Poppy had gone to high school in Lawrenceton. She and John David had been five years behind me at the local school, which in those days had meant I was hardly aware of their existence. Her parents, who’d had her late in life, had moved to a retirement community a couple of hours’ drive away after she’d graduated. Poppy’s father, Marvin Wynn, had been the local Lutheran minister, and his wife, Sandy, had worked in the registrar’s office at the local junior college. The whole community had pitied these righteous people when Poppy, their only child, reached her teen years.

But she’d never been arrested or gotten pregnant, those two grim incidents typical of wild teen years. And by the time she’d gone to college, she’d more or less settled into a relationship with John David Queensland. It had been a tumultuous one, and they’d broken up and reconciled more times than any onlooker could count. Neither Poppy nor John David had been faithful during the off-seasons, and maybe not even when they were supposed to be going steady. This pattern seemed to have continued even after they’d eventually married, five years after they’d graduated from college and begun pursuing their careers. Amazingly, Poppy had been a great elementary school teacher. I’d heard how good she was from more than one set of parents. And John David seemed to be able to talk almost any doctor into buying his company’s pharmaceuticals.

After Poppy had had Chase, almost any onlooker would have been excused for assuming that life had settled down for these two former wild kids.

Not so.

Though I’d always liked Poppy, and had often admired her terrifying habit of saying exactly what she thought, I didn’t approve of some aspects of her marriage. To me, marriage is the chance to put away the trappings of a single life and concentrate on making one good thing work really well. The cornerstone of this would have to be-in my view-faithfulness. There have to be some assumptions you make when you agree to bind your life to another person’s, and the basic assumption and maybe the most important of all is that this person will get your exclusive attention.