Luck

As a furniture maker, Philip Lawrence understood that the design of his work should be simple and beautiful, because life is often complicated and uncomfortable. When he suffers a fatal heart attack in his sleep at 46, the three women who share his house — his artist wife, Nora, their assistant, Sophie, and Nora’s model, Beth — learn just now knotty his life was. Despite being brash enough to answer the door in the nude, Philip had secrets, erotic and otherwise. So do the women, and Philip’s sudden departure uncovers them all as they struggle with buried emotions. Joan Barfoot falters in a half-baked subtheme about art and religion in Luck, but her entertaining use for Philip’s cremains should leave every philandering husband aquiver.