuation with her young roofer was hitting the rocks.

Carrie, of course, to be conversational, asked how it was going with the roofer, and Kirsten reported that it wasn’t: “He stood me up at the Spearfish Lake Bar and Grill the other night, and I wound up having dinner and a few beers with Mike.”

“Mike? Mike McMahon? Our Mike?” Carrie said, a little surprised, although not very surprised; she figured Kirsten would get around to him sooner or later.

“Well, it was better than sitting around alone,” Kirsten admitted, “And, the dinner was good. He really is kind of a nice guy. I think it’s just taking him a while to get adjusted.”

“Going to date him again?” Carrie asked.

“I don’t know,” Kirsten said. “I just might. It was kind of enjoyable, just talking with him. He doesn’t know anybody up here, really, and I guess he was just glad to talk to me. I mean, he didn’t try out his moves, or anything.”

This was very tentative for Kirsten, Carrie thought, so maybe there was some electricity there. “He’s thought about it,” she said. “Have you ever noticed him watching you?”

“Well, you know,” Kirsten smiled, “I do sort of like to have guys pay attention to me.”

It was nothing Carrie didn’t know; otherwise, Kirsten wouldn’t have been addicted to thin blouses and very short skirts.

“You get his attention,” Carrie reported. “But you’re right, he doesn’t know anybody much up here. I imagine it has to be pretty lonely for him.”

“You mean you think I ought to go out with him again?” Kirsten smiled.

“I didn’t say that,” Carrie replied, but wishing she could plant the idea in Kirsten’s head. Mike was a nice guy, in a non-threatening sort of way. Kirsten had never dated anyone from the office before; perhaps, working together, a relationship with Mike might be able to be kept low-key enough that it could sneak past Kirsten’s flightiness. If it didn’t work out, well, Mike was a junior reporter and would be leaving in a few months, anyway. Maybe there was something Carrie could do to grease the skids. “I know what it’s like to be alone,” she told Kirsten. “It’s not fun. Maybe Gil and I ought to have him out here some time, just for steaks and friendship. Like, maybe next Saturday. I’ll have to talk to Gil about it.”

“That’d be nice of you,” Kirsten said. “Maybe I could come, too.”

Walked right into it, she did, Carrie thought. “That’d probably be a good idea,” she smiled.