Summary

In the Prologue, First Lady Alice Blackwell, lies in her bed in the White House and wonders if she has made mistakes that have affected her husband’s presidency. She dreams of the past and wonders if things she did then changed the path of her life. Most of all she wonders if she is living a life that is “in opposition to itself” (2).

In this opening section of this novel, Alice goes back in time to remember the day when she and her grandmother met Andrew Imhof and his mother in a grocery store, and her grandmother thought that Andrew was a girl because he was so pretty. Before they parted, Alice’s grandmother told Andrew he was to report to her if Alice did not behave herself in school. When Andrew lifted his eyebrows at...