Plantation by Dorothea Benton Frank

Author:Dorothea Benton Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

Twenty-six

Daddy

1974

I had just graduated from Carolina Academy in Walterboro and was spending the summer getting in gear to go to Ashley Hall in Charleston. Ashley Hall was where Mother had gone to school and she announced I would go there as well. Daddy wasn’t too keen on the idea of me leaving home so early, but he understood that the options in our neck of the woods were limited. We were sitting in the kitchen, sharing a Hershey bar—plain chocolate, my favorite.

“You can take me out to supper on Wednesdays,” I said.

“And I’m going to do that too, so you had better not be making plans without me for Wednesdays!” he said, his eyes filled with mischief, then suddenly they clouded, and his face became solemn.

“Daddy? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“To remember, Caroline, to remember your face just like it is now. You are the spitting image of my mother. She was a beautiful woman, a heart-stopping head turner. You will be too. You had better tell those boys in Charleston that your daddy will rip the legs off the first one that tries anything funny with my daughter.”

“Daddy! I’m almost fourteen! And, in case you forgot, it’s an all-girls school!” I smiled at him and watched him relax, letting out little puffs of air, him trying to hide the fact that he had actually been concerned. That he had realized in that flash of a moment I no longer wore pigtails, that, good Lord, someday I’d have a sex life. It made me want to apologize for growing up without his notice or approval. In another way, I felt myself swell a little as though my possibilities had been discovered. I was growing up. Boarding school a whole thirty miles away! I could come home on weekends and there was nothing to stop Daddy and Mother from visiting me during the week.

I had some anxiety about going away, but I figured all those other generations of girls went there and didn’t kill themselves; neither would I. I’d be fine.

Trip was going to have his eleventh birthday that July and Mother was planning the party. All it took was anticipation of a party to watch the energy surge in Mother. Party? She was the tree in Rockefeller Center, and somebody flipped her switch. God only knew how overboard it would be. I heard her talking to Mr. Jenkins about creating a western town from plywood cutouts and something else about costumes. She was probably gonna fly in Roy Rogers and Dale Evans from somewhere and have a rodeo in the old rice fields. Pigs would die, there was no doubt of that. Mother just couldn’t help herself. She was born to dream up and give the fantastic parties she wanted to attend.

We all knew that Trip wanted a horse for his birthday. The campaign had nearly coincided with his birth. His entire room was swallowed alive with horse mania—posters, sheets, magazines—you name it. If it had a horse on it, Trip owned it.

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