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were still meeting in people’s houses, though they’d signed a lease for space starting August 1, offices that would turn out to be small and cramped and full of the old tenant’s left-behind furniture, with pipes poking out of the ceiling and holes in the floor of the manufacturing space. And the company wasn’t even
expected
to make a profit for a year or more, though there would be money to pay his salary, Danny assured me. A venture capitalist (the first time I’d heard that term) was helping them find investors.
    “People are lining up, knocking on the door for the job Andy says
I’m
the perfect guy for, Frankie,” Danny said. And Danny is not above liking to be flattered; I should know.
    “Silicon-gate MOS,” he said. “That’s my baby.”
    I thought I was your baby,
I wanted to say.
I thought Fairchild was the opportunity of a lifetime.
Wasn’t that why we’d moved so far from home?
I thought we talked about big decisions like this before we made them,
I wanted to say. We
had
talked about it, though, and after five years of marriage I should have been used to the way Danny made decisions when he had to make them: while I was still eyeing the airplane from the ground, he was up above the clouds with the door open, sure his parachute would work.
    So many Bay Area parachutes didn’t work, though, or didn’t work fast enough. The earth shifted beneath them before they could land. Technology-business failures were so common that a
Business-Week
cartoon that fall would parody the risk: crowds piling in and out the doors and windows of an “Integrated Circuits” building while a salesman asks, “Want a beam-leaded MSI Flip-Flop Chip in MOS-Compatible DTL?” and another says, “That went out back in July!” But it wouldn’t be funny if Danny’s MOS chip was one of the technologies that crashed.
    “They’re giving me a thousand options,” he said. “I’ll be an owner, Frankie, without even having to put any money up!” And he started talking about investing our savings in his fledgling company’s stock, too, once they’d set up an employee stock-purchase plan. But what about the kids’ college fund? What about the mortgage and the groceries and the doctor bills? How would we pay them if the company failed and we were left with no savings to live on while Danny found another position? What if the company was a smashing success but the treasurer absconded to Brazil with all the cash? But to question Danny’s decision would make him think I lacked confidence in him. And besides, he’d already quit.

W E LAUGH NOW at how nervous I was before our first Miss America party that September, the first time we moved beyond meeting up at the park on Wednesday mornings. I hurried to finish my curtains and cleaned my kitchen so you could have eaten off the cabinet floor under my sink, I swear, and I even considered painting my shutters, though in truth I was liking the pink more and more. That evening, I set up a bar on the kitchen counter and put out snacks, and I sent Danny off with Mags and Davy for hot dogs and ice cream at the Dairy Queen, with instructions not to return until the children were fast asleep in the backseat of the car.
    Danny wasn’t the least bit disappointed to miss the pageant himself. Funny, isn’t it? No fellow I’d ever known would sit through a beauty contest; the gawking at beautiful women was done by us girls.
    Ally was the first to ring my bell that evening. I’d seen no signs of her child the week after we met: no tricycle left in the circle of pine trees, no Ally hurrying her little one to the car, no playmates knocking at the door. There might have been toys in the backyard, but it was wrapped up in a high wooden fence you couldn’t see over or through, and that had seemed to me to mean something, too. But Ally had turned up the following Wednesday with the hand of two-year-old Carrie in her grasp. Ally’s husband must have fetched their daughter from the park while I