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 […]
An hour later, when Cheryl came down for dinner, she had redone her hair and makeup and slipped into a sleeveless black Marc Jacobs number she had worn only once before, at an Alpha Kappa Alpha cotillion the previous fall. The dress, with its shirred silk and its low scooped back, was a touch too […]
The forty-minute flight from Washington DC had been bad enough, their eighteen-seat prop jet bucking and yawing on every stray gust, but when Cheryl stepped out onto the tarmac at the tiny Lathrop airfield and felt that first rude slap of Southern humidity, her stomach lurched again into her throat. Cheryl Crawford had been raised […]