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that,” Henry said, “but you don’t know much about construction.”
    “I can learn,” Larry answered.
    “Do that and then come back to talk to me,” Henry advised.
    Larry went from Henry to a man with a reputation as one of the most competent men in the industry and asked for a job. The next day, he began working as a carpenter for $2 an hour. A week later, he got a fifty-cent-an-hour raise.
    After a year of working in the grunt end of the business, Larry went back to Henry and asked for some financial backing to help him get started with his own company.
    “How much you got on the hip?” Henry asked, meaning how much of his own capital did he propose to put up.
    “I’ve got four or five thousand put aside,” Larry said.
    Henry shook his head. “You’re a little bit light,” he said.
    Instead of financing his venture, Henry agreed to sell him one of the lots in a subdivision he was developing if Larry could get a loan from a bank for part of the money.
    The bank agreed to take a chance, and Larry began his first house late in 1971. A few months later when it was finished, he sold it for $69,500, clearing about $9,000 after he paid off the loan. What really made Larry feel good, though, was the fact that his profit was about twice what the bank expected him to make and that his house sold for some $20,000 more than any of its neighbors’.
    That house led to another, and gradually Larry W. Aylor Custom Builders Inc. won a reputation for quality and craftsmanship. As the business grew larger and Chris got older, Joy began working for the company as well, designing the interiors.
    The business boomed beyond the Aylors’ or the Davises’ expectations. Within a relatively few years, Larry and Joy joined the sizable community of the city’s young and semi-rich. On her wrist Joy wore an expensive Rolex, and in her parking spot in the garage was a bright red Porsche, right next to Larry’s Jaguar. Larry also had bought himself a motorcycle, a pickup truck and trailer, a boat, and several four-wheel-drive vehicles. And, to gratify his need to escape the city once in awhile to indulge a macho self-image, he bought a 140-acre ranch in Kaufman County, an hour’s drive to the east.
    By all indications, the couple had it made: a prospering business with a good reputation for providing quality and value; a bright, healthy son going into adolescence with doting, financially comfortable parents; and a decade-plus marriage that ostensibly was as solid as the concrete foundation on one of their houses. In actuality, their life was largely a pretense.
    The business, indeed, was doing well. But Larry and Joy were having more than a few problems. One of them was Chris, or rather the effect his grandparents Henry and Frances were having on the boy’s development.
    Joy’s parents seemed to thrive on having growing children around the house. Joy’s sister Liz was eleven years younger and was almost of another generation. In addition to Liz, Henry and Frances had practically adopted Carol and Michael’s daughter, a girl named Michelle, who was a little younger than Liz. And then there was Chris, the only boy-child in the family. No matter how much Larry objected, it seemed as though Frances and Henry were always buying the boy things, or promising to buy him things, if only he would do what they asked of him. As he grew older, the stakes got higher: They each demanded more of the other. While the gifts began with toys and trinkets, they later escalated to sports cars and expensive clothes. In return, Chris was expected to live with them.
    But the problems in the two families were not restricted to the relationship between Chris and his maternal grandparents. Larry and Joy’s marriage was suffering as well.
    According to Joy, Larry had a roving eye and did not go to great lengths to conceal it. At the same time, she said, he hovered over her possessively and often overplayed the part of the jealous husband. According to a