The poetic justice was that she’d locked Tom out of their shared accounts. When he tried to pay for her off-book medical tests, his debit card declined.

He threw a screaming fit in the cardiac ward, and his own mother disowned him as an “ungrateful parasite.”

But the matriarch wasn’t finished. Six days after discharge, Christine decided on a frontal assault.

She marched onto the turf of the community sports center at four in the afternoon, flanked by two stout, angry women from her neighborhood watch, wearing her garish red coat and shrieking like a banshee, intent on getting me fired.

“You shameless tramp!” she roared, marching toward the track where I was leading fifty students in sprints. “I want the director! This woman is a violent hooligan!

She beat my son and tried to steal our money!”