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While Susie waffled, she made no move to get divorced. “Warren and I don’t want to lose anything,” she told a friend who inquired about her plans. It wasn’t the money she was talking about; she had enough Berkshire stock of her own. Susie was the type of person who never subtracted from but only added to her life, and she never thought of acting differently now.

Meanwhile, she phoned Astrid Menks at the French Café over and over. “Have you called him yet? Have you called him yet?”45

Susie knew her target well. Born in West Germany in 1946 as Astrid Beaté Menks after her parents “walked out of Latvia when Russia took it,” Menks had emigrated to the United States at age five with her parents and five siblings on a converted, broken-down battleship. Her first sight of America as they pulled in to the harbor was a huge object approaching through a fog bank—the Statue of Liberty.

The Menks family was assigned to sponsors in Verdell, Nebraska, where they lived on a farm with a potbellied stove and no electricity or indoor plumbing. When Astrid was six, the family moved to Omaha. Shortly afterward, when their mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, Astrid and her two younger brothers entered the Immanuel Deaconess Institute of Omaha, an all-purpose facility operated by Lutheran sisters that included a retirement home, an orphanage, a hospital, a church, and a recreational hall. Her father, who spoke little English, worked as a maintenance man on the grounds while the children lived at the orphanage. Astrid’s mother died in 1954. When Astrid was thirteen, she was sent to a succession of three foster homes. “I can’t say I had wonderful experiences in foster care,” she says. “I felt more secure at the children’s home.”

After high school, Menks attended the University of Nebraska, until she ran out of money. After a stint at Mutual of Omaha, for a while she worked as a buyer and manager for a women’s clothing store, although she dressed herself in thrift-store finds. Eventually she wound up working as a garde-manger in restaurants, slicing fifty pounds of zucchini and preparing cold foods. She lived in a little apartment downtown in the Old Market close to work, which was convenient because the rusted-out floor of her Chevy Vega had holes through to the street.46

She was always broke but knew everybody in the perpetually gentrifying warehouse district, and was one of a restaurant crowd that would help organize the area’s would-be artists, stray singles, and gay men to put on a meal or a holiday feast. Small-boned, fair-skinned with ice-blonde hair and refined features, Astrid had a Nordic beauty with a subtle hard-knocks edge to it. At times she looked even younger than her thirty-one years. She always made light of her life struggles, but when Susie Buffett got to know her, Astrid was depressed, empty, and unfulfilled. Nonetheless, when it came to caretaking people in need,47 she could out-Susie Susie any day.

Faced with all this badgering about calling Warren, Menks wasn’t exactly sure where Susie was headed, so she was terrified. But finally she made the call.48 Arriving at the door to cook a homemade meal, she found a cave filled with books, newspapers, and annual reports. Warren, who was incapable of functioning without female companionship, was desperate for affection; he had been trying to fill the void by taking Dottie to the movies and spending time with Ruthie Muchemore, a divorcée and family friend. Yet he was obviously still a lonely, miserable man who had been reduced emotionally to an eleven-year-old boy. He needed feeding. His clothes were a wreck. Astrid was the least pushy woman imaginable. But—as Susie had known would happen—when faced with a problem, she knew what to do.

Warren would eventually come to explain why Susie left this way:

“It was preventable. It shouldn’t have happened. It was my biggest mistake. Essentially, whatever I did in connection with Susie leaving would be the biggest mistake I ever made.

“Parts of it are sort of not understandable. It