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hovering presence in her daughter’s life. Janie lived at home when she began classes, but when she moved into the university’s apartment building for dental and medical students, it was Delores who came with her maid to clean and paint, fix and decorate. And when Janie moved from the second floor to a larger apartment on the seventh floor, Delores repeated the performance. Delores had a key to the apartment and came almost daily to clean and straighten and bring food. She cooked all of Janie’s meals at home and brought them to her in heat-and-eat containers. She left fresh milk in Janie’s refrigerator and took home for herself the still unspoiled milk she’d left earlier. Janie was expected to call her mother every night at 11, and if she was late by a few minutes, the phone rang and Delores wanted to know what was wrong. If Janie was to be out late, she had to call her mother before leaving and again upon returning, no matter the hour.
    Janie seemed unbothered by such smothering and laughed it off, telling friends, “She’s just a Jewish mother who isn’t Jewish.”
    Her mother, friends figured, was the reason Janie never married. They thought that Delores’s constant harping against her husband had helped sour Janie on the idea of marriage. But more important, they believed that Janie simply was afraid that she never could find anybody who would please her mother. Four times, Janie seriously contemplated marriage, three times to lawyers (her mother not only boasted that Janie dated lawyers but she also kept in touch with two of her daughter’s old boyfriends after the relationships ended in case she needed their services), but as the moment of commitment neared, Janie inevitably stepped back.
    “Every time somebody asks me to marry him, I go get another degree,” she laughingly told Denise Payne, a friend from the dental school who was about to marry.
    That wasn’t exactly true. Janie’s first serious romance was over by the time she got her degree in education at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, in 1966. Encouraged by her mother, she followed her parents to Kentucky to begin teaching and got an elementary school job in Cobb County, some eighty miles from Louisville. After two years, she enrolled at the University of Kentucky in Lexington to get her master’s degree in special education.
    Janie shared her mother’s paranoia about crime, and to protect herself, she began taking karate lessons, a skill in which she eventually won a brown belt. She attempted to teach karate to her mother in weekend classes in her parents’ front yard at Hunting Creek, much to the amusement of neighbors, who speculated about which of them Delores was planning to use it on. Janie’s instructor was a lean, muscular young man, a native of Lexington enrolled at a prestigious out-of-state college. John Trent was nineteen, Janie twenty-five. Their relationship would last five years, during three of which John was away at school. In the beginning, their romance was one of holiday visits, summer vacations, letters, and long-distance calls, but it grew deeper when John returned to Lexington to attend law school.
    Once, when it seemed that marriage might be in the offing, John was visiting at the big house on Covered Bridge Road into which Janie’s parents had moved, and Janie’s father pulled him aside and said, “You know, Janie is a lot like her mother.”
    John took it as a warning, and later Chuck made it clear that that was how he had intended it. “You might want to read this,” he said, offering John a gift of a book, The Manipulated Man by Esther Vilar.
    After getting her master’s degree in 1970, Janie became a speech pathologist in the Fayette County schools, then went to work at the Clinic for Communicative Disorders at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. By 1975 she was restless and unhappy, troubled at work by an older man whose sexual advances she’d refused, uncertain about her feelings for John, a