in that field were numbered when the school lost its funding for their art programs. He ended up working as a salesman for thirty years, selling filters for the engines of diesel trucks, and he was so likeable that he thrived at that job, too. Even as he pedaled filters, the artist in him could not be squelched, and Nancy loved the way he doodled elaborate masterpieces on the paper tablecloths whenever they had to attend boring banquets.
Nothing delighted Mark more than seeing kids happy, and he was so excited about the Barbie House that he got Cari for her ninth Christmas that he roused her hours before she was ready to wake up. She was eleven when she started serving as his chauffeur—but only when it wasn’t a school night! He played on a volleyball team, and after the games, the teammates got together at a local bar. Cari often went along, and while the kids ran around playing, their parents drank beer and played cards. “Mark likes his beer,” Nancy notes. But he was not about to drink and drive, so Cari drove home. The roads in their little town were long and lonesome and surrounded by cornfields. Very rarely did they encounter another vehicle on the two-mile drive. Cari was a good driver, even as a child, and she got them home safe.
The girl was fearless, always up for any challenge. That didn’t change when she grew up, and she didn’t hesitate when one of her boyfriends invited her to go skydiving. She bravely leapt from the plane and found the experience thrilling. As is often the case with intelligent people, she grew restless without variety in her life. When she was a teen, she had many boys interested in her, and they would “go together” until she broke up with them. She was always the one who did the breaking up and tended to tire of them quickly, but “she always managed to stay friends with them.”
Cari met Max’s father, Frank, at the University of Kansas, and while it was at first romantic and wonderful, the relationship fizzled when the excitement did. Cari discovered she was pregnant just as they were breaking up, so they attempted to stay together. Despite their best efforts, it didn’t work out. Nancy was worried about how her young daughter would cope with single motherhood. At the time, Cari was working as a secretary, and Nancy advised her to find something more lucrative. “She’d always had a good aptitude for computers” and had a chance to take a special, six-month course but didn’t have the five-thousand-dollar tuition. Grandpa Max and Grandma Luanne stepped up and paid for it. Cari gave birth in December 1997, and about ten weeks later, she graduated and “got a tremendous job because of that computer course.”
Cari announced that she planned to name her baby after her Grandpa. While Max Bisbee appreciated the sentiment, he was not so certain it was the best thing for the boy. With only three letters, it sounded more like a nickname, and he admitted he had never really liked his own name.
“How do you feel about Maxwell?” Cari asked him.
“Dad was okay with that,” says Nancy. “He is so very proud of Maxwell, and now he tells people he is his namesake.”
The baby was officially Maxwell but also called Max. When Cari and Maxwell moved in with the Raneys, he became more like a son than a grandson to Mark, who had never had his own biological children. Maxwell’s father lived too far away to play an active role in his life, but there was no lack of love and attention from father-figures. His Great-Grandpa Max, Grandpa Denny and Grandpa Mark were thrilled to welcome a new baby, and Cari was pleased her son had a trio of positive male role models.
The instant Cari held her son for the first time it was obvious she would protect him with the ferocity of a lioness guarding her cub. Any qualms Nancy had about how twenty-three-year-old Cari would cope instantly vanished when she watched her with Maxwell. He was her number one concern, and motherhood made her stronger. There were still struggles ahead, but now Cari had a sense of purpose that would never waiver. Over the next years, she would marry and divorce twice, and change occupations several times. When Maxwell was very young, he and Cari moved to Topeka for a couple years, and “It broke our hearts,” Nancy remembers. But