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would have killed me because it was a very elite show in Atlanta. Biscayne and I made the first few jumps, but we were coming up on a solid brick wall and I just knew she couldn't spread out enough to make it. I was terrified, and I clamped my knees down and made it look like she'd balked. Everybody blamed her but I was the one who was scared. I felt guilty about humiliating her that way." With time, the pain from Kent's suicide became less acute for Margureitte, although she never truly recovered from the loss. But she still had Pat and the colonel, who accepted her grandchildren as his own. He called Susan "Poogie," Debbie "Diddie," and Ronnie "Sam Houston Texas Taylor." As for Pat, she was so much more serene when she lived with her parents. Her own parenting sometimes seemed quixotic. She continued to sew for her daughters, wonderful special dresses that would have cost hundreds of dollars in a store, and she encouraged their efforts. "She was always telling me I could do anything," Susan said. "She was so proud of us when we did well." But there were times when Pat's maternal talents were not quite so genteel. Susan recalled riding in a car with her mother when she was twelve or thirteen and asking a question about sex. "We were driving in the car and my class had been studying the population explosion. I didn't know the first thing ibout sex, and I said, 'Well, nobody should blame somebody because God put a baby in her stomach." My mother laughed and said, 'Don't you know anything? The man puts his penis in the woman's hole and wiggles up and down." She went on telling me about sex in the ugliest, most graphic terms. There was nothing about love or no birds or bees-just a blunt explanation of what men did to women. I was stunned. I don't know why she told me Page 125 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html that way. When I was older, I told Boppo about it and we both laughed. All in all, the years living with Boppo and Papa were good. Neither Debbie nor Susan remembered them as unusual in any way. They adored Boppo. And Boppo told them constantly how much she loved them. Boppo herself was happy. She had her daughter and her grandchildren. Her sisters were an easy drive away and she saw them often. Mama Siler was eighty-six and frail-but still with them. The Silers continued to meet every August at White Lake, North Carolina, for the annual reunion. Aside from missing Kent, life was as good as it had ever been for Boppo. She had never had a house she loved as much as the one on Dodson Drive. She never wanted to leave it-and, apparently, neither did Pat. Sergeant Gilbert Taylor was nothing if not persistent. He still loved Pat, and in his mind, it was only a matter of time until he gathered his family around him again. He knew what it would take, and when he transferred back to Fort McPherson in 1969, he was prepared to give his wife what she wanted. Pat had always dreamed of a house finer than any house a Siler had yet known. Hell, she still wanted her Tara. She always had and she always would, and if he ever hoped to get her out of her mama's house, he was going to have to find a way to give her what she demanded. They went out driving in the country looking for likely properties. Finally, they found some land for sale on Tell Road. They could have missed the place so easily; it was west of East Point in the Ben Hill district, beyond No Name Road, and deadended at the Atlanta city limits. It didn't look like city at all. It was deep country with thick trees up to the road and wetlands that some homeowners had dammed up into algae-covered ponds. The piece for sale was way back in, past a log cabin-like place inhabited by a maiden lady of indeterminate age named Fanny Kate Cash, who had lived there all of her life. It was ]Panny Kate who was selling off the back piece of land. There was no house, no road, nothing but trees. But Pat wanted it. Here they would build their mansion and create a wonderful riding ring for horse shows. She would give riding lessons to help meet their bills. She assured her husband that the spread at 4189 Tell Road S.W. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |