His grin was lopsided, self-deprecating. “This philosophy went over big with a ten-year-old who’d never known a day without servants. I didn’t know how to pour my own milk on my cereal. And I thought watching television was an essential body function—eating, sleeping, watching television. Grandpa Crow had a garden behind his house that he worked on every day. He had to keep whacking at the red dirt to keep it from baking hard and dry around his plants. He had a goat and a flock of scrawny chickens. He had an old Ford pickup that was in worse shape than your klunker, and every Saturday we’d go into town for some canned food and mail and Grandpa’d get a bottle of whiskey. When he was alone I think he might have been drunk a lot of the time, but when I was there he’d just sip at the whiskey and get more talkative.”

The grin broadened. “By normal standards more talkative wasn’t exactly chatty. Grandpa Crow was a man of few words.”

“Is he still living on his land?”

“Yeah. I went to see him two years ago. He’d moved into a trailer. Very spiffy, but he still wasn’t using lights. At least that’s what he said, but I think when no one’s around he pulls out a television and makes microwave popcorn.”

“How about you? Do you have servants now?”

“Someone comes in to clean.” He polished off another chicken leg. “I learned how to pour my own milk when I was in college, so I was able to do away with the butler and the cook and the manservant.”

“Do you miss them?”

“Sometimes the cook. Once in a while the manservant. Never the butler.”

Daisy gave him a long look. “Are you at all like your grandfather?”

“Not much. I’m also not much like my parents. Lately I’m not even like myself.”

“Are you having an identity crisis?”

“I think I’m in a period of transition.”

“Ah-hah.”

Steve sighed. She was so incredibly pretty, sitting there with her feet tucked up like a cat and her blond hair dappled in sunlight. Very feminine. He reconsidered the word. Feminine didn’t feel exactly right. Womanly was better. There was a ripeness to her, a lushness of personality. She didn’t whine or flirt or make excuses. She went about the business of living with open exuberance. In an odd way she reminded him of his grandfather. His grandfather Crow was much more taciturn, but there was depth to him, and there was depth to Daisy.