Ah, well, I’ve got bigger things to focus on, Keisha thought as she crossed the parking lot, trying to push the vision of the mystery man out of her head. She absently rubbed her wrists, still feeling the heat of his hands there. Her lashes lowered as she sighed.
“Okay, stop it,” she said aloud. “Focus, Keisha. Focus!” But focus on what? Something she could no longer control? The election was out of their hands now—and firmly in the hands of the voters.
Keisha glanced down at her BlackBerry, willing it to buzz. Tanya should be calling her by now with news about the race, but she wasn’t. Keisha sighed deeply and grabbed the locket around her neck that her mother had given her when she was eleven years old. She often rubbed the silver piece when she got nervous. Just feeling it in her hands reassured her.
“God, this is torture,” she murmured, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk. She wondered if Sydney Parker was going through the same anxiety right now, though she doubted it. Parker had said from the beginning that if it was meant to happen, it would happen. That had been his attitude even before he decided to take the plunge and make his first run for elected office four years ago.
Back then, he had been a well-liked political science professor who had often joked about running for mayor of their college town so that he could “make some badly needed changes around here.” She had been one of his many grad students who had been in awe of him. One minute, Parker was a fumbling, scruffy, bearded professor with wrinkled clothes and salt and pepper hair that looked badly in need of a comb. The next minute he was a commanding presence in front of the class, talking passionately in his heavy baritone about the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, bouncing between references to Thomas Payne and Martin Luther King Jr. He could be downright inspiring.
Keisha remembered the day as if it were yesterday when she had walked up to him after class and issued her challenge. She had waited until most of the other students had left to go to their next class and watched as he packed up his laptop and a pile of books near the lectern. “Dr. Parker,” she had ventured hesitantly. He quickly looked up at her over the top of his horn-rimmed glasses and smiled.
“Yes, Keisha. How can I help you?” he asked. Despite having more than five hundred students, he was always quickly able to identify his star pupils by name.
“Dr. Parker,” she paused and cleared her throat, “why do you always talk about what you’d do as mayor of College Park…if you aren’t going to run?”
At that, he chuckled. “The joke’s getting old, huh?” Parker closed his leather satchel and pulled the strap over his shoulder. “So you’re saying I should think up a new one? Come up with fresher material?”
She emphatically shook her head. “No, Dr. Parker, I’m saying that I think you should run!”
She watched as his brown eyes widened behind the lenses of his glasses. He then started to laugh, hearty and loud, making her frown.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said, waving his hands. “I didn’t mean to laugh like that, Keisha, but I have neither the time, the money, nor the experience needed to run for mayor. I appreciate your vote of confidence, though.” He glanced down at his watch. “Shouldn’t you be getting to your next class?”
“But why not?” she persisted as she followed him toward the lecture hall doors. “You say all the time that even a monkey could do a better job than the mayor we have now! I could help you, you know.” She had to walk quickly to keep up with his long strides as they made their way down the echoing corridor. Students milled about the hallway. One drank from a nearby water fountain. “I could help organize stuff for you,” she insisted. “I could build your web site. And I know plenty of students here that would be willing to volunteer for your campaign. I could—”
“Keisha…” Dr. Parker sighed as he rolled his eyes.
“No, really,” she persisted. “Look, Dr. Parker, you always say that politics is more than just speeches, dinners, and handshaking. It means using the system to actually do something! It’s about believing in an objective and working towards that goal. Why can’t this be one of your goals? What do you have to lose?”
His pace slowed as he considered her words. He then turned to face her, narrowing his eyes. “You sure this isn’t an elaborate way to get extra credit points?”
She laughed and shook her head. “No, I’m serious, Dr. Parker!”
He took a deep breath and sighed. “Okay, I’ll think about it,” he said, making her grin and clap her hands.
“For real?” she exclaimed.
“I didn’t say yes, Keisha. I’m just going to think about it,” he repeated sternly, though his face softened as he gave her a wry smile. “I’ll let you know in a week or two.”
But it didn’t take Parker that long to decide. The next time she came to class he told her that he would run for mayor and, if she wanted, she could be his campaign manager. Keisha jumped at the opportunity. Initially, he hadn’t taken the mayoral run all that seriously, but she had. Keisha built a web site for him, as she had promised, and she recruited more than two dozen of his other students to become campaign volunteers. They got enough signatures to put Parker on the ballot and made signs, pins, and bumper stickers that were plastered with his name. They tagged along with Parker as he went door to door, talking to constituents, telling them what he would do if he became mayor. They posted flyers everywhere and camped out at the polls.
Their low-budget grassroots campaign drew scorn from the standing mayor, who had lots of powerful business people and money behind him. But it also drew lots of press. The newspapers loved Parker, a firebrand who seemed to inspire hope in the residents of their small town as he had in his students. In a surprising upset, Parker won the election. Keisha graduated from college that year, knowing that she left with more than just a master’s degree and a job offer as a high school U.S. government teacher in Baltimore. Thanks to Parker, she had gained experiences that she would treasure for the rest of her life and that she assumed she would never have again.
So Keisha was more than just a little surprised when four years later Parker called her again, this time with his own challenge. By then, Keisha was getting frustrated with teaching, discouraged by the state of inner city schools. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. Should she strike out on a new career path? Go back to school for her Ph.D.?
“Why don’t you come to work for me?” Parker had asked her over the phone.
She frowned. “You mean work at the mayor’s office in College Park, sir? You have an opening?”
“No.” She heard him sigh on the other end of the line. “I’m running for office again, Keisha, and I’d like to have you on my campaign.”
She laughed. “Well, thank you, Dr. Parker, but I don’t know if I’m up to that again. That took a lot of time and energy out of me the first time and—”
“I’m not running for mayor again, Keisha,” he said. “Look, you’ll be well compensated if you worked for me. It’s just running for Congress isn’t something that should be taken lightly. It’s definitely a more precarious playing field and if I’m going to do this, I have to do it right. I want people around me that I can trust.”
Keisha paused, wondering if she had heard him correctly. “You’re running for Congress?”
“I know. It seems far-fetched, doesn’t it? Especially considering that I’ve only been mayor for one term, but the Democrats are desperate to put someone out there they think can finally knock out Vincent Dupré.”
“That makes sense,” Keisha murmured.
Dupré was a conservative Republican for Maryland’s Fifth Congressional District. He was admired by many of the white citizens (and despised by about half of the black citizens) in the state. His ties in Maryland both professionally and socially, thanks to his many businesses and the wealth of his family, were widespread and deeply entrenched. Gregarious and good-looking, Dupré would be a hard man to beat come November. In the past eighteen years the nine opponents that had bothered to challenge him lost to him.
Parker sighed. “The Democrats are rounding up every Tom, Dick, and Harry to do this. I guess my name got thrown into the hat because of my popularity and the positive press we got a few years ago.”
“Maybe the Democrats feel if there’s a time to take out Dupré, it’s probably now,” she said.
“Maybe,” he murmured. “But regardless, I got suckered into this and I told them I would give it a shot. So what do you say? Are you up to it, Keisha? Will you join my campaign? We’re going to start up soon so I need an answer pretty quickly.”
She should have told him she needed at least a day to think about it. It was a big decision that should require some reflection. But Keisha didn’t do that. She heard herself impulsively say, “Yes,” and the deal was done. Within two weeks she had quit her job, packed up her bags, and had begun her new position as Parker’s deputy campaign manager.
Now as she paced the hotel parking lot, Keisha wondered if she had made the right decision all those months ago. The campaign this time around had been nothing like the one when he ran for mayor. It was no longer just a bunch of well-intentioned, twenty-something college students. Now it was lots of highly-paid strategists who talked about focus groups and straw polls. Though they still went from door to door to campaign every now and then, they were more likely to attend $200-a-plate fundraisers and sit in meeting after meeting with unions, associations, and business leaders. Keisha still found her new job exciting, but there were moments when she felt as if she had been cast in the wrong movie that was turning out to be her life. Was she really prepared for all this? Was she really meant for the big leagues?
She stopped pacing when she heard a buzzing noise coming from her hip. Her eyes widened. That was probably Tanya giving her the news about the election results. Keisha took a deep breath before unclipping her BlackBerry from her hip. She slowly pressed the button to answer, raised the device to her ear, and closed her eyes.
“Hello?” she said shakily.
“Girl, get back in here!” Tanya shouted over the clamor in the background. “He won! He won, Keisha!”
Keisha’s eyes suddenly opened as she gasped, “Are you kidding?”
“No, I’m not kidding, girl! Come on and celebrate!”
Keisha hung up the phone. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God, we did it!” she yelped. She then broke into an end zone dance, ignoring the stares of the few people walking by her. In seconds she was back in the conference room, where the party was in full swing. Someone had released at least a hundred red, white, and blue balloons and handed out party horns, which several people blew loudly. It was hard to hear Tanya shouting over the loud noise, but Keisha did.
“I told you he’d win!” Tanya said as she flew into Keisha’s arms and gave the younger woman a bear hug. Keisha laughed.
“Indeed, you did.”
“So you know what this means,” Tanya said as she handed her a champagne glass. “We have to celebrate, girl.”
Keisha raised her eyebrows as she took a sip. “What do you call this?” she said, pointing around the room at Parker’s jubilant supporters.
“Oh, no, my dear!” Tanya exclaimed, waving her hands dismissively. “I mean really celebrate. We are getting out of this hotel, going to the city, finding us some fine-ass men, and dropping it real low on the dance floor, Keisha.” Tanya raised her eyebrows. “Don’t let the clothes and the age fool you, girl. I can shake it like the best of them.”
Keisha slowly shook her head, dying from laughter. “Tanya, there is no way I’m going into the city tonight!”
“Why not?”
“Why not? For one, I don’t even have clothes to go out dancing! Secondly, I am completely exhausted. It’s almost midnight and I’ve been on my feet since 4 a.m. As soon as Parker makes his speech, I’m going upstairs, putting on my pajamas, and crashing.”
Tanya narrowed her eyes and smiled mischievously. “No, you’re not.”
Keisha fervently nodded her head as she finished the last of her champagne. “Yes, I am.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am, Tanya!”