He wasn’t a particularly nice man, her husband. In fact, he was mostly an ass. A me-me-me man, who pretended he was an it’s-all-for-us man. He managed a bank, made good money, but Mary Alice frequently thought that he would have been somewhat happier (if happier was the word for it) as a stockbroker on Wall Street.

Their son had decided to teach high school, computer skills. Mary Alice had supported this, but her husband had gone through the roof. You had to teach forever—and spend a ton on furthering your education—before you made any real money teaching.