Marilyn couldn't find a listing for Elwood in directory a.s.sistance, but she did find a number for a fellow pumpkin grower mentioned in the article. She called and talked to him. "I knew about Elwood from a long time ago and wonder what he's up to now," she said.

The man was chatty, telling her that Elwood worked as a truck driver, had a son who served in Iraq, and was separated from his wife. He gave her Elwood's cell phone number, but then asked, "Now, who is this again?" Marilyn gave her name and then said, "It's been a long time. I don't even know if Elwood would remember me or my family. . . ."

"I felt a little underhanded," Marilyn tells the girls, as they sit on the porch, "but I really wanted his number."

"Did you call right away?" someone asks.

"No," she says. "I figured I'd wait until the weekend, when he wasn't driving his truck. I didn't want to startle him and have him drive off the road."

Actually, three months pa.s.sed before she found the courage to make the call. Her heart pounded as Elwood answered, and she began by introducing herself. Her name was not familiar to him. She asked if he was driving and wanted to pull over. He said he was in his truck, but he had a hands-free headset on his cell phone. He was fine. And so she began.

"In 1960," she said, "my family was in a car accident and I believe you were the driver of the other car. My brother, who was almost seven years old, died in that accident. . . ."

There was a pause. "Yes," he said. "I remember."

"I don't want to alarm you," Marilyn told him. "That's not why I'm calling. I guess I just want to tell you that after my brother died, things turned out well for the rest of my family. We're OK. I guess I'm contacting you because I need this closure."

He was listening. Marilyn went on. "What I'd really like to do," she said, "is send you a letter to tell you who I am, and to ask how you've been since that accident. Do you mind if I ask for your address?"

"I'd like to read your letter," he said softly, "and I will call you back after I get it." He gave her his address.

He asked her no questions. Maybe he got the sense that she wanted to begin their dialogue with the letter, not over the phone. "This may be a lot to absorb while you're on the road," Marilyn said.

"We will speak again after I read your letter," he told her. "Thank you for calling."

When Marilyn finishes telling the other Ames girls about that phone call, she pulls out the letter she wrote and pa.s.ses it around. Jane and Karla read it earlier, in a back bedroom. Now the other girls are seeing it.

In the letter, she told Elwood the things she knew about the accident, how it had led to her birth, and she rea.s.sured him that her parents never blamed him. She asked him what memories he had of that day, what injuries he had endured, how his family reacted.

As the other Ames girls consider the letter, one paragraph Marilyn wrote stands out for some of them. It begins: "I wanted to write to tell you that I owe you thanks. Had it not been for the accident, I wouldn't have been born. I wouldn't have had the great childhood I had growing up in Ames. I wouldn't have the friends I made there. I wouldn't have my wonderful husband and children."

She ended her letter: "Not many people get the opportunity to communicate, in a positive way, about a life-changing accident. I would like to get a letter from you to find out how your life has been. I wonder if you've been happy, if you're happy now. I want to let you know that if you ever had or still do have any anguish over the accident, well, I think that G.o.d has a way of planning things. I am relieved that you were receptive to giving me your address when I called you. I look forward to hearing from you."

A couple of the girls tell Marilyn that it's a very moving letter, that it could bring closure, that they're eager to see if and how Elwood responds.

"My daughter says the story of how I tracked down Elwood could be a movie," Marilyn says.

"If they made a movie," one of the other girls tells her, "you'd be single, he'd be gorgeous, you'd fall in love, and you'd drive off in his truck and get married."

Six of the girls are taking a hike on a state park trail a half hour from Angela's house. Marilyn is walking with Kelly, while Jane and Karla are a little farther up the trail, discussing the letter to Elwood that Marilyn showed them earlier in the day.

"Marilyn wrote it from her heart," Jane says, "but I just couldn't get past her saying 'thank you.' Those aren't the right words. If you say them out loud, it's like saying, 'Thank you for killing my brother.' It made me angry that she said that. It bothered me. She shouldn't be thanking him."

"I thought exactly the same thing!" Karla says. "That line jumped out at me." It felt to Jane and Karla as if Marilyn's thank-you was offering Elwood an opportunity to say, "You're welcome."

Marilyn catches up with them, and Jane speaks to her frankly. "I found the letter a little troubling. I just didn't think 'thank you' is what you meant to say."

"No," Marilyn allows, "that isn't the message I wanted to give."

"What would have been a better way to say it?" Karla asks, and Jane considers the question as they walk through the woods.

"I guess," says Jane, "that I would have worded it something like: 'I just want you to know the full story of my family, in case you've wondered. The accident happened. We can't change that. We understand it was probably painful for you, too. And I just want to put things in context for you. I want you to know that I am a consequence of what happened. My birth is a consequence.' "

Marilyn has already put the letter in the mail. It's too late to edit out her thank-you. But she smiles at her old friend. "Context . . . consequence . . ." Perfect words. Why hadn't she shown that letter to Jane before she mailed it? It means a lot to her that Jane would pa.r.s.e the letter, looking out for her.

"Thank you," she says, and this time, she means exactly that.

16.Through Kell'yy Eyes

It's time to go to sleep, and the girls are in various bedrooms at Angela's. Kelly joins a conversation in the room Cathy, Karen and Diana are sharing, and the talk turns to hairstyles.

"All my life, I wanted beautiful long hair like yours," Kelly tells Karen, "but my hair grows very slowly and I get tired of my style. So I end up cutting it short in a fit of restlessness. Then I have to slowly grow it all out again."

The girls tell Kelly that her hairstyle hasn't changed much since high school. That surprises Kelly. In her mind, she recalls times when she had arranged her hair differently over the years. But here are her friends telling her that when they look at her, they see the same old Kelly with the same old hairdo.

Maybe that's because Kelly always looked her best in the same haircut. But she certainly had her hair moments that came and went. In junior high, her mom took her to get her hair cut by a woman who had a salon in her bas.e.m.e.nt. Ice skater Dorothy Hamill was the woman influencing style at the time, and Kelly was talked into getting her hair cut into that cute bob. Given her very curly hair, Kelly thought she looked ridiculous in that style. She never ventured into that bas.e.m.e.nt again.Kelly, Karla, Sally, Marilyn In ninth and tenth grades, she and the other girls carried big combs in the back pockets of their first designer jeans. In the summers, they used lemon juice to try to lighten their hair.

Early in high school, Kelly got her first perm by a stylist Cathy and her mom recommended. She took Diana with her and enjoyed meeting the openly gay stylist. She had what she called "enormous eighties hair" for a while.

And then there was the time Grease Grease came to a theater in Ames, and Kelly and Diana attempted to dye their hair before attending. Kelly the brunette tried to go pink, and blond Diana tried to go black. The results were iffy at best, but Kelly recalls feeling proud and radical. came to a theater in Ames, and Kelly and Diana attempted to dye their hair before attending. Kelly the brunette tried to go pink, and blond Diana tried to go black. The results were iffy at best, but Kelly recalls feeling proud and radical.

In her adult life, too, Kelly had different hairstyles. But here are her old friends telling her they see her as predictable. And so Kelly makes a decision, but doesn't articulate it. She's going to grow out her hair-make a real change-and then come to the next reunion with a new look. It's past time, given the changes in her life, the divorce, her arrival in her forties. What will she look like with long hair? What will the girls say when they see her? Kelly can hardly wait for the next reunion.

At this moment, none of the others know the unexpected direction in which life will take Kelly, or what her hair will say about her when they next see her.

Kelly and her husband made the decision to separate in 2005, right before the reunion at Diana's house in Arizona, and about a year after Christie's death. Kelly arrived early that weekend, before everyone else, and when Diana picked her up at the airport, Kelly was an emotional wreck. She hadn't yet told any of the girls she was getting divorced, and on the drive to Diana's house, she spilled everything.

Kelly admitted she enjoyed spending time with another man she knew from work. The new man was appealing, Kelly said, because he was "organized, tidy and kind, and maybe that's what I think I need right now."

Kelly was so grateful for the ways in which Diana was there for her. In Kelly's view, her old friend was being nonjudgmental. Kelly felt like, in that moment, she was finding out what it was like to have unconditional love from a friend.

On several fronts, Diana disapproved of the ways in which Kelly contributed to the breakup of the marriage.

This was the second time Kelly struggled with the concept of staying faithful in a marriage where she wasn't happy. The first time was when she'd been married for three years and her husband was traveling a lot for work. As Kelly explained it: "My affair was with a man who was handsome and carefree. He was also around, while my husband was often gone, working in another state. It lasted six weeks, and then I vowed never to have an affair again. But then I met someone after Christie's death, and I had no desire to stay faithful."

Diana listened and offered sympathetic words when appropriate, and silence when that seemed right. She kept Kelly busy with projects. Years earlier, Karla and Kelly had started a reunion tradition in which the host put together an amusing welcome gift for the others. Diana had decided that she wanted to make slippers to give the girls when they arrived at the Arizona reunion.

"Kelly, you'll help me," she said.

The slippers would be made with, of all things, Maxi Pads. A woman in Diana's church had a crafts table set up in her home, so Diana told Kelly they needed to go over there to learn the process. Each slipper would require two Maxi Pads. One would become the sole of the slipper, and the other one would wrap around the toes, forming the top of the slipper. The pads would then need to be glued together and decorated with beads, flowers and charms.

Kelly considered the whole process. "I am not a crafty person," she said. In fact, she was proud of one of her Christmas letters to the other girls that had poked fun at Martha Stewart.

"You can do it," Diana said. "It's going to be fun."

Diana took Kelly to the grocery store and they stood in the feminine hygiene aisle, discussing what types of pads to buy.

"Extra long or extra thick?" Diana wondered.

"I don't know," Kelly said.

"I'm thinking extra long," Diana decided.

Kelly was thinking: "This is totally surreal. My life is an uproar. And I'm making crafts out of Maxi Pads."

But maybe that was exactly the diversionary therapy Kelly needed. She had stepped into a foreign world, where Maxi Pad crafts enthusiasts were connecting with each other online, emailing amusing suggestions for how to describe the slippers on gift cards: "soft and hygienic," "built-in deodorant feature to keep feet smelling fresh," "no more bending over to mop up spills." At least these crafts-crazy women didn't take life so seriously.

When they returned to Diana's house, Diana put Kelly in charge of the glue gun. They started a.s.sembling the slippers, adding on plastic flowers and other baubles. It went on like that for a couple of hours; they talked, they glued, they took apart Maxi Pads. Kelly confided in Diana about wanting to be with another man. Sometime after that, she left her glue gun tipped sideways, and Diana snapped at her.

"What are you doing, Kelly? Will you watch it please? You can't leave the glue gun tipped sideways! Come on."

Kelly found herself thinking: Here was one of life's great ironies. Diana seemed to be understanding about Kelly leaving her marriage. But here she was, chastising her for a sideways glue gun. Maybe Diana's feelings about Kelly's questionable decisions were showing up on the Maxi Pad front.

As the night wore on, Kelly and Diana got so caught up in the slipper a.s.sembly line that, until the phone rang, Diana didn't realize that she'd forgotten to pick up one of her daughters at church. Diana rushed out of the house, and Kelly was left holding the glue gun.

As she worked, one of Diana's other daughters asked if she would test her on her spelling words.

And so Kelly sat there, gluing baubles on Maxi Pads, calling out words and making sure they were spelled right, all the while contemplating the end of her marriage.

The next day, the other girls arrived and Kelly began filling them all in. Most listened, resisted being judgmental, and occasionally shared a helpful story of divorce that their siblings or other relatives went through. Like Karla, Angela had gotten divorced and remarried, and both of them were able to offer Kelly their perspective that light comes after darkness. As they spoke to her, Kelly thought to herself: "It's comforting to have people who can give you stories that make a difference when it's so bleak."

Upset and distraught over the breakup, Kelly's husband had her cell phone service stopped because he was angry at her and didn't trust her while she was at Diana's. So she was in Arizona without a phone. Then her husband wanted to talk to her so he called Diana's house several times. Unpleasant conversations were sure to ensue if Kelly took the phone, so she didn't. Her husband always got along well with the other Ames girls. He respected and liked them. "But he a.s.sumes you'll unify behind me," Kelly said, "and that's hard for him."

It was obvious that Kelly's husband was caught up in his anger and the swirling emotions he was feeling. Diana finally and firmly told him to stop calling, to just give Kelly this time alone with her friends, and he complied. Kelly was grateful that Diana took this stand. The weekend with the girls became a brief respite from so many hard issues swirling back in Minnesota.

A large part of Kelly was beside herself. But through it all, she also found herself having fun. Just being with the other girls made that inevitable. At one point, the women all put on their Maxi Pad slippers, circled up the way they did as girls, and each put one foot forward. Then they aimed their cameras downward to capture what looked like the March of the Maxi Pads. They couldn't stop laughing.

There were times that weekend when Kelly felt desperate, confused and shattered. But she also felt embraced and loved. And that sustained her.

When Kelly thinks back to her childhood dreams, to what she wanted to do or be when she grew up, she always had a clear, four-word answer in her own head. "I want to write."

She didn't always articulate that to her friends. She recalls signing up for Career Day in junior high with some of the other girls. What career should they learn more about? They decided, like so many of their female cla.s.smates, to meet with the modeling agency that had come to school. As Kelly now thinks back to that day, she realizes that she went only to be with her friends. She has an image in her head of Diana, in a tan outfit with a hat and her Farrah Fawcett hair. Diana certainly could be a model! But Kelly? She wanted to be a writer.

She was and is a terrific writer. The girls have known this since childhood. They see her writing talents in her emails to them, and in the stories she sent them from her 2000-2004 stint as a local newspaper reporter, when she took a hiatus from teaching. Now back in the cla.s.sroom, she feels she is living her writing dream by teaching journalism and writing to a new generation.

In her forties, Kelly senses that the word "writer" can be defined broadly. It's about expressing emotion. It's about helping people think. It's about using words to understand herself. It's about helping other people find their own words.

Briefly in high school, Kelly thought she might want to spend some time in the military. Later, in college, she flirted with the idea of joining the Peace Corps. "Teaching definitely fills that void," she has told the other girls.

Kelly loved working as a newspaper reporter, but she returned to teaching because she missed interacting with kids, especially teaching them about First Amendment issues. She feels First Amendment rights have been restricted during the Bush years and wants her students to be more active citizens.

Many of her students call her "Zwag," rather than Ms. Zwagerman. They say she is unlike any teacher at the high school. Spend a day with her students, and they speak openly about her. "Most teachers, you can't argue with them," one boy says, "but Zwag is the kind of teacher who thinks that what you say matters. She likes to go back and forth with you. She wants that give-and-take." Says another student: "She'll mark up your paper with a red pen, and when you get it back, there's so much red you can't bring yourself to look at it. We don't like it, but we do realize that she tells it as she sees it."

As Kelly explains it: "Every red mark is an opportunity to teach."

"She's my track coach," one boy says. "She coaches me in the hurdles. Even if you win and feel you had the perfect race, she's always telling you what's wrong and how you can improve. That's not easy. Sometimes I get Zwag overdose."

Kelly has talked with her students about her relationships with the Ames girls, and they are intrigued and full of questions. In the office of the student newspaper, The Echo, The Echo, a group of the editors are sitting around and one girl says, "It's great that Zwag has so many friends. I have one friend-that's why we're sitting here next to each other-and she's my best and pretty much only friend. I wish I had more friends like Zwag has." a group of the editors are sitting around and one girl says, "It's great that Zwag has so many friends. I have one friend-that's why we're sitting here next to each other-and she's my best and pretty much only friend. I wish I had more friends like Zwag has."

These Faribault students talk about how groups of friends form in high schools today. There are the typical groupings-the druggies, the jocks, the nerds. But there are new subgroups now. At schools today, for instance, there are groups of girls who are all anorexic and sit together at the same lunch table every day, not eating. There are girls bonded together as "cutters"-their friendships bound in self-injury.

Kelly monitors her students closely, trying to stay aware of problems in their home lives, their friendships, their own fragile psyches.

Some of the Ames girls worry that Kelly is too open with her students. As she guides them through their own issues, she's not averse to sharing personal details of her own life and struggles. She's open about her own political views and her honest a.s.sessment of administrators with whom she has battled. She counts ex-students among some of her best adult friends now. They are in their twenties and thirties, and Kelly is both mentor and confidant to them. At the same time, they help her see the world from a younger perspective.

Kelly hears the other Ames girls' concerns, but in her mind, they don't quite understand her view: that she isn't just teaching journalism to her students. She's teaching them about the world beyond Faribault, Minnesota. And when a teacher and former student become friends, it's an honor and gift to both.

The other girls notice that Kelly didn't move far from Ames, that she took a traditional job as a teacher, that she is not the full rebel they predicted she'd be when they were all young. But Kelly still sees herself as strident. In fact, she thinks that in some ways, she's more of a rebel now.

Gay rights is just one of many causes Kelly has embraced as an adult that wasn't on her radar screen when she was a girl back in Ames. She is proud of a letter she received from a mother of one of her students who is gay. The letter arrived a few weeks before she headed to the reunion at Angela's. Faribault is a mostly conservative town, of course. Kelly's brave support of the gay boy did not go unnoticed by his mother, who wrote: I am so thankful for your presence in my son's life. Teachers can and do make a difference. Sometimes they close the doors for young minds, but not you. You challenge them. You encourage them. But mostly, you have taken the time to support and befriend my son. You have empowered him and guided him to use his voice and his pen to express himself. I know of some of your more personal conversations, and I am so proud that my son would choose a person of your caliber to confide in. It tells me that he has the ability to recognize wisdom when in his presence. Thank you for taking risks.

Kelly considers her greatest achievement to be the work she has done with students such as this boy. She also is proud of the efforts she has put into raising her kids, but knows her divorce has taken a toll. Because her three children live primarily with their father, and because she and her ex are not speaking, there have been challenges and difficulties. Her children have blamed her for the demise of the marriage, but now there seems to be a better understanding that both people in a bad marriage play a role when it fails.

In Kelly's view, she did make attempts to save the relationship.

The very week of Christie's death in February 2004, she had rethought everything. She was on leave from teaching, working at the local newspaper, and she just decided to quit the reporting job and add a year to her leave. She wanted to explore who she was and rethink her marriage.

She had been married since 1987, and she knew the relationship was floundering. Was there any way to save it? She thought she'd try. In the summer of 2004, she planned a five-week family road trip out west. She wanted to pull her family together, to show her husband, her two sons and her daughter that she appreciated them and felt blessed that they were all healthy. But the trip served only to drive home the obvious: Her marriage was over. A couple of months after the vacation, her family visited her husband's relatives. "I knew I was seeing them for the last time," she says.

Kelly tries to reflect on marriage and motherhood honestly. "I hope I've contributed in a meaningful way to my children's growth and development," she says. "Certainly, I provide the basic necessities, but I do wonder if lessons I've tried to teach them will make a difference in their lives. The jury is still out on this, with all three of them in high school. I'm holding my breath and I'm just hoping they make choices that keep them safe." Kelly a.s.sumes they'll experiment in ways that she and her friends did when they were teens. "But I had the other girls to catch me when I fell," she says, "and I'm not sure my kids have such a strong support system from their friends. My children are very influenced by their friends, and I'm not sure they have the safety net I had with the girls in Ames."

Kelly's daughter, Liesl, is fourteen years old and has come to recognize how crucial friends can be. "I think friends are way important-sometimes more important than family," she says. Why does she say that? "Because of divorce."

She explains that she has been able to confide in her friends about her parents' breakup because so many of them have divorced parents, too. She has bonded with several other girls over divorce. She's had one particular friend since first grade, and that girl "is really wise. She gives me lots of good advice. I feel like she helped my through everything when I was really mad at my mother over the divorce. Even though I was mad, my friend told me to hang out with my mom."

The parents of another friend have an amicable divorce, and Liesl envies that. "For Mother's Day, my friend's father made breakfast at his house and took it over to the mother's house. So they were able to celebrate Mother's Day as a family. That sounded nice."

Liesl is saddened that her parents are not at the stage where they can spend time together. And because she has begun to look so much like Kelly, she says she wonders if her dad is thinking of his negative feelings toward Kelly when he looks at her.

But overall, Liesl says things are improving. For Valentine's Day, Liesl came to Kelly's house and they ordered a heart-shaped pizza and rented some romantic movies. They talked about Liesl's long-distance boyfriend, who lives in a town that Liesl described precisely as "twenty-six minutes away." The boyfriend is always texting Liesl, and she loves getting his texts. He has promised, however, that if he ever breaks up with her, he won't do it by text, and she appreciates that.

Liesl's texting stories have reminded Kelly of her own texting adventures, post-divorce. "The first text message I ever received was from a man I dated last spring," she says. "There was something incredibly exciting and a little erotic about receiving 'thinking of you' as I was finishing the school day. I quickly taught myself how to send a text message back, and from that point on, we sent 'good morning' and 'good night' messages every day."

Kelly now trades text messages with her students-at all hours, if they have homework questions, they get in touch-and at times she has had all three of her kids in the car, and they've all been texting at once. She noticed how silent it was in the car, yet everyone was communicating.

And so Liesl's texting love life, her fears about being dumped via a text-it all resonated with Kelly. And bonding with her daughter on Valentine's Day was a thrill on other fronts, too. They vowed to each other that, at least for the foreseeable future, they'd try to spend a part of every Valentine's Day together, so they aren't just relying on the boyfriends in their lives.

Liesl said she was glad she spent last Valentine's Day with her mom. "I love her," she said, "and wanted her to know it."

Like all the Ames girls, Kelly has given thought to the question of who she is now and what she wants from her life moving forward. "I want to be a strong female role model," she says. "I want to be an inspirational and motivational teacher. I want to be a parent who builds a network of love and support for my children, which includes involving my parents in their lives. I want to be a kind and caring friend."

Over the years, she has come to a realization about the Ames girls: All of them have close family ties-they're close to siblings, parents, children. "These women seem to have an extraordinary capacity for strong connections, and not just with their families and the group of us, but also with their newer friends and colleagues. Maybe through our strong friendship we have learned how to more deeply care for others."