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someone else.”
    The temporary separation began to look more permanent when, a month after she moved out, Kathleen met Henry Sperr at a local bar. Henry had actually been a high school classmate of Kathleen’s, although they hadn’t known each other then. He was now a CPA who had just left the grind of Price Waterhouse to make a career as an independent financial adviser. Beneath his drab accountant’s garb, Henry was nearly as lean and mean as he had been during his high school football days. An auto accident during tax season had left him with a permanent tracheotomy that occasionally made breathing difficult and day-to-day living uncomfortable, but Henry was still a steady, commanding presence, with a ruggedly spent look and a distaste for overly emotional outbursts. He was also a relatively social man, with a growing list of client-friends.
    Henry had separated from his wife the year before, and he was already immersed in the growing culture of divorcées, recently single parents, remarried couples and holdout bachelors that was offering a new kind of adult teenagehood—the malt
beverage
shop—for Ozzie and Harriet refugees. In the record books, 1972 would go down as the peak year in U.S. history for remarriage of divorced men and women. Society might not have been quite prepared to embrace this new class of emotionally disenfranchised men and women in their thirties and forties, but the business community was more than willing to create institutions to serve their needs. There were boutiques for those reentering the social scene; bars and clubs where the newly single, and those “cheaters” who weren’t yet ready to make (or unmake) the commitment, might show off their colorful plumage.
    It was a lifestyle that Kathleen Carangi immediately tookto, and Henry Sperr was her escort. “Henry swept me off my feet,” she recalled. “I couldn’t believe that a man could make you feel like that—especially after what I’d been through. I started living with him almost immediately after I met him.”
    While all this went on, the Carangi children were the subject of the most concern but the least actual attention. “When Mom first left, we didn’t see her for a while,” said Michael Carangi. “She would call to tell us she loved us. Later she started to come around.”
    Kathleen recalled the situation differently. “I know Michael
thinks
there was a time period when I wasn’t around,” she said, “but it isn’t true. Also, he was a boy, Gia was a girl. There were lots of times when I would go over there and Michael would have ten million pals around. I realized that was important to him, so I didn’t bother him … and, really, I don’t remember
any
of them begging for me to come back. For a while Joe wouldn’t let them come to visit me. Then he started letting me have Gia over for dinner.”
    In the midst of all this, Joe Carangi felt he had no choice but to maintain his hectic work schedule. The Hoagie City chain was doing well—he would build up business at one shop, sell it off, and open another—but it required his constant attention. He was gone most days before the children rose for school and he often came home late. When he realized that his wife wasn’t coming back, he too began to socialize—he got himself fitted with a hairpiece, bought some new clothes and started staying out even later at night. Although he could afford it, Joe didn’t want to hire anyone to help him take care of the children. So, Joey, Michael and Gia were often left to their own devices. “It was real peanut-butter-for-breakfast time, at least from the way Gia described it,” recalled one friend. “Nobody was paying attention to those kids.”
    “We could’ve used some discipline,” said Michael. “Every child needs it. We were allowed to do what we wanted. I could stay out as long as I wanted and nobody would know. I don’t think my parents ever talked to us about sex. In the back of your mind, you want