Where the River Ends Read Online Free PDF Page A

'' crown, 2 3 / 4 '' brim. I bought it about eight years ago because I thought it made me look like Indiana Jones. Now it was faded, the brim rose and fell like a roller-coaster track and my thumbs had worn a hole where I pinched the crown. As much as I wanted to look dashing and heroic, my reflection looked more like Jed Clampett.
    “You’re not gonna actually wear that silly-looking hat, are you?”
    I nodded. “My head spent five years just breaking it in.”
    She laughed, “It’s broken alright.”
    The problem with a wish list was what it told you about the person who wrote it. If it’s honest, it’s a rock-bottom, barebones, clear shot all the way to someone’s soul.
    Hats can do the same thing.

3

    M ost said it was a match made in heaven. Those who didn’t were just jealous.
    William Barclay Coleman had been born with “presence.” Tall, handsome, well-spoken, he commanded attention and even those envious of him treated him like E. F. Hutton. His gentleman’s pedigree was flawless. The Citadel, Harvard Law, European summers abroad. A young political up-and-comer, he grew up with a speaker’s gavel in his hand and was the youngest candidate ever elected to the South Carolina legislature. But that was just the beginning.
    Ellen Victoria Shaw was the poster child for Emily Post and Gloria Vanderbilt. A fifth-generation Charlestonian, she attended Ashley Hall and then, as a freshman at Randolph-Macon women’s college, no less than eight suitors asked her to accompany them to Fancy Dress—Washington and Lee’s annual formal. By her junior year, most every Kappa Alpha in a hundred-mile radius invited her to the Confederate-themed Old South Ball where the whispers and jealous mutters of the Hollins, Sweet Briar and Mary Baldwin girls voted her the unofficial belle of the ball.
    She graduated—a double in French and Art History—returned home and then a chance meeting at the Hibernia Society ball.
    He was twenty-five. She, barely twenty-two. They courted, appropriately, for nine months and then married in a wedding that shook most of Charleston with jealousy and unending speculation and gossip. For a wedding gift, he gave her a convertible Mercedes 450 SL Coupe.
    After an Austrian alpine honeymoon topped off with a Tanzanian safari and a trek up the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro, they returned to his family home on the Battery in Charleston where he strategized for a run at the governor’s mansion. Eighteen months later, she bore him a daughter, Abigail Grace Eliot Coleman—the sixth generation. During the inauguration ceremony the following January, Abigail Grace smiled through her bonnet at every camera flash and drank up the attention like chocolate. Even then she had a knack.
    But life took a turn.
    Abigail turned two, and Ellen fell ill. Bruises that wouldn’t go away. Tests confirmed ovarian cancer run rampant. It didn’t take long. The widowed father placed Abigail Grace in Miss Olivia’s arms, put the car in cold storage, hid his mourning and focused his aim. He gave himself to “the people,” and after two terms as governor, he ran for Senate—where’s he’s been ever since.
    When Abigail was ten, the then junior senator remarried. Like her predecessor, Katherine Hampton was everything Charleston. She could trace her lineage to one of the founders of Charleston and signers of the Declaration. In his search, he had done the unimaginable—he had found a woman who could dance on glass. She was strong enough to step out of Ellen’s shadow while not dishonoring her memory.

    A BBIE GREW UP A DEBUTANTE, a graduate of Ashley Hall, the only daughter of the senator from South Carolina and the poster girl for the social elite. She had more class in five minutes than I had all day. Or all week. While I tripped over a crack in the sidewalk, stepped in dog crap or spilled mustard across my white button-down, she dabbed the corner of her mouth with a lacy napkin, made friends with stray dogs and