Xanthe

Marley is at least a year older than Cheryl -- if Michael left town say 6 months before Marley was born and Mary came to work one month after Cheryl was born, that could be a gap of at least a year and a half with no overlap. Michael met Mary as Marissa when she turned up in Bay City and he didn't seem to recognize her. Mary left Reginald because he was rotten to the core -- he wasn't written in a way that gave her any justification for being loyal to him after she found out what he had done even though she had apparently loved him up until that point. There was no subtlety about his character and he had no redeeming features. She also didn't just leave him and go back to Vince -- she worked in Vince's restaurant in order to support herself and be around her daughters, and she also went to college. It took some time before she actually got together with Vince. The complexity of her choice wasn't between two husbands -- it was between independence and one husband (and reconciled once she had achieved something like independence and was therefore able to be both independent and have a husband). Regarding Vince's face -- Mary was dead during the first Vince (Jack Ryland) and really only experienced Duke Stroud and Robert Hogan.

Jake wasn't the first member of the McKinnon family introduced anyway, and he also wasn't the first one to interact with the Love family. M.J. came first, and she was still in Bay City with an active storyline when Reginald and Mary appeared. Before Jake, M.J.'s teenage brother Ben dated Marley and Donna disapproved, in a mostly general class snobbery way. But since neither family was meant to be new to Bay City there was nothing in the storyline about being surprised the people existed. Reading the AWHP synopses I see that when Ben met Marley at first he let her think he was wealthy. Since they hadn't grown up together and Marley must have been too young to be aware of Mary and Reginald, there is no reason why she should have known anything about the McKinnons. The fact that Jake and Victoria grew up together in Pennsylvania is more peculiar.