Dan Davis and Frederica (Ricky) Kintner's relationship

Dan Davis and Frederica Virginia Gentry—Ricky, whom Dan first knew as “Picky”—are bound by a childhood companionship centered on Pete, the cat they care for together. Their connection outlasts Dan’s engagement to Belle and the betrayal that sends him looking for a trustworthy ally; Ricky becomes both the person he trusts with his property and the human link to the life he has lost. The relationship moves between childhood play, adult regret, and a renewed promise of trust, with Pete at its center.

Childhood Companionship

Dan’s friendship with Ricky begins when she is a little girl living with her widowed stepfather, Miles Gentry. During the Six Weeks War, Miles is called back to duty, and Ricky and Miles are away from the danger with Pete on the weekend the disaster strikes. Ricky takes Pete because Dan cannot bring him to Dallas. Her practical role in caring for the cat becomes the basis of a lasting intimacy: Dan later describes her as the person who shared responsibility for Pete and understood how to treat him properly.

Dan recalls that Ricky had been “my girl” since she was six, while he told her that they would marry when she grew up and both look after Pete. He understood this as a game, perhaps one that mattered to Ricky chiefly because it promised her eventual custody of the cat. The joking promise nevertheless gave their friendship a language of future belonging. Dan’s recollection is qualified by his recognition that he could not know exactly what the child made of it.

He values Ricky not simply because she likes Pete. She reminds him of his own sister at the same age, and he respects her quiet dignity and her Brownie activities rather than talking down to her. Their closeness is expressed in shared caretaking and ordinary attention: Ricky likes Pete, treats him properly, and is someone Dan regards as a friend. He does not initially interpret this companionship as a serious romantic attachment.

Belle and the Broken Promise

Dan stops treating the childhood marriage game as a joke after his mother and sister are killed in the bombing. Ricky is seven at the time. By the time Belle joins Dan and Ricky’s circle, Ricky is around ten, and she resists speaking to Belle. Belle calls this shyness, and Miles appears to accept that explanation; Dan believes Ricky’s reluctance reflects a more intense dislike, although she expresses it only by withholding conversation. He tries to persuade her that Belle is lovable, but Ricky does not want to discuss the matter.

As Dan and Belle become engaged, Ricky’s unhappiness sharpens the contrast between his adult plans and the bond he has let lapse. Dan later recognizes that, had Ricky been ten years older, he would never have turned to Belle. At the time, however, he treats Ricky’s feelings as something that will pass and does not resume the childhood promise. The difference between what the promise means to Dan and what it may have meant to Ricky remains an unresolved part of their early relationship.

Dan’s engagement to Belle also becomes entangled with the ownership of his Hired Girl stock. He had refused to buy Belle the costly ring he wanted and instead transferred some shares to her as a betrothal present, continuing to vote them himself. When Belle’s conduct makes him question their engagement, he protests that he had never intended to surrender control of the company. A lawyer tells him that if he can prove the shares were given in expectation of marriage and Belle accepted them on that understanding, he might use the betrothal-gift principle in McNulty v. Rhodes to reclaim them. Dan rejects the possibility of marrying Belle merely to recover the stock, but the dispute gives his later trust in Ricky a concrete financial dimension.

Trust Placed in Ricky

After Dan is shut out of the company and has been considering cold sleep, he decides that Ricky is the person he can trust. He sees the two cases as unlike: he has known her for half her life, believes her reliably honest, and knows that Pete trusts her too. This choice marks a shift from the broken engagement and business conflict toward a private safeguard built around their old friendship.

On December 3, 1970, in Los Angeles, Dan writes Ricky a letter asking her to keep an enclosed envelope secret. He realizes that if he dies while she has it, the contents could eventually reach Miles and Belle, so he prepares a separate assignment of his Hired Girl shares to the Bank of America in trust for Ricky, payable to her on her twenty-first birthday. He directs her that if she has not seen him for a year, she should take the inner envelope to a bank trust officer and ask him to open it; she should also take care of Pete if she can find him. The arrangement is intended to give Ricky the stock if something happens to Dan while preventing Miles and Belle from taking it from her.

The trust is also connected to Dan’s decision not to flee into cold sleep. As he writes, he recognizes that he has decided to stay and fight, using the stock certificate as leverage to inspect the company’s books and, if necessary, challenge the people keeping him out. He sends the envelope to Ricky at her Girl Scout camp, but imagines that if his circumstances improve, he can simply ask her to return it. For him, the act safeguards both the shares and a relationship he considers familial: Ricky and Pete are all the family he has left.

Separation, Regret, and Reunion

When Dan wakes decades later, Hired Girl and its related products have become prominent, and he regrets having been in such a hurry to dispose of his shares. He immediately corrects himself: if he had kept the stock, Miles and Belle might have taken it, whereas Ricky received it. His first priority is to find her. He estimates that she would now be forty or forty-one and imagines that the shares may have made her wealthy. If she is poor despite the stock, he thinks, he would marry her, reasoning that she had managed Miles’s household with serious efficiency as a child and would still know how to tell him no.

That impulse is checked by the recognition that Ricky may have married years earlier and built a life without him. Dan nevertheless insists on looking her up, because she is the only other person who truly understood Pete. His dream of Ricky holding him and saying that she has found Pete gives the loss a tender, private form, but it remains a dream: his conscious plan is to search for her rather than assume reunion is possible.

When they meet again, Dan apologizes for having chosen Belle and tells Ricky that he was wrong. He insists that Belle is out of his life, then shows Ricky the certificate for all his Hired Girl stock and explains that he is giving it to her because he expects to be gone for a long time. He tears up the earlier, separate assignment, judging it too vulnerable to tampering, and turns to the certificate’s standard assignment form. Before arranging the transfer through the Bank of America in trust for her, he asks Ricky to confirm her full name: Frederica Virginia Gentry. The practical details echo his earlier letter, but the renewed transfer is now made in person, as an act of trust after their separation rather than merely a contingency in case he dies.

Meaning of the Bond

The relationship is shaped by promises that change meaning over time. Dan’s childhood talk of marriage begins as a game tied to Pete; his engagement to Belle turns a different promise into a dispute over whether the shares were a gift or had an expected return. Later, Dan’s decision to entrust those same shares to Ricky gives the old bond a material consequence. Stock, letters, envelopes, and assignment forms register his efforts to make trust durable when he cannot depend on being present.

Pete provides the relationship’s continuing point of recognition. Ricky cares for him when Dan cannot, and Dan repeatedly thinks of her as the person who shared his understanding of the cat. Their adult reconnection therefore rests not on an assumed romantic future but on remembered companionship, contrition, and a concrete act of confidence. Dan’s admission that Ricky was right and he was wrong acknowledges the injury created by his choice of Belle; his renewed transfer of the stock answers that history with action, while the narrative preserves the uncertainty and delay that separated them.