Adam, was born about two and a half years before Cari. “He was a beautiful baby—a mama’s boy until he was about three.” But his temperament was the opposite of his sister’s. Nancy loved him every bit as much as she loved Cari, but he was colicky and cried incessantly. “I had postpartum depression after Adam was born.” The fact she was sleep deprived didn’t help. She laughs as she recalls that she didn’t get a single good night’s rest the first year of his life. “He would sleep for a couple of hours and then be awake for three or four. When he did sleep six hours, I felt like I’d died and gone to Heaven.”
Nancy had steeled herself for more sleepless nights with the new baby and was relieved to see how easily Cari slid into a peaceful slumber. The infant was not only relaxed, she seemed surprisingly aware of her surroundings. When friends and family gathered to see the baby for the first time, they commented on her intense gaze. The infant’s knowing blue eyes seemed to hold a thousand years of wisdom. Cari looked around, assessing her new environment as if it were familiar to her. She was, some remarked, “An old soul.” Nancy didn’t argue with them, for she, too, was in awe of the newborn’s serene demeanor, and she noted that the baby seemed to be thinking, “Okay, here I am again.”
Because she was her second child, Nancy was more aware of Cari’s uniqueness. She was the exact opposite of her big brother in many ways. While Adam had been a typical infant and had clung to his mother when he was tiny, Cari was surprisingly independent and adventuresome, but very quiet. “It took Cari a while to start talking,” Nancy remembers, adding that her daughter was age three before she talked, and when she did, it was in complete sentences. “It was as if she was waiting until she had everything right before she spoke.”
By kindergarten it was apparent that she was brilliant. Her teacher told Nancy it was a challenge to find things to keep the little girl’s mind busy, adding “She’s so advanced. She’s the only one in the class who can read.” It was somewhat of a luxury for her to count her among her pupils, because it was almost like having an assistant. At age six, Cari sat down with her classmates, reading books to them as they listened, enthralled. In elementary school, Cari was enrolled in the talented and gifted program. Even among the smartest of the smart, she always rose to the head of the class.
While she had been the dream baby who slept through the night and the brilliant child who kept her room neat, she was no Goody Two-Shoes. She had her rebellious moments when she became a teen. She ruined her mother’s thirty-ninth birthday, on the Fourth of July 1990. She can laugh about it now, but Nancy was livid on that sultry summer day when teenage Cari and her friend went out drinking with some boys. Nancy and the other girl’s mother were worried sick when their daughters didn’t come home that night. The next morning when Cari nonchalantly walked through the front door, Nancy was waiting and said firmly, “You aren’t going anywhere for two months!”
Grounded for the rest of the summer, Cari apparently learned her lesson. It was the last time she missed her curfew. She was a spirited teen, and she and her mother had their share of arguments, but they always made up. When Cari went away to college at the University of Kansas, she indulged in the normal amount of partying and was not that excited by her classes, but she did well and never got into trouble.
Overall, Cari had been a pleasure to raise, and her mother and both fathers could attest to that. While she was close to her father, she lived more years with her stepfather, Mark Raney, and she couldn’t have loved him more if he had been her biological father. While Mark is Nancy’s second husband, he was her first love and one of her very first friends. “We’ve known each other since we could communicate.” They first played together as toddlers when their parents met at the Methodist church. Mark’s parents, Charles and Betty Jane Raney, were a little older than Nancy’s parents, but they had a lot in common. The Raneys’ four kids were in the same age range as the