Samantha is abandoned by her husband in the opening pages of this three-handkerchief special, and the resultant tremors keep her off-balance for most of the novel. There are practical problems aplenty, of course, including a shortage of money and an 11-year-old son to raise. But Sam's sense of emotional bereavement is far worse, despite the fact that her husband had been giving her the conjugal cold shoulder for years. The loneliness in her "as constant and as irrefutable" as circulating blood, Sam begins to rebuild her life. She finds a job and takes in a couple of boarders to help meet her mortgage payments--one of them, a depressed student named Lavender Blue, informs her that "life was nothing but one major disappointment after the other"--The sort of homily that Sam is understandably reluctant to hear these days. She also starts dating, with disastrous results. Yet this comically kvetching heroine does manage to find love in the ruins. It's hard not to believe that she's much better off ... seems just right--the light at the end of the post-matrimonial tunnel.