“Cher, wake up,” Frank whispered, shaking her gently. “It’s late.” She opened her eyes and the bedroom filled with bright morning sunlight. At first she saw only the empty room, her clothes on the floor, the sheet she’d thrown over Frank the night before bunched at the bottom of the bed. Her back ached from […]
It was strange how she felt then, sitting alone in the dark in the crotch of an old oak tree deep in the backwoods of Virginia holding a dead cell phone in her hand. Free was part of it. But also unmoored. Untethered. It was her father who had insisted she buy a cell phone […]
Cheryl was still on the sea-green chaise with the Let’s Go book open on her lap when Frank knocked lightly on the door. He’d had a few glasses of champagne after she left and was full of stories about his grandfather and how the other guests had reacted to his speech. Cheryl tried to listen, […]
For the next hour Shaw v. Reno was forgotten, and in response to Cheryl’s steady prodding, Frank told her how his grandmother had used her position as the wife of a prominent local doctor to chip away at segregation in Lathrop, Virginia. Once, in the early sixties, he told her, when the city closed the […]