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Our plan was to move to Wisconsin by the time Cathy was five. Joliet was not a nice town and we wanted our daughter to go to school in Wisconsin, where we knew she'd be raised and educated correctly. Our plans were accelerated in the spring of 1995 when a coworker of Debbie's left home to go to Wal-Mart to pick up a prescription for her husband and never returned. Her body was found the next day, raped and murdered. All of a sudden, it was time to move back to Wisconsin. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Appleton was a conscious decision on our part. On my days off I would drive up to scope out a gig... as long as it wasn't (the forbidden) teaching. In July I applied for and received a job as parts manager for a John Deere dealership. The position was similar to the one I'd had the last four years, though this store was smaller. We moved in August. Once here, Debbie took a job in charge of payroll for a company with 700 employees. It was quite the feather in her cap, and the company had day care on site. Three months after we moved here, the company for which I was working folded and I was out of work. I temped at a number of places until I got another job with another tractor dealership. We bought our first house together in a small town near the Fox Cities just in time to host Catherine's fourth birthday party. In addition to my day job, I started coursework on my master's degree at UW-Oshkosh and was actually allowed to teach one night a week at UW-Fox Valley. Debbie's reasoning: teaching college was okay because (in her mind) there aren't as many women teaching college as there are teaching high school, and not so great a chance for temptation. |