That's the way it has been since she started volunteering for more on-call duty to make extra money. One recent Christmas weekend, she got paged 13 times.

Becky puts on her purple scrubs and hurtles toward her Nissan pickup with coffee in hand.

"Bye, babe!" Joe says. "I hope it's not a long one."

He hates that Becky has to work so hard to make ends meet. He wants someone in Washington to fix the economy, to make things easier for middle-class Americans.

He used to think the economy would turn around quickly. That didn't happen.

He finally came up with a plan for his own family: In the coming days, he's taking big steps to reinvent himself. But he's not sure which candidate's plan is right for the country, which one will reinvent America.

"Everything is so vague," he says, cutting the last of the chicken. "They tell you what they are going to do, but they never give you the details."

The doorbell rings, a sure trigger for Molly, the Chihuahua, to bark from her spot on the couch. It's Laura, the first of Becky's sisters to arrive for the party. From there, it's a steady stream of almost 20 people.

Another sister, Diane, arrives next with peanut butter and chocolate cake in hand, along with her husband, Steve Dullanty -- Joe's former business partner. Steve offers to help assemble the kebabs on the bamboo skewers. Pepper, onion, mushroom, beef or chicken. Then repeat.

He asks Joe about Obama's visit to Reno a few days before.

"I bet that was pretty cool seeing the president," Steve says.

"Yeah, that was pretty cool, actually."

It was the first time Joe had seen a president up close. He liked that on his Reno campaign stop, Obama focused on higher education as the "pathway to the middle class." He especially liked that Obama said he and Michelle did not come from rich families and that it took years for them to pay off their student loans.

That was a message that resonated.

Joe heads out back to the concrete patio he poured a few years ago. It's a hot one: 95 degrees outside. He grabs another can of Rockstar, the energy drink he's been gulping ever since he gave up soda.

Today, there'll be talk of sports, the kids, food. But better to refrain from politics with the family, he says. Too many warring opinions.

Joe and Becky Stoltz never wanted to be wealthy. They just craved a better life than what their parents had. They wanted to send all three of their kids to college and have enough left over to retire.

Joe grew up in Spokane, Washington, the youngest of three kids whose father started out as a bus driver and worked his way up to a systems analyst for the transit authority.

He was only 6 when the first "Star Wars" movie hit theaters. He imagined himself as Luke Skywalker, pretending that falling leaves in autumn were galactic invaders.

Becky was raised in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. She, too, was the baby in a family of five girls. Her troubled teenage years were the opposite of what she wishes now for her own children. By the time she was 19, she'd had her first child, Ry, with an older man she wanted nothing to do with anymore. Unhappy and alone, Becky went to visit her sisters Laura and Diane, who at the time were living in Spokane.

She met Joe there and never looked back.

Joe knew it would be tough supporting a family. But he was willing to work hard.

They began their lives together humbly. During their first date at a Jack in the Box, Joe snuck a peek in his wallet as Becky was ordering, just to make sure he had enough money. Later, he proposed in the rain after they'd been to see a stage production of "The Diary of Anne Frank."

Joe got his hands dirty building houses while Becky enrolled in college to become a cardiovascular technician. She graduated and found a hospital job that took her and Joe from the greenery of Washington to the desert drab of Reno. Downtown boasts casino after casino, but "the biggest little city in the world" sits on a high desert at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas, and Joe and Becky, both outdoor enthusiasts, loved the scenery and ski slopes.

Nevada's real estate market was booming, and Joe had no trouble finding work. One day, there was sand and dirt and barren hills; the next day, an entire subdivision was popping up.