Chapter 1

Before I start telling you about my family, I guess that I should give you a little background. This story just evolved over a long period of time and sometimes even I have to pause to remember how I got here. Oh, by the way, my name is Damon Wilkes.

Peggy, my wife, is one of those women that make you pause and turn for a second look when she passes you on the street. She is drop dead, hold on to your hat gorgeous. She will be a head-turner when she's sixty. She has a trim body and legs so perfect that they should be illegal. Her breasts are not huge but just the right size for her build. She stands about five feet four in her stocking feet. I've seen fourteen year old boys stop and stare at her with their mouth open when she walks by them on the street.

Not with-standing her physical attributes, she has a personality that draws people to her and she has an outlook on life that is infectious. She feels that we are all put on this earth for a reason and that there is good in everyone. You'd better never cross her once though or you'll be on her shit list forever.

If you would see us together, you'd wonder what was going on. I'm one of those guys that have a chest, waist and hips all the same size. I'm six feet, two inches tall and weigh two hundred and twenty pounds. I'm not fat by any stretch; all muscle. I work out every day in our basement gym and try to eat right. I've never considered myself a handsome devil but I've never failed to attract females in high school and college. Not a day goes by though that I don't look at Peggy and wonder what she sees in me. For a long time I was a bit jealous every time I caught some guy staring at her. I knew that she was so exquisitely beautiful that guys would always be staring at her and that I had to get over it, so I worked on it and finally overcame my possessiveness. As I said, I don't know what she sees in me.

My father and mother both worked in semi-skilled jobs all of their lives, never making much money but they did keep the bills paid and food on the table. My parents never owned a house; the houses that we lived in were always rented. I had a decent childhood though. You know how kids are; I didn't realize that we were poor. My father told me that he expected me to get a job when I was fourteen so I cut lawns, washed cars, painted houses and built landscape structures like pergolas, arbors, and sheds. A local contractor saw me working in his neighborhood one day, looked over my work, and asked me to work with him during the summers. I wound up working for Dan Longren every summer after that and on the weekends during the school year.

Dan Longren was the premier building contractor in the Phoenix area and I worked in the warehouse repairing tools and sorting material during the school year and out in the field during the summer. It was great experience. I learned all of the tools and material and what they were used for and I learned to appreciate the value of tools. After a year I had a key to the warehouse so that Dan didn't have to come in on the weekends. Dan took me under his wing and tried to teach me everything about construction that he could. Along the way, I also learned a lot about life from Dan and his wife Abby. My father seemed to be always working to make a few bucks to help make ends meet; so Dan and Abby taught me what I should have learned from my father about work ethics and morals. I'm not downing my father; it's just that, with three boys that could eat you out of house and home and a pretty daughter that my parents doted on, it was hard making ends meet.

I had two brothers and a sister, all younger than me and I knew that if I wanted to go to college that I'd need help. My size and athletic ability made me a star on the Glendale High School football team. My high school coach asked me to quit the soccer team because of my size. He said that I was hurting the other players when I body-checked them. I studied hard and kept my grades up. I scored high on the SAT's and won an athletic scholarship to Arizona State in Tempe.

All through high school and the summer after I graduated I worked for the local building contractor. I was hired as a laborer but I was soon doing whatever needed to be done. I don't know why but I really took to construction and reading blueprints. Being able to visualize what the building would look like when it was done was never a problem for me. I often found mistakes on the blueprints that had slipped by the architects and engineers. I learned a lot on that job, but the most important thing that I learned was that I didn't want to work that hard for the rest of my life. I also knew that construction was a bit seasonal and it had cycles where you wouldn't work for weeks or months. I decided that I would take business as my major in college.

In my senior year of high school, I started to investigate colleges to see which one that I wanted to go to. The fact that the scholarship that was offered by Arizona State was so generous made my decision for me. I knew that going to an out-of-state college would be a huge financial burden even though some of them did offer a smaller scholarship.

After my interviews I walked around the campus to see what college life was like. I quickly decided that I needed to live off-campus. I felt that the general college population was a bit less mature than I was and liked to party more than I did. I knew that I had to study harder than some of the other students, in order to keep my grades up, and the party atmosphere at Arizona State would not be any help to my studies.

I was a year older than most of the students because I had broken both legs when I was in the third grade. I was horsing around on the edge of a cliff at one of the man-made lakes in northern Arizona and fell, breaking both legs. I missed a whole year of school.

I spent the weekend, after my interviews, searching for any available housing that I could afford; rents were high, mainly because Tempe is a pretty up-scale area. Anything close to the college was sky high. I stayed an additional two days searching. I couldn't find anything and went home worried that I might not find anything that I could afford. I started researching any other options to solve my housing dilemma. My parents volunteered to help with the college costs but I knew that they didn't have the money; besides, my one brother and my sister both got great grades in school and had their eye on college. The brother closest to my age was into cars and wanted to be a mechanic. He eventually started his own shop and he's doing great.