“I don’t know shit about movies. I hardly ever go. Not even as a kid. My sisters sometimes took us to the Saturday-morning serials, but my mother, the women of my family in general, always say, ‘You need drama, children? Well look no further than the Baptist church. King Kong got nothing on the Baptist God. In the Baptist church, you get your religion in Technicolor.’”

“Well, I got my religion in the Church of Rick and Ilsa,” I said before I remembered he had never seen my favorite film. “They’re the main characters in Casablanca, and the lines they speak amount to Holy Writ.”

“Well, Roxanne, if you had grown up with Addie Dexter, you would know your Holy Writ and your hymns, or you wouldn’t eat.”

“And if you had grown up in the Church of Rick and Ilsa, you’d know that the true Ten Commandments have to do with happy endings and snappy dialogue. You’d be able to recite the whole airport scene, along with big chunks of Citizen Kane, my little Rosebud.”

At the fireplace he examined the huge, framed, florid poster of the 1931 talkie Cyrano de Bergerac where my father played the title role. I told him about being born on the set and named for the heroine.

“If your father is Sir Rowland Granville, what does that make you?”

“Lady Chopped Liver.” I laughed and took a deep bow. “Truth is, I throw my father’s name around when I want to impress people. He’s certainly good for that, but I hardly know him.” I detected in Terrence’s eyes a flash of condolence, or something very like it. I hastened to add, “I was lucky not to grow up with my parents—with my mother, anyway. If I had, I’d spend my whole life maundering to a shrink. My mother has a long-standing grudge against me. I thwarted her destiny and ruined her career. She always said if she hadn’t been pregnant with me, she would have played the beautiful Roxanne in nineteen thirty-one, and she would have been so absolutely stupendous she would have won an Oscar and landed the role of Scarlett O’Hara that went to that trollop Vivien Leigh a few years later. Oh, and then, there was this . . .” I brought my hand up to my stained cheek. “She hated the imperfection.”

He reached over and touched my face. “You ever think that this just means yours is a face no one will ever forget?”

“I have never thought that. It’s been the bane of my life.”

“Yours is a face I will never forget.”

His touch was so tender, I wanted to reach up, to hold his hand there forever, but instead I said, “You better come in the kitchen with me and get started.”

“On what?”

“You have to eat your weight in ham sandwiches.”