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Joan realizes that she knows nothing about her husband's past when she finds an old photograph of his two children. Unable to have children of her own, Joan persuades Ken to fetch his children so that they can be raised in
Florida. Ken tricks Birdie by offering to take the kids on vacation, which she
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In 1969, at the age of 40, Ken moves to
Florida with Moira, where he finds work as a gardener. When he and Moira break up after a few months, he takes a room with Joan Cohen, a rich professional woman of Jewish descent about his own age. They soon become lovers and Joan sees Ken as her last chance
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he feels attracted to Birdie Bell, one of his female students. Ken, who is 32, marries the 19-year-old Birdie on the spot. The
Kimbles have two children, Charlie and Jody. Soon after he is forced to resign over an alleged affair, Ken disappears with Moira Snell, one of his students.
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Ken one day sells his company and starts a government-funded project providing affordable accommodation for those in need, which gains him a lot of recognition in the community. Dinah has an extramarital affair until Ken, despite his lifelong strict
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at happiness, especially now that one of her breasts has been removed due to breast cancer. Ken pretends to have a Jewish background and, after getting married under Jewish law, starts working as a real estate broker.
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It takes Birdie many years to get over her husband's desertion. Only at the end of the novel, when she is 51, does Birdie find some solace with Curtis Mabry, her teenage sweetheart.
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large sums of money from his non-profit organisation and that a small child has died in one of the houses he is responsible for because he refused to have a faulty
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and his regular exercise, has a heart attack in 1994 at the age of 65. Hoping that it might cheer Ken up, Dinah invites
Charlie and Jody for
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Charlie and Jody. Although she is more than 25 years his junior, they get married in 1979 and have one son, Brendan.
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Ken inherits all her money and moves to
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only serves as an eye-opener to Ken Kimble's despicable character.
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naively accepts. At first, Charlie and Jody take Joan for a
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Born in 1929, Ken Kimble is raised the son of a pastor in
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http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/reviews/n_8405/
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410:Sara Ivry SFGATE (February 2, 2003).
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