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and all about water safety.
    That helped, but it wasn't all that worried Susan.
    "We knew someday we'd have to move out," she says, "and how would our kids feel then, having to go back to where we really belonged? It's hard to step down, after you've been living in the lap of luxury. My grandma used to say, 'How are you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?'"
    Her fears about money seemed groundless, at least for their first comfortable, fun year in the house. They were the envy of everybody they knew. They gave tours to their friends and family, and pool parties where everybody brought their own booze and nobody was allowed to get out of hand, for fear of breaking things, or offending the neighbors. They began saving for their own house, the much more modest one they hoped to be able to afford one day.
    They were happy, their boss was happy, even if the other employees were jealous, and said so.
    But as the McCullen family's savings grew, so did their desire for a boat, just a little one, to ply the canals that tempted them from the backyard. The house had a lovely wooden dock, and what was a dock without a boat?
    And so, at the beginning of their second year of living there, they purchased a used runabout for $8,000, on credit, with a down payment, and named her the Lucky Ducky.
    "I had no idea boats were so expensive to keep up," Susan says. They were midwesterners who'd lived in Bahia only for a few years, and they'd been too busy having babies and trying to support them to pay much attention to the multi-million-dollar business of boating in south Florida. "Man! We might as well have decoupaged that boat in hundred-dollar bills!"
    Tony says it wasn't that bad, that Susan exaggerates about it, but there was a complete engine overhaul they didn't expect, and a zillion less costly repairs and items to buy.
    "Do you know you even have to buy a special key chain for a boat?" Susan told her mother back in Dayton, Ohio. "You've got to have one that floats, in case your key falls in the water."
    Somehow, expenses mounted, too, just from living in such an affluent neighborhood where it was nothing for moms to take a van-load of kids to McDonald's several times a week, sometimes more than once a day. And where Susan felt Natalie couldn't go to the nearby elementary school dressed a whole lot poorer than the other girls.
    It was expensive, and they weren't even trying to keep up with the Joneses! They just didn't want their children to feel different or deprived, in comparison with their playmates.
    "I didn't want them to feel ashamed," Susan says.
    By the night Natalie died, Susan was regularly having trouble sleeping, worrying about making ends meet. "And I wasn't the only one on that block doing that," she claims. "One thing I found out from living there, was that rich people worry about how they're going to pay their bills, too." She was learning that people everywhere have a tendency to live beyond their means, no matter the size of those means.
    The gift house was turning out to be a burden, in ways they never expected it to be. She hated to feel ungrateful, but she began to wish that Tony's boss had never offered it to them, and that they were still living in their tiny apartment on a landlocked block in a blue-collar part of town.
    And then the worst happened, and the house of their dreams turned into the scene of a parent's worst nightmare.
    Tony McCullen has a sensible way of speaking that goes with his appearance. A former amateur boxer, he's six foot tall, solid and muscular, with an unusually long reach from shoulder to knuckles. When he was in the ring, his nickname was The Gorilla, because of that reach, and because he's hairy—lots of curly black hair, including on his arms, legs, chest, and back.
    "He was good," Susan says loyally, of his days in the boxing ring, "but I told him that if he got his nose broken, I wouldn't marry him." She's only half-joking. The truth is that Susan did hate his