Fe and Casey settled into a three-bedroom, two-car-garage tract home in Rio Rancho with option to buy. They furnished it all new, sold Fe’s car and bought a brand-new sedan model, right out of the showroom, for the occasions when they went out together to nice places like the Four Seasons Hotel to dance on Saturday nights.

Outside of marriage itself, perhaps the biggest change that Fe undertook at that time was that she also left her job at the savings and loan in Tome where she had worked since high school.

Well, Fe considered herself the steady and dedicated worker type, always giving her one hundred percent to the job, even when she was passed up twice for promotion at the bank and remained in New Accounts without so much as a prospect to get a real raise, neither. What she was finally told was that although the company did not want to discriminate against her new “handicap,” her irregular speech really did not lend itself to working with the public. “What do___ mean, handi___ ?” she asked the manager, but was only advised to go to speech therapy and that was that.

Nobody had complained before to Fe about not understanding her, at least not to her face. Her mom and sisters always understood her. Her dad did not seem to care one way or the other whenever he misinterpreted something she said. And Casey, well, Casey never said nothing about her speech, because to Casey, Fe was about as perfect a wife as a man could get.

Then a girl (she wasn’t really a girl, this is just how Fe referred to most of her female co-workers) who had once worked at the bank told Fe that they were hiring assemblers at Acme International. Acme was a big new company and though the work was, let’s face it, shit, the “girl” told Fe, the pay was real good. “Hell, you make twice what you do at the bank. And depending on how good a worker you are, you keep getting raises!”

What she did not tell Fe, because she herself had not put two and two together yet, was that in addition to the raises she was getting nausea and headaches that increased in severity by the day. What she also did not tell Fe, because those bonuses were helping her catch up on her bills—or maybe it was the migraines clogging up her sense of reason, was that many of the women she worked with at Acme International were also having similar symptoms.

They all went to complain to the nurse at some point or another, it’s not like the money was that good that they couldn’t tell that they were feeling almost too lousy to make it through the shift. And the nurse gave them each ibuprofen tablets, advice about pre-menopause and the dropping of estrogen levels in women over thirty, and pretty much that it was just about being a woman and had nothing to do with working with chemicals.