But as the 1980s rolled on, there was no way for Karen to ignore his drinking. He was always loaded to some degree, and erratic. There were nights he came home late, flat-out wasted, or didn't come home at all.

With a mortgage and three boys, his dissipation forced her to take command.



Karen propelled her way into middle management at Hughes as her marriage fell apart. John stopped working regularly. When she learned he was spending her earnings on pints of Smirnoff vodka -- and, to a lesser extent, crack cocaine -- she cut him off. He holed up in the extra bedroom for two years, in depression, until he started getting government disability checks and could drink again.

John became a ragged, drunken specter who came and went. He was bloated and dirty. Karen couldn't bear his smell.

Her feelings for him were a messy snarl she would rather ignore than try to untangle. She was livid that he just couldn't get himself together. She resented how his morose presence sucked the air out of her home. And her heart broke to see how pained he was knowing he let his boys down.

When she let herself, she missed him. They had tender moments of friendship now and then. He still had his glint of humor. When she asked him why he wasn't out drinking one New Year's Eve, he told her, "This is amateurs night, and I'm a professional." When his brother found him in a hotel in San Pedro with all his clothes in a grocery bag, he declared that it was his "San Pedro Samsonite."

But mostly, Karen just moved on. The corporate track awoke an ambition inside her, and she didn't have time for distractions.

One day in 1995, she was preparing to give a lecture to engineering students at UC Berkeley on the business management strategy Six Sigma. When the students asked her to send her bio, she was mortified. She had never taken a college course.

She ignored the request, but she knew she had to deal with the calcified phobias of her childhood.

She signed up for Harbor Community College. Her first classes were basic English, pre-algebra and a speech class. She was so nervous that she had her oldest son, John, take her around campus before the first day to find all of her classrooms.

She studied obsessively and as the semester came to an end, she realized she wasn't so dumb. She would forever remember her math teacher doing an equation on the blackboard, glancing at her and saying, "Karen, you'll probably get this. . . ."



She pictured her husband's death. Perhaps her youngest son, Kevin, would call her at work to tell her the news. She would rush home to console her boy and convince him of her sadness.

Then one night in May 1996, Kevin, 17, found him lying in vomit and blood in the bedroom.

John was confused and caked in dried blood. His face was swollen. Karen dreaded that he might need to go to the hospital. She didn't want her car to get dirty and couldn't bear to be seen in public with him.

Karen demanded that he wash off his blood.

John tried to clean his clothes. He stared at the washer-dryer and put his bloody shirt in the dryer. He stumbled to the bathroom and sat on the toilet.

His body suddenly stiffened and started shuddering. Karen called 911. Kevin ran from the room, horrified that his dad was dying. John keeled over and slammed onto the bathroom floor.

Karen rushed to him. The seizure stopped. She touched his chest and told him how sorry she was.

She hadn't touched him in years.

She thought about the retirement plans they used to have.