After she finished her cry, she’d pick up the mail and sit down at the kitchen table, the way she did every afternoon. And once she juggled the family finances and put off the bill collectors for a few more days, she’s start supper… Roxanne moaned, squeezing her eyes shut. “Just like I do every afternoon.”

This was ridiculous! She was living a cliché, the abandoned wife with the dismal future. She’d become a bad Jerry Springer guest, filled with resentment and hidden anger and a list of grievances against her ex-husband that seemed to be unending. He couldn’t just have decided that marriage wasn’t for him. No, he had to completely humiliate her in the process.

She’d had such a perfect marriage-or at least that’s what she’d thought. On the surface, John Perry seemed like the model husband, a good father and a generous provider. He’d wanted a big family and Roxanne had been thrilled to be a stay-at-home mother. They’d bought a beautiful old Victorian row house in the historic Mount Vernon neighborhood in Baltimore and had begun to restore it. His job as a lawyer gave them extra money for vacations and a nice car and dinners out twice a week. Though he spent long hours at the office she’d assumed it was all part of building a career.

But now she’d realized how naive she’d seen. John had run off to Barbados not with a pretty secretary or an aspiring supermodel, which she might have understood. He had thrown her over for a muscle-bound Amazon, a client with a career in professional wrestling and a complicated lawsuit brought by her greedy family. Roxanne had lost her man to “The Velvet Hammer,” a woman she’d seen only once when she secretly taped Wednesday Night SlamFest and watched after the children when to bed.

“My children’s stepmother has biceps bigger than my head,” she said, hoping that might start the tears. But all it brought was a little giggle.

It was all so embarrassing. She’d always thought her husband was a rational, intelligent man, a man who loved his family and his position in the community. But then Roxanne had discovered the savings account empty and the stock portfolio gone. Luckily, she’d still had a small trust fund from her grandfather to pay the day-to-day expenses. Even after the divorce settlement was final, the child support had been slow in coming.