bedroom doorway was the first, and possibly the most important.
She nodded warily. “Daddy.”
Ferris smiled. “You must be my daughter. No one else calls me Daddy.”
She tapered her own smile into a warning. “If that keeps up, I’ll wish I hadn’t come home.”
“You should have called your mother, darling.”
“I know that.” She crossed the room and rose on tip toe to kiss his cheek. “I just needed some time alone to think about Grandmère’s death.”
“That’s one of your problems. You always think too much.”
She stepped away from him and shook her head. “This is the sixties. Women are allowed to think. You’d do well to remember that, if you want to be the next governor.”
“So you read, too. What do you think my chances are?”
Dawn thought his chances were good, but she thought telling him was a bad idea. The state of Louisiana would benefit from a humbler Ferris Gerritsen—but not as much as it would benefit from a more liberal man in the governor’s mansion. “What do you think?” she countered.
“I think you’d better face your mother and get it over with. She’s furious at you for not getting in touch.”
She put that aside for a moment, only too aware of the scene to come. “Daddy, do you know what this is about?”
“No, but I intend to find out. I don’t believe your grandmother really invited Nicky Reynolds and her family here.”
Dawn didn’t want to address that. Not yet. “Do you know why Ben Townsend was invited?”
His expression didn’t change, but then, his thoughts were rarely visible. “No. Are the two of you—”
She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “I haven’t seen him since…in a year.”
“Apparently your grandmother had a sense of humor I never appreciated.”
She stepped back to view him better. “Don’t dredge up old scores to settle with Ben.”
His expression was still pleasant. His voice was not. “Ben Townsend doesn’t belong in this house, and he doesn’t belong with you.”
That was undoubtedly true, but she didn’t want to give her father the satisfaction of knowing he was right. “That’s over now.”
“It should never have started.”
“If we could change history, there’d probably be more significant mistakes for both of us to worry about, wouldn’t there?”
His response was interrupted by a noise on the stairs. Dawn looked beyond her father to see her mother coming toward them. She added guilt to the carousel of feelings she had experienced in the past hour, and prepared herself. “Mother.”
Cappy Gerritsen stopped on the third step from the top, her posture regal. Dawn envisioned a younger Cappy, the prewar New Orleans debutante, gliding across the floor of her family’s River Road home with a volume of Emily Post on her head.
Cappy’s body was still gracefully curved and firm, and though she was a size larger than the six she claimed, neither age nor an extra fifteen pounds could destroy her basic beauty. No silver showed in her pale gold hair, and only twin frown lines between perfectly shaped eye brows signaled her basic dissatisfaction with life.
“Don’t badger Dawn, Cappy,” Ferris warned. “Just be glad she’s home.”
Dawn went to the head of the stairs, but her mother had made it impossible to embrace her. Cappy had al ways been three impossible steps away. “You look wonderful,” Dawn said. “Daddy’s plan to become the next Huey Long must agree with you.”
Cappy didn’t attempt to be polite. “You could have called.”
“I know.”
“Your grandmother dies, and you can’t even call your father or me to tell us you’re sorry?”
“Cappy.” Ferris joined his daughter. “Dawn and I have already discussed this.”
Dawn dredged up a smile. “I’ll go on record. I’m a failure as a daughter. Okay? Now can we go on to some thing else?”
“You disappeared off the face of the earth for a year. You didn’t call. You didn’t write. You didn’t visit. What are we to you, anyway?”
The smile died. “Right now you’re a living reminder of why I didn’t do any of those things.”
“Well, your grandmother’s not a reminder anymore, is she? Where were you when she needed you here?”
“You know where I was. I was in England, trying to find out if there was anywhere in this world where I could be something more than a member of this family.”
“You don’t have to be part of this family at all!”
Ferris stepped between them. “I’m not going to listen to any more of this.” He turned to Dawn. “There’s enough happening here without you and your mother going after each other.”
She shook her head in wonder. “My God, I’m a kid again.”
“Both of you are tired,” Ferris said. “This is a difficult time. Wait until you’ve rested before you talk.”
“I found Pelichere. She has drinks out for us.” Cappy started down the steps.
Dawn accepted Ferris’s brief hug, but she didn’t re turn it. “I’ll be down in a little while,” she said. “Let me comb my hair.”
She waited until he was gone before she took up her station at the window again. A year ago she had journeyed to another continent to banish her emotions, but now she knew she hadn’t succeeded. The child who had summered in this room was still inside her. The teenager who had longed for the love of her parents dwelt there, too. And the young woman who had given herself body and soul to Ben Townsend still cried out for understanding and forgiveness.
By the faint glimmer of a cloud-hazed moon, Pelichere swept the cottage gallery until not one grain of sand was lodged between the weathered boards. Dawn had offered to do it for her, but Pelichere had refused.
“I doubt anyone will even notice the fine job I’m doing,” Pelichere said, “but your mama would notice if the job wasn’t so fine. Mais yeah. She’d notice, just like she noticed the water stains on her bedroom ceiling, under the spot where the shingles blew off last week.”
Dawn leaned against a pillar, not at all anxious to go inside again. After an evening that had seemed endless, the house was quiet now, as if everyone had scurried to their rooms like ghost crabs hiding from shadows. She hoped they all stayed in their individual holes, particularly her parents. “Did she give you trouble?”
“How was I to know that storm would pry off shingles that haven’t budged in a century? At fifty-seven I’m supposed to climb up on the roof and inspect, shingle by shingle, every time it rains? I’d be up on the roof more than I’d be down on the ground. So maybe your parents should make their home on Grand Isle now that your grandmother, she’s dead. What shingles would blow off with Senator and Mrs. Ferris Lee Gerritsen living here?”
“Is it going to be their house after the will’s read? Seems to me Grandmère always said she was going to leave the house to you.”
“She said that, yeah. But there was more she didn’t say.”
A shrill whistle cut through the air. Pelichere turned and raised a hand in greeting as a pickup rattled along the oak-lined drive. “Joe and Izzy Means from down the road. Do you remember them, chère?”
“A little.”
Joe and Izzy got out, and Joe went around to the back of the truck, while Izzy trundled her substantial