Or, when he'd managed the Menlo Park McDonald's in 1966 and '67 during his first two years at Stanford and decided to take the stock option they were offering to their management employees even though it lowered his pay by ten percent, to under three dollars an hour. He'd taken a lot of grief from friends about the thousand dollars he was throwing down the drain, but Mark had had a hunch, and when he got out of law school eight years later, that stock was worth over $65,000 and he and Sheila used it as the down payment on the home he still owned, which they'd bought for $97,000 in 1975, and was now worth well over a million.

Long odds.

Kneeling in the pew, his knee jammed painfully into the space between the padding so it would hurt, some of the other riskier chances he'd taken came back at him. The time when…

But, halting his reverie, Christina appeared in his peripheral vision. He lowered his head in an attitude of prayer. She was wearing jeans, boots, a Gore-Tex overcoat, and did not see him. She kept walking, her own head bowed. A couple of pews in front of him, she genuflected, stepped in and kneeled.

The Glitskys lived in an upper duplex on Lake Street, and Abe was in the kitchen, bringing handfuls of cold water to his face. A steady downpour was tattooing the roof, but a thin ribbon of pink hung in the eastern sky, off to the right, out the window over the sink.

The thing to do was get the chores started, but he couldn't move. The order of things didn't flow anymore.

How could he do this alone?

He wasn't going to ask that question, not in this five minutes. It would paralyze him. He wouldn't think about it.

He depended on Flo – she was one of the world's competent beings. The two of them had split up their domestic duties long ago. Glitsky had always helped with heavy cleaning; he'd fixed things, lifted and moved, washed and dried dishes, organized shelves and rooms and closets. When the boys had been born, he'd changed diapers and heated baby food, but eventually their care – dressing them, feeding them, comforting them – had fallen mostly to Flo.