Gil knew Kirsten well enough that he’d figured it would be best if she didn’t know what he was up to. It might raise false hopes, send her into another round of depression, or both, so he’d asked Carrie to only tell her he had to go deal with some old Army business at the request of a friend. And, even after he got back, he figured it’d be best if he kept it to himself, for that very reason.

He did tell Mike he’d done some looking around on the incident, and had picked up a few things, but in the end, he hadn’t learned anything that would give any further answer to whether Henry was alive or dead. The last anyone knew of Henry Toivo was when he disappeared into a booby-trapped piece of jungle, and there had been no peep of him since. Gil was as sure as they could be short of a body in hand that Henry was dead. Mike had no cause to doubt Gil’s opinion. Unless the Vietnamese knew something and came clean someday, they might not ever know much more.

Gil kept his ruminations about what the unit had been like and his dark thoughts about the people in it to himself, but in a gentle sort of way said if the chance ever came to go looking for him, he would, like he’d told Heikki Toivo he would.

When all was said and done, Mike didn’t know much more than he had before Gil’s trip, and had learned nothing that would help him with Kirsten.

If it was Henry Toivo’s ghost that kept Mike and Kirsten from getting officially closer, thanks to her promise to herself and her agreement to Mike to be available if he ever returned, it was also Henry Toivo’s ghost that kept them together, for Kirsten’s reluctance to leave town kept Mike there.

Mike was just past his first anniversary with the Record-Herald when Webb called him into his office one afternoon. “Mike,” he’d said, “I don’t want anything I say to make you think you’re not welcome here, or you’re not welcome to stay as long as you like. But, even when I was the junior reporter here, I only stayed a year and a half, and it was a few years before I came back. But look, the best I can pay you is still pretty crappy, and I’d like to at least plant the idea in your head that you might want to at least think about moving on. You’re ready, you’ve taken hold well, and I can give you about the best recommendation I can give anyone. One phone call and I could have you working down at the Press on Monday.”

“George, I appreciate the thought,” Mike told him. “Don’t think I haven’t at least given some thought to looking. But, you know the situation I’m in with Kirsten.”

“Pretty much. It’s no secret. You’ve been good for her. She was awful flighty when you came, and just between you and me, Homer and I had conversations once or twice that maybe she was doing more harm than good around here. Granted, she had a problem, we knew what it was, and we tried to overlook it, but it was getting worse, not better. Then you came along, and those problems disappeared. Homer and I know we owe you, and, what’s more I would think the Toivo kid would think he owes you, too, under the circumstances.”

“I know,” Mike nodded. “But she’s not about to leave this town. At least, if she did, she wouldn’t be happy. And, I don’t want to leave her. That means I guess I have to stay. I don’t mind. I’ve learned to like this place.”

“Figured you’d say that,” Webb grunted. “I wasn’t sure how well you were going to work out when you were here first, too. It took you an awful long time to take hold. But I think Kirsten settled you down, too. Look, I’ll have a talk with Homer. Maybe we can find a few more bucks in the budget. But for now, you can quit calling yourself the junior reporter. You’re the senior reporter, although I don’t guess we’re going to have a junior reporter for a while.”

“Thanks, George,” Mike replied. “I appreciate that.”

Although Mike couldn’t tell George or Kirsten, he really wasn’t happy with the decision. First, he’d mostly let himself be forced into it, whether he liked it or not. More importantly, it meant conceding his hopes of a better, more important, and better paying reporting job back in a real city, resigning himself to an uncertain future at meager wages for the sake of the woman he loved. “Love” was a word Mike and Kirsten still used very gingerly around each other, but damn it, he loved her enough to give up his dream of a better job, and commit himself to spending his life with her, as long as she would let him. Henry Toivo’s ghost sat heavily on his shoulders as he walked back out into the office and tried to look busy for the afternoon. Kirsten was out and around somewhere, and he couldn’t even share the bright version of the news with her.

He didn’t see Kirsten again until they got back to what was now their apartment – Kirsten had been sharing in the rent for some time. She was waiting when he walked in. “Hi kid,” he said. “I’ve got news.”

“So do I,” she said, a mixture of happy and downcast. “I think I’m pregnant.”

The world shifted around Mike again. This put a whole new spin on things. For himself, he didn’t know whether to be happy or sad, how this could change the always delicate relationship he shared with Kirsten, so he just stood there speechless.

“I’ve been taking my pills,” she reported, “But they do fail once in a while.”

“How do you feel about it?” Mike finally managed to ask.

“I don’t know what to think. Happy. Sad. Faithless. Confused. I keep wondering what would happen if Henry walked in.”

“He’d probably understand that time passes and things change. God knows you’ve tried to keep the faith for him. But, I’ll tell you this: if Henry’s ghost” – it was a term he’d often used to himself but never to her – “Were to walk in here right now, I think he’d be happy for you.”

“You think?”

“I think.”

She was silent for a long time. “If it’s a boy,” she finally asked, “Can we name him Henry?”

“Sure,” Mike smiled. “But I draw the line at ‘Henrietta’ for a girl.”

“Maybe a middle name,” she grinned.

“Kirsten,” Mike said quietly, “Maybe it’s time we got married.”

“No,” she said. “I’ve thought about it a lot, especially the last couple hours. I know you’ve been talking to Gil and you’re both pretty near positive he’s been dead for years. But what if you’re wrong? I told you a long time ago that if he ever comes home I’ll leave you in a minute. I love you, Mike. I love you in a way I never loved Henry, I think, and I’ll still love you if he ever does come home. But I promised I’d be waiting for him to come home, and I could never stand myself if I can’t keep that promise.”

Mike was dead sure he stood a far better chance of winning the state lottery than he did of having Henry Toivo knock on his door, but he felt the weight of Toivo’s ghost settle even heavier on his shoulders as he said, “All right, Kirsten. If that’s the way it’s got to be, I guess I can live with it.”

Since Mike and Kirsten couldn’t get married, they did what they thought was the next best thing: they bought a house together.

It was clear that Mike’s little apartment, cramped for two, would be impossible for three, and before Kirsten got very big they were already looking. As luck would have it Kirsten’s parents were able to work out something.

Back when Kirsten had been small, they had lived in a small house on the south side of town, not far from the railroad yard. Karl Langenderfer told Mike it had been all right when the kids were small, but as they got bigger, it got a bit cramped. About the time the situation got out of hand, Karl’s aging aunt had been widowed, and had a big, empty house to take care of. “It didn’t take a lot of thinking to come up with the idea of swapping houses,” Karl told Mike. “That meant Gretchen wouldn’t have to worry about payments, and she’d have some income from us.”

But now Karl’s Aunt Gretchen was getting too old to take care of herself; even the little house was getting too much for her, and her only relatives around were Karl and Birgit. They’d been looking for a good excuse to get Gretchen to move in with them, and this was a possible lever, especially with Kirsten being pregnant. Karl didn’t hesitate to use it.

Gretchen wasn’t expected to last a whole lot longer. Karl and Mike could see that a will, a land contract and possible Medicare charges for a nursing home could make things unbelievably complicated, so it was agreed the kids would finance the house through the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank. Gretchen herself would front the kids the down payment without expecting repayment. That worked out to a sweetheart deal, one that could only come off from a close-knit family that was up to something, and Mike and Kirsten were grateful recipients.

It was close to Christmas in 1976 before Mike and a heavily pregnant Kirsten were able to move into the house. It wasn’t like there was a lot to move – the old apartment had been furnished – but stuff had accumulated in almost a year and a half, and Mike didn’t mind doing all the work, under the circumstances. But they sort of inherited all of Gretchen’s old furniture. It was solid old stuff, out of style but built to last a few lifetimes, and other than a desire to replace a few things that were really ugly, they didn’t have that issue to worry about.

After living in the apartment for so long, the house seemed like it had all the room in the world, cozy enough for them and a baby. But, there were drawbacks they didn’t care much about at the time. It wasn’t the greatest neighborhood; while not a crime problem or anything, it was on the grubby side of town. It was close to the railroad tracks, and the trains could knock him out of bed with an air horn any old time of the day or night. There was only a single garage, and a one-wide driveway, so any time they needed to take the car parked in the garage they had to move the car in the driveway. Usually, they just took that one, but eventually they started leaving the second car at the Record-Herald.

All in all, Mike didn’t mind. It beat having an apartment, and the joint ownership of the house sort of filled in for the lack of a marriage certificate.

Though things were tight for the next few years, it was an idyllic time. Tiffany proved to be a good baby, sleeping all night right from the start, and was rarely cranky, which was just as well, since they couldn’t afford a sitter and couldn’t afford to have Kirsten quit work to take care of her. In fact, Tiffany was riding in a baby carrier while her mother sold ads and serviced accounts when she was three weeks old, and when she was a little older Webb moved a vacant desk upstairs at the Record-Herald in order to make room for a playpen. Tiffany didn’t hurt ad sales, and even Homer Sanderson figured the motherly touch might have helped.

But those were busy years, too, especially for Mike, who although officially the senior reporter was still the junior reporter, and had a lot of stuff to cover, sports as well as news in those days. What with a new baby and the first girl’s interscholastic teams he was increasingly feeling himself run ragged.

Webb could see that Mike was stretched thin, and his work was reflecting it. “Something’s got to give,” Mike told Webb in the spring of 1978. “I don’t want to have to quit this job. I like it too much, but shit, I’ve had weeks approaching a hundred hours.”

“What else would you do?” Webb asked.

“I dunno,” Mike said. “I’m stuck here, and you know it. But Ryan Clark told me the other day they were maybe going to be doing some hiring at the plywood plant.”

“You’d hate that,” Webb smiled. “It’d bore you shitless.”

“I know,” Mike said. “I didn’t spend four years at State to work in a goddamn factory. But only forty or fifty hours a week, and at union scale, looks pretty damn good right now.”

“I’ll talk to Homer,” the editor conceded. “It should slow down over the summer, and maybe we can get a part-timer in over the fall to cover the other sports if you can keep doing football.”

Homer was getting old and crotchety by then, and Webb had quite a time even getting him to go that far; he had to endure a lot of lectures about how hard he’d worked back in Linotype days. “Mike’s putting in even more hours, Homer,” Webb told him several times. “That job is really too big for one person any more, what with the addition of all these girls sports.”

But Homer had his soft days, and one day, rather unexpectedly, he told Webb he might have a point, and it would be a damn shame to have a bright young father and good reporter like Mike running a milling machine out at the plywood mill. Webb took that as a sign to go ahead, and the next time Homer came into the office there was a new junior reporter working a sports desk crowded up against Tiffany’s crib.

Tim Warner, the new sports reporter, had never been to journalism school, or college at all, but wanted to work sports, so Webb had been able to hire him at an absolute minimum wage. However, he could write sports, and he was talented at it. He wound up covering sports for the next four years, until he eventually was hired on at the Camden Press. He didn’t stay there long, and soon moved on to a sports desk at a TV station in Camden. He bounced around several TV stations for a bit and they lost track of him for several years, until one day Bud Ellsberg came back from a trip to report he’d seen Warner on TV, anchoring sports at a big station in Chicago. He wasn’t the first junior reporter who had gone from the Record-Herald to much bigger things, nor was he the last, but he’d been one of the less likely prospects the first time he’d covered a Marlin game.

But that was many years later and a lot of water was to pass under the bridge in the intervening time. With his work load lowered to a merely daunting level, Mike had time to be a father. Even as a toddler, Tiffany was a sweet kid and she quickly became the joy of his life. Even as a two year old she seemed quiet, serious and competent, and was fun to be with. She’d go far in life, Mike was sure.

The three of them spent a lot of time together. Mike was still busier than he wanted to be, but he now had some spare time that went to his family. Their pleasures were cheap in those years. For instance, with only a little editorial pressure from Mike, in the summer of 1976 the City Parks Department started a sand-court volleyball league, played at the city beach not far from the Record-Herald office. Volleyball became a particular passion for both of them, and they were good at it. Mike and Kirsten were mixed doubles champs in 1976, though she was pregnant with Tiffany at the time, and they continued to dominate the mixed doubles for many years to come. Mike and Gil won the men’s doubles several years, although they didn’t dominate that class the way he and Kirsten did theirs.

The success of the sand court volleyball caused Mike to approach the school a couple years later about using the gym for a winter league. That backfired, a little; the school was willing, but they were also putting together an interscholastic girls’ volleyball team that winter, under the pressure of Title IX – and guess who had the most experience in town, or any experience, for that matter, at varsity team competition in full-court volleyball? Mike wound up coaching the team for four years, and took the girls to the state semifinals one year – Gil’s daughter, Brandy, was on that team, the last year he coached it. After Warner arrived, Mike at least made a deal with him that he’d cover the volleyball games for him if Warner could get to some meetings he had to miss, and in the end, it worked out pretty well.

By the time August of 1978 rolled around, things seemed pretty stable between them. They’d been together for three years. The ghost of Henry Toivo was still around, at least in Mike’s head, but his chains didn’t get rattled very often, at least as long as Mike was careful not to get into certain areas he knew were sensitive, although maybe not quite as sensitive as they once had been. They weren’t making a lot of money, but they were making enough, and they were living a quiet, but happy life, and, on balance, neither of them had much to complain about, or saw much need to change.