The Old Girl

Eleven days before Mardi Gras, Kelly Guidry's father is crushed beneath a nine-foot papier-mâché alligator in the tin-roofed den where he built parade floats for forty years. Kelly, an Atlanta insurance adjuster who prices other people's disasters for a living, comes home to bury him. She is stuck with a sober brother she hasn't spoken to in four years, a teenage daughter filming everything, and a seventy-thousand-dollar float that must roll on Lundi Gras night. She is also stuck with the locked back stall her father never let anyone open. Something under its tarp has gone a whole winter without being fed.