functioned as a real mother.
Myrna Louise leaned back in her rocker and closed her eyes, remembering Andrew as he had been when he was little-so cute, so smart, so mischievous. 'Full of the devil,' is what Howie used to call it.
Because of the tufts of soft gray hair spilling in a heap onto the bathroom floor, Myrna Louise recalled as if it were yesterday that long-ago time when Roger, her second husband, took her little boy to have his first haircut.
Roger was offended by Andrew's headful of adorable blond curls. He insisted it was time the child have a real boy's haircut, that the curls made him a sissy. Before the two of them left for the barbershop, Myrna Louise took her son aside and talked to him, telling him how he should behave.
'You mind your uncle Roger,' she said. 'You do everything he tells you.'
'He's not my uncle,' Andrew muttered stubbornly under his breath.
'What did you say?'
'He's not my uncle. Granny said so.'
Any mention of her former mother-in-law threw Myrna Louise into unreasoning rage. 'He most certainly is, too,' she insisted, 'and that's what you're going to call him.'
'No,' Andrew said.
'Yes,' she returned.
'Say 'Uncle.'
'Uncle,' Andrew replied sullenly.
ay 'Roger'.
'Roger.'
'Now say 'Uncle Roger.'' 'I can say 'Uncle,'' her son responded, 'and I can say 'Roger,' but I can't say 'Uncle Roger.'' And he never did. Not once.
Without humidity to hold it back, the heat peeled away from the desert floor like skin from a sun-ripened peach.
Brandon and Diana tried driving with the Ford's windows wide open, but it was too chilly on Davy, who had stretched out lengthwise in the backseat and fallen sound asleep, so they rode with the front windows barely cracked, making conversation possible.
'Davy's a cute kid,' Brandon offered tentatively. Riding with this strangely silent woman still made him uncomfortable.
Diana nodded. 'He takes after his dad.'
Walker had noticed Davy's physical resemblance to his father, but he hadn't wanted to mention it. The boy's wide-set blue-gray eyes and blond good looks were a long way from his mother's brown-eyed, dark-haired features.
Brandon hoped, for Davy's sake, that looks were all he'd inherited from his father. If genetics were destiny, then David Ladd was doomed.
'Sometimes he does funny things, bizarre things,' Diana mused, 'and I wonder if it's anything like the way his father was when he was a child, but I don't have any way of knowing.'
'You don't see your in-laws?'
Diana shook her head. 'They wanted me to come back, -to Chicago and live with them, but I wouldn't do it.'
'Why not?'
'Rita,' Diana answered simply. 'They didn't understand about Rita.
Since I couldn't bring her along, we didn't go.'
Diana's in-laws weren't the only ones who didn't understand about Rita, Brandon Walker thought, about the strange bond that existed between the young Anglo woman and the much older Indian. It didn't make sense to him, either.
'Davy's grandparents don't stay in touch?'
'They send Christmas presents. That's about all.'
'That's too bad.'
'It's their loss,' Diana added.
Garrison Ladd told Diana Cooper about his parents that very first November afternoon during their three-hour coffee marathon at the I-Hop.
'I don't like them much,' he said. 'Especially my dad.'
This was something about Garrison Ladd that Diana Lee Cooper could relate to. She knew all there was to know about hating your own father.
'What's wrong with him?'
she asked.
'He's brilliant for one thing, and expects everyone else to be the same.
He's worked his way up to being a big-cheese executive with Admiral back in Chicago. He started out in
