A Life That Matters Read Online Free PDF Page B

lose weight, she’ll tell you.”
    The moment she graduated from high school, she came to me. “I’m ready to lose weight,” she said.
    I took her back to Dr. Ickler. He put her on a Nutra-System diet, at that time a new kind of weight-loss regimen, and slowly, gradually, the pounds came off.
    Her loss of weight triggered a transformation in Terri that thrilled us and delighted her friends. From a stay-at-home, she became a girl who loved to socialize. Her sense of humor, until then sly and quiet, blossomed. She could be the loudest in a group, the least inhibited, given to teasing and being teased. By the time she was twenty, she had lost forty pounds. Friends and strangers commented on the beauty of her figure. She became sure of herself, unafraid to voice her opinions, the center of attention rather than at its outskirts. And her laughter! It seemed to me everything struck her funny, and her glee was evident, her joy of being alive.
    It was not surprising that this vibrant, graceful, blossoming girl would attract men. Nor, in retrospect, was it surprising that Terri, sexually innocent and naïvely unaware of the effect of her new power on others and on herself, would fall hard for the first attractive man who fell for her.
    She did. His name was Michael Schiavo.

CHAPTER 4
    Terri and Michael
    Terri was in love. Blond, blue-eyed, six-foot-six Michael Schiavo, at twenty-one, a year older than Terri, was the first boy she had ever dated, and she thought being out with him was romantic and grown-up. They had met in 1982 in a sociology class at Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania, and when he asked her out for the first time, she was so excited she asked a friend to come down from college and help her with her clothes and makeup.
    On their second date, he brought her a single red rose and shortly afterward asked her to marry him.
    As a younger teenager, she had fantasized about marriage, often stopping in front of bridal shops and imagining herself in the wedding dresses. It’s hard to know what she fantasized about Michael, but in retrospect, I believe it was the man of her dreams she wanted to marry, not the person she eventually wed.
    As we got to know Michael, we began to refer to him as Mr. Charm. He was almost always polite, but his words and behavior toward us seemed rehearsed, as though he was holding something in, something he didn’t want us to see. Michael’s parents were blue-collar, Lutheran, rock-solid. Michael was the last of five boys, and I was happy when I met his parents, for they struck me as gentle and kind. It was easier for our family to maintain a friendship with them, in fact, than it was with Michael. Bob in particular was uncomfortable around him. “He doesn’t seem real,” he’d complain. We didn’t know which Michael would show up on any given day.
    The important thing, though, was that Terri was happy. Michael introduced her to a kind of life she had never known. They went frequently to bars and neighborhood restaurants, where Terri enjoyed the social drinking and the flattery of not only Michael but of other young men who obviously found her as attractive as he did.
    Terri dropped out of college and got a job as a field-service representative for Prudential Insurance. Just before their marriage, Michael was employed at a McDonald’s, one of a string of restaurant jobs that he had throughout their relationship.
    When Terri told us they were planning to get married, I was horrified, as I probably would have been no matter her choice. She was still a girl, an inexperienced, naïve girl, I felt, and Bob and I tried to talk her out of it. But she was so obviously in love that our hearts softened, and soon we kept our objections to ourselves.
    They dated for one year, Terri more and more sure she was making the right choice. Her certainty eased our fears. We offered her a choice of a gift of $10,000 or a $10,000 wedding.
    “The wedding!” Terri exclaimed. “It’s what I’ve