Game On by Nancy Warren

better.”
    “How did you get from there to here?” He sounded amazed. “I deal with people who live that life. It’s brutally hard to break the cycle.”
    “I’ve thought about that a lot. Strangely, I think TV saved me.”
    “TV?”
    “Sure. No matter how poor we were, we always had TV. The only bonding my mother and I ever did was over television shows. She loved the big splashy soaps about all those rich folks. She’d say to me, ‘When I get some money together, we’re going to get a house. And buy clothes like Linda Evans and get a maid.’” Serena shrugged. “Of course I knew that was never going to happen, but what those shows taught me was that there was another life out there being lived by people who had enough to eat and didn’t live in utter squalor.”
    “You’ve got some guts. That’s a long journey from there to here.”
    “Well, the great thing about being a kid is you don’t know how badly the deck is stacked against you.” She sipped her rapidly cooling tea. “I don’t think I would have got out if I hadn’t had a couple of mentors in my life. Apart from the TV ones. There was a teacher at school. You have to realize that at my school there weren’t a lot of college-track types. But I was smart and hardworking. I liked school. There were rules, order. I got fed lunch. And I had a teacher, Mrs. Brand, who told me about the scholarships that were available to people like me.”
    She stretched back. His arm was still around her and she liked the warm feel. Found she even liked telling Adam her pathetic childhood story.
    “The worst part was I had to keep it all a secret. If my mom found out there was money coming my way, well, let’s say it wouldn’t have gone in my college fund. Everything went through Mrs. Brand. But I did it. I got into college with a full scholarship. I worked a couple of part-time jobs and studied my butt off. One good thing about my background was that I was used to living on nothing. I ate a lot of beans and rice. Bought my few clothes at the thrift store. And I watched how the other kids did things. Dumb little things you take for granted when you have a normal family. How they ate, how they dressed, even their table manners. I studied them and copied them.”
    “Did you make friends with them?”
    His tone suggested he already knew the answer to that. She turned to look at him. “You’re a perceptive guy.”
    “Detective. Remember?”
    “No. I was an outsider. Plus, I was so busy working and studying I didn’t have time for friends. I had a great boss, though. Another mentor. Ed owned the bakery I worked in mornings before school and on the weekends. We were allowed to take home day-old bread and things that didn’t turn out for whatever reason. I lived on misshapen buns and cookies that were overcooked. I didn’t care. After where I’d been? It was heaven.”
    “How did Ed mentor you?”
    “He was from Poland. He’d come from a poor family and he knew all about hardship. He was a self-made man. And, as he liked to remind me, when he’d started, he didn’t even know English. He had several businesses. I guess he was a little bit like Max. Anyhow, he was an amateur investor, a pretty good one. He taught me about the markets and he instilled in me the idea of being an entrepreneur.”
    She smiled in memory. “He was a wonderful man. He had a sweet wife and three kids he swore were turning into American brats. But he loved those kids like crazy. After I finished my business degree, I went to work for him on the corporate side for a couple of years. I built a pretty decent nest egg between saving a ton of what I earned and investing. But I was ambitious. As I’m sure you know, some of the greatest success stories in business are people who came from poverty. You get so determined never, ever to end up where you started that it’s easy to become a workaholic.
    “I guess those TV shows had really planted themselves in my brain. I learned