Born with blue in his collar, not in his veins, Dean Cassidy chronicles his soul-scarring rise from New York's darkest alleys to a place somewhere nearer the top of his world. A human accomplishment as difficult as it is unlikely, his struggle is intensified by haunting memories of Theresa Wayman, his long-estranged teenage soul-mate.

Theresa!Theresa!Theresa! She just won't go away.

For five years after losing contact with her, Dean anesthetizes his pain with the same things that caused it - boozy nights and faceless women. Then he gets lucky again. He meets, and soon marries, Maddy Frances Ronan, a woman so giving (and forgiving) she deserves to be canonized. Despite Dean's many hang-ups and blunders, Maddy's love for him never wavers. For two decades she endures all the jumped jobs, the time he goes postal, his frequent depressions and his ongoing anguish over the hostile corporate takeover of his and other American families. Even after she finds Dean unconscious, clutching a faded photograph of Theresa Wayman, she sticks by him.

But their problems don't end there. There's a green cloud, known as money, that forever casts shadows on their happiness. Even when Maddy and Dean's two boys enter school and she takes on a job, there's never enough. That is until the eleventh hour when things are looking their bleakest .......