More from the book . . . .
In fact Rachel Kirby had heard those same endorsements before. Her husband – now late husband – had been a good guy, a real good guy. He may have been the king of all the real good guys for all she knew. And it was the same friend who recommended him. It was 1973 then, she was just out of junior college and Jim had just finished a tour of duty in Germany and had taken a job as an operator in a chemical plant nea
rby.
Her friends were marrying then. Right and left they waltzed to the various Protestant altars in town to marry good guys. Rachel, she heard this more than once, from more than one of them, you’d better think about what’s going to be left over for you if you push him away.
She didn’t like that argument – that kind of logic. She did not want to think of her life as nothing but minimizing loss. Surely there was more to it than that. More to it than just taking on – for life, till death do us part – someone whose only real qualification was that he was not really the bottom of the barrel.
Some of her friends’ lives had “worked out,” as they put it. When kids came
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