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After a decade of it, Alma wants a break from public life. No sooner did she get Colin back from the Joint Chiefs than she almost lost him to a presidential campaign. She was not so much worried about the dangers he would be exposed to, friends say, as tired of the intrusions. She'd had too many evenings alone while Colin worked late, too many security men in her kitchen while she made morning coffee. "I think she would like to go out to dinner with her husband without being bombarded," says Barbara Greene. Still, Alma weighed such annoyances against the broader question of her calling. "She never said, 'Wouldn't it be fun to be First Lady?'" says Michael. "But she did say, 'Is this more important than what I don't like about it?'"
Colin Powell did not force his wife to answer that question. In the blessed calculus of a married life, he loved her too much to ask her point blank, because she loved him too much to tell him how she really felt. After 33 years, words are scarcely necessary; they share a vocabulary of shrugs and knowing glances, a collection of quirks and foibles fully accepted. Colin's inability to please Alma with a birthday gift, for example, has become a running joke in the family. "He'd always present her with some lame appliance--a waffle iron, a potato peeler, a Ginsu knife,'' says Michael. "If it was advertised on late-night TV, he thought it was pretty neat. Of course she'd hate it, and of course he'd be crestfallen. It became an annual ritual: 'Is Dad going to blow it again?'"
At dinner one night in October 1990, as Powell was grabbing a break from deploying troops for Operation Desert Shield, he suddenly realized it was Alma's birthday. As a close friend tells it, the phone rang, and he used the excuse of answering it to get out of hearing distance. Then he phoned his personal shopper at a Nordstrom department store. "Susan, I've forgotten her birthday. Pick out something she'll like and get over here." The shopper came through with a nice warm-up suit, arriving just as the Powells were having coffee. Colin presented the gift to Alma, who loved it. "I thought you'd forgotten!" she cried. Her husband just smiled and kept his big mouth shut.