But Tom does remember the moment he saw Mom for the first time. He was immediately captivated: she was, as he says, “drop-dead gorgeous.” He walked over to her and started talking, about any old thing. She had a great sense of humor, and he was especially impressed by her intelligence, how she expressed herself precisely and fully and didn’t dumb anything down, even at a party. He told her, “You are something special,” and I can imagine her then, a skinny young teen, pretending not to be overwhelmed by his attention but still impressed by his direct confidence, a rarity in teenage boys. He said, right there, the very first time he met her, that he wanted to be with her. He knew a little about her family, knew there was trouble and unrest, if not outright abuse. He wanted to take care of her. It didn’t much matter that she was already dating someone, some guy called Junior, one of the multitude of Knight boys, well-known troublemakers in town. He considered this a minor obstacle.
Tom Perry had the thickest, shiniest black hair Crystal had ever seen. He was a little older—eighteen to her fifteen—with a wide, open face and small eyes that crinkled at the corners. He had friendly round cheeks and the muscular shoulders of a man who reaches under car hoods all day. She could smell motor oil on him, just faintly, a sweet, inviting smell, the smell of a man who took care of things, who could fix what was broken. He looked only at her when he spoke, nothing else competing for his attention.
Tom stole her away from Junior rather easily. He was charming and good-looking, with steady work and his own place. He’d been on his own since he was fourteen. He rented a trailer near the elementary school, close to the Black Horse Tavern, one of the town’s nicest restaurants, a place marked with a carved-wood sign that hung from fine chains, where locals mingled with the well-dressed summer people from Boston. He was a way out, a way to avoid living under Ray’s roof ever again. She moved into his place a couple of weeks after meeting him.
Tom drank and liked to have a good time, but he had a good reputation in town as a hard worker and a fair man, someone who didn’t take handouts and treated people well. These facts compensated for his occasional hell-raising—mostly fighting. Cops were rarely called, and when they were it was only to break things up when they didn’t resolve on their own. It wasn’t the sort of town where you talked out your differences, and Tom, raised with four brothers in the woods to the north, fit right in.
When Grace called the police, saying that her daughter had run off with this grown man, the cops took a look at the situation: Crystal wasn’t the first Farnum girl to start partying, to run from the house and from Ray. Officer Bell, who had picked her up in Norway as a skinned-kneed ten-year-old, was now chief of the Bridgton force, and he and others had reluctantly delivered the girls back home time and again. At Tom’s, Crystal was behaving: she went to school every day, got good grades. Chief Bell told her mother, “She’s doing fine, Grace. Just leave her be.”
Still, Grace kept at Tom. She must have realized that she was going to lose her baby daughter for real this time, and she panicked. She latched onto the idea that the two were “living in sin,” her own errant weekends momentarily forgotten. She’d call constantly and demand that Tom return her daughter, so soon enough he drove to her house alone to reason with her.
When Tom arrived, Grace let him in—here was an opportunity to lecture him in person. But she hadn’t gotten very far before he said, “Hey, listen. I don’t wanna live in sin; I want to marry her.”
She had not expected this. “Absolutely not!” she said. “No way! Get outta my house!” If she kept yelling, he’d have to take it back, this ridiculous thing he’d said.
Tom backed toward the front door, square-palmed hands in the air. “Okay, okay,” he said. He paused. “Well, just think about it.”
But Grace kept screaming, “Get out!”
I imagine Tom chuckling, shaking his head as he started up the car.
Ray liked Tom, though. He’d bring his dull brown Oldsmobile to the garage where Tom worked, in the center of town behind the laundromat. They’d talk man to man, share a cigarette. The way Tom saw it, Ray wasn’t perfect, but he was doing his best. Grace was so high-strung, and she had so many damn kids.
One day Tom’s phone rang at the trailer. It was Ray, a sober weekday Ray: “Come on up to the house. Bring Crystal.”
Crystal was quiet on the ride over, tensely flicking one fingernail against the other. It was Ray who opened the door this time; Grace was nowhere in sight. He asked them to sit down in the kitchen, and soon it was settled: Crystal and Tom would get married as soon as possible. She was a minor, so there would be paperwork, but Ray assured them that Grace would sign. Crystal knew it wasn’t kindness that motivated her stepfather.
When they brought the marriage papers to her mother, Grace voiced no objections. The men had arranged it, and she knew how eager Ray was to clear the house of children. This would, after all, remove some friction from her life. Crystal would be sixteen in two months, just about the age Grace was the first time she married Ray. For Crystal, pregnancy was nowhere in sight, but freedom was.
Tom and Crystal were married June 20, 1979, in a little chapel in the nearby town of Harrison, on the slender northern shore of Long Lake. There were only two witnesses: Tom’s brother Tony and his friend Mike Macdonald. I have no idea what she wore.
* * *
Gwen never quite forgave their mother for signing those papers. One summer, she and Crystal were painting vacated dorms at Bridgton Academy—a tiny college prep school near their house, a green-lawned alternate universe—earning extra cash, driving each other crazy, playing one-on-one basketball on the abandoned courts. And then the next, Crystal was married at fifteen and on her way to California with a husband Gwen hardly knew. The sisters wouldn’t live together, work together, help each other out, as Gwen had hoped. Now she was on her own, and she didn’t know what might become of Crystal. In the seventies, California meant adventure and sunlight. To Gwen it seemed like everyone was heading out there, although most would return before long, finding that it wasn’t the gold-rush opportunity they’d imagined.
* * *
Tom and Crystal ripped across the country in a black 1966 Ford Fairlane, a boxy hot rod of a car that Tom had fortified with a police cruiser engine so it could better haul the weight of his tools. They had nothing to lose, and he had family out there. They stayed at campgrounds along the way—cheaper than motels, safer than rest stops.
The Fairlane covered more than three thousand miles in five days, finally rolling up to the house of Tom’s father and stepmother. Tom and Crystal just appeared one day at the front door. Tom didn’t call anyone to tell them they were coming; he figured that once he arrived, with no money to go home, they couldn’t turn him away. Faced with asking permission now or forgiveness later, it seems Tom has always made the same choice.
The family gave them the space they had: a huge enclosed porch with a view of rolling, thickly wooded mountains. They slept under an electric blanket to stave off the Northern California chill. The town was called Brownsville, in Yuba County. To this day, Brownsville is still an unincorporated community, like Milton, with a population of about twelve hundred.