Word: andreas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Andrea Kennedy had never before been so bold as on the day in 1989 when she knocked on Rusty Yates' apartment door to ask if he knew who had dinged her car. He did not, but they talked. She later confessed to him that she had simply wanted to meet him--just as he had first been interested in her after seeing her in the pool weeks earlier. She went by herself to eat at a steak restaurant by a river, and the sight of couples chatting intimately made her focus her attentions on Rusty. Back at their apartment complex...
Eventually, he gave up Monday-night football to visit her apartment. They talked for more than an hour. "She was smart," recalls Rusty, who was 25 at the time, as was Andrea. "She used two or three words and I didn't know what they were." Perhaps for fear of embarrassing him, she did not tell him then that she had been high school valedictorian. He had been a popular jock in high school--and a summa cum laude graduate of Auburn University. There were secrets she would never tell him. Her boldness was rooted in desperation...
Even as a teenager, she kept her confidences. "Andrea would not let people get close enough," says Marlene Wark, her only good friend through Milby High School in southeast Houston. "She was prickly that way. She minded her own business and expected you to mind your own business." She was the youngest of five. Her parents, determined to vary the children's interests, would rouse them from bed at 5:30 a.m. to swim in the cold pool at the YMCA. The family had one of the largest paper routes in Houston, making deliveries in their mother Jutta's aqua...
...Andrea worked as a post-op nurse at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center while dating Rusty, who designed computer systems for NASA. They spent two years getting to know each other, living together, reading the Bible and praying. Their wedding in 1993 was not extravagant, but Andrea and Rusty had very set ideas about the future. The couple talked openly to wedding guests about planning not to use birth control and wanting as many children as might come along. Within three months, Andrea was pregnant...
With Noah still in diapers, Andrea was pregnant again in 1995. She gave up swimming and jogging. She saw less of her friends. "That was her choice," says her friend Marlene Wark, who lost touch with her old chum after Noah's birth. "Andrea is not a cream puff. She never struck me as the type who rolled over." Wark had seen her friendship lapse with Andrea before. In college they stopped talking for a year until Andrea warmed up again, without ever explaining what had miffed her. Andrea later told another friend that, at the time, she might have...