It was a warm late summer day as I dropped out of the mountains of Eastern Oregon and let my new Subaru drift down the hill into Idaho. The Snake River plain was stretched out before me and through the clear Idaho air I could see the next ridge of the Northern Rockies, some sixty miles away. At the base of that ridge lay my destination, Boise. The Boise Front, as it is known defines the beginning of a series of mountains that run north from there to Canada and east into Montana and Wyoming. Between my location and the front range to the north lay a broad plain—a lush green, where there was water for irrigation, and a barren grey green sage steppe, where there wasn't. To my surprise there was quite a bit more city here than I had expected, nearly 500,000 people I would later learn, in a series of towns strung out along the Boise River where it coursed down out of the mountains and drained into the Snake River at a little town called Caldwell. Nothing of course compared to where I had come from.
I was fleeing. Not in the sense of running from the law. Just in the sense of leaving my life in Silicon Valley of the last 20 years or so, and everything it represented, behind. I had replaced my Tesla Model S with a Subaru Outback. I had sold my company, paid a huge tax bill, and purchased a diverse portfolio (meaning I had a lot of liquid assets, way more than I could ever spend). I had shed my girlfriend, or perhaps she had shed me. At best it was mutual. Neither of us had been particularly committed to the relationship. She had been an early investor in my company so she left our relationship with nearly as big a pile of money as me. But most importantly, I was free of the culture of the Silicon Valley start-up environment—no lawyers and accountants, no venture capitalists and investment bankers, no quarterly benchmarks to make, no employees who always seemed to want the company to do something about that idiot the rest of the country had elected President, or at least provide a bigger game room. Their priorities were sometimes unclear. I felt like the guy in the Joni Mitchell song who is celebrating being a "free man in Paris," except
he
was bemoaning the fact that he had given up his free status when he left Paris "to run the star maker machine", and I had just achieved my freedom and arrived in Idaho, hopefully a safe distance from the Silicon Valley "money maker machine."
An hour and a half later, after sliding through what passes for commute in Boise, I was in the city's North End looking for the home of my old friend Jared Christensen. The streets, laid out in a square grid reminded me of the older parts of Palo Alto with huge old hardwood trees (maples, gums, oaks and a dozen other species I didn't recognize). The houses dated back to the late 19
th
and early 20th century, with many rehabilitated, but some showing their hundred year age and probably a better candidate for a scrape and build from scratch than a rehab.
When I pulled up in front of Jared's house, he and his wife Julia were waiting for me on their front porch. The house was a classic craftsman design with a broad covered front porch, probably built in the 1920s. Julia and Jared were sitting on the porch sipping an ice tea. A couple of huge old oak trees dominated the front yard and cast complete shade on the front of the west facing house.
As I emerged from the car stretching my legs and back, stiff from my long drive, Jared jumped from his chair and strode down the walk to greet me, calling out "Michael, you made it." He was still as I remembered him from our undergraduate days, tall and lean, with closely cropped dark hair—good looking by anyone's standards. After college I had gone on to pursue a Masters in computer science and a start-up that had collectively consumed the next fifteen years of my life, but Jared had abandoned the tech studies, choosing to pursue a divinity degree from a small college in Eastern Washington—Whitman Now he was the pastor of a small church here in Boise. Dressed in traditional preacher's work garb of dark slacks and shirt with a narrow white ecclesiastical collar, he embraced me with gusto. Jared in a preacher's garb was going to take some getting used to.
His wife of several years, Julia, whom I had not met, trailed a few steps behind him. She was several inches shorter than Jared, standing perhaps 5-5 or 5-6, even with the benefit of a tall set of heels. She had thick, lustrous, dark brown hair tied in a loose ponytail that hung just a bit short of the middle of her back. Unlike Jared, Julia could best be described as pleasingly plump, with broad hips and, most noticeably, large breasts. Her legs were largely hidden by her mid-calf length dress. She wore glasses and understated make-up that accentuated her round, dark brown eyes. The overall look was consistent with the role of a minister's wife I thought, with the exception of her tall heels. Those didn't fit the mold. I let the question they raised slide past my attention as Jared stepped aside, and she stepped forward to greet me. I extended a hand, having never met her before, but she slid by it, and repeated Jared's embrace, mashing her large breasts against my chest.
"I'm Julia," she said as she released me and stepped back. "Jared's told me so much about you."
"All good I hope," I said with a smile as I looked down at her.
She smiled and said, "Well most of it, but I think you boys did get up to no good now and then."
"Really?" Jared responded. "I don't remember anything like that. I was a minister to be—straight arrow."
"So you say, so you say," she repeated sharing a lascivious smile with me. "Maybe I can get a straighter story out of Michael here."
"Oh no, he was so straight he was boring to live with," I lied. Jared had raised far more hell than me in college.
Julia laughed and shook her head as she turned toward their porch. "Let me get you an iced tea," she said. As she walked away, I couldn't help but notice how the conservative dress she wore draped her hips in a way that made me think thoughts totally unsuited to a minister's wife. Julia was plump, but in a most attractive way, her hips broad and her waist narrow. Jared always had good taste in women I remembered. And, the number of women he bedded and then left seemed never ending. Seduction was his strong suit, but commitment was a foreign concept to Jared. How had Julia managed to catch him, I wondered?
We sat on the porch as we sipped iced tea. I was rather hoping for a beer, but . . . Jared was a minister now. He had met Julia while he was in divinity school, so I assumed she had put him on the straight and narrow. I imagined that the girls he met in divinity school were a far cry from the Stanford Dollies he and I used to chase around with as undergraduates.
When the iced teas glasses ran dry we adjourned to dinner. The air conditioning of the house provided a welcome relief to the warmth of the front porch. Boise is hot in the summer. When I mentioned it Jared said, "Oh yeah it's not Palo Alto is it, but you get used to it."
When we sat down, Julia spoke up, "Jared since we have a guest tonight, perhaps we could have some wine. I have a bottle chilling in the fridge." Actually she had several bottles chilling in the fridge. I was to learn that there were always several bottles chilling in the fridge. Apparently, alcohol on the front porch was forbidden, but it was okay behind the closed doors of their home. That matched one of Jared's characteristics I remembered—a willingness to put appearances before his actual standards.
Jared nodded, easily convinced.
During dinner we exchanged details of what we had been doing over the last fifteen years. Julia was mostly silent as she listened to my description of the founding, growth, and sale of my company and Jared's description of his efforts to grow the little reform Baptist church he had assumed leadership of in Boise and his decision to separate from the sponsoring national Baptist organization. Near the end of dinner, and nearly through the second bottle of wine, I turned to Julia and asked, "So how did you and Jared meet?" I could have asked Jared, but I wanted to give Julia an opportunity to get into the conversation.
Julia smiled and looked towards Jared. He cleared his throat in a fashion loaded with meaning, "Ahem," which I read as a message to Julia to treat my question with care or even just decline to answer.
Julia smiled—a most seductive smile, her lips together and the corners turned up with a twinkle in her eyes I hadn't seen until then, as she thought about how to respond. "Uh . . . well, that's kind of a complicated story. Let me clear the table to the kitchen and then we can adjourn to the living room."
"Certainly," I said, as I stood to help.
Jared had disappeared to the back of the house, but I stayed with Julia and helped her with the dishes. We had them all cleaned up in no time. While she worked she returned the topic of discussion to me, but I was determined that I wasn't going to let her off the hook on the question I had asked earlier, especially since it had seemed to hit a hot button with Jared. I was just waiting until we all reassembled in the living room so I could watch Jared's reactions.
Once the dishes were done, Julia and I refilled all three wine glasses and moved to their living room. I sat down in one corner of their couch and Julia sat at the other end. I noticed that at some point in the evening she had dispensed with her glasses. I wondered if they were really necessary or just clear glass worn for appearances. Jason came in right behind us. I noticed he had changed out of his work clothes and was wearing a loose pair of cargo shorts and a T-shirt. Basically the same as me. He sat in an arm chair facing the couch Julia and I had taken.
As soon as we were all seated, I spoke up before either of them could hi-jack the conversation as they had earlier. "So Julia, I think you were about to tell me how you and Jared met?"
She looked over at Jared for a moment and then spoke up, "We met in church."
Jared rolled his eyes.
"Well, really out back of the church," she continued.
"Her father was the pastor," Jared said.
"Yes, I was home from my second year at Washington State, and I was working in the church office before I returned to college. Daddy had hired Jared to clean up the church's summer vegetable garden which was in a post-harvest mess. He was an intern."
"I was pulling up dried out bush bean plants, melon vines, corn stalks, and all the other debris left behind in a community garden at the end of summer and piling them in a truck to haul to the dump," Jared said. "In theory it was an internship I was getting credit for with the divinity school, but I wasn't finding anything particularly religious about it. I think it was mostly Big Al taking advantage of free labor."
Julia smiled more broadly and her pink tongue crept out and licked her lip as she remembered. "He was working hard in the hot sun . . . and he was
naked
from the waist up." The gleam in her eyes, had, if anything, brightened.
I smiled at her choice of language, she had said "he was
naked
from the waist up", rather than "he had his shirt off," and she put an emphasis on the word "
naked"
that made it the focal point of the whole sentence.
"No big deal," Jared said a little defensively. I smiled to myself. In college Jared had been heavily into body building and several of the women who floated through his life had described him to me as "ripped." A couple also described him as "hung," but it didn't seem appropriate to share either characterization here.
"And who was Big Al?" I asked, ignoring the naked part.
"He was my Daddy."
"The Pastor?"
"Yes."
Now it was Jared's turn to smirk.
I looked at him and raised an eyebrow, effectively asking him to continue.
"He wasn't very happy," Jared said.
Now Julia laughed, a hard belly laugh. "That's an understatement," she said. "I'd never seen him so mad."
I couldn't resist, so I asked, "Why?"
Jared rolled his eyes. He had known from the beginning the story was going to come out.
Julia laughed and ignored Jared, the twinkle still in her eyes. "I was on my knees, sucking Jared's cock."
I broke out laughing. When I finally recovered, I said, "I am not surprised by any of this. That's the Jared I remember from college. Five minutes from meeting a girl to getting in her pants."
"Hey it took him longer than that," she said with a pout. "We didn't do that for a couple of weeks." Jared just had his head in his hands now. He'd lost complete control of the conversation.
