It was the next three weeks for which the word “blur” had been created. Bryce was on the campaign trail continuously, a regular in Iowa and New Hampshire, with swings through South Carolina and Alabama. He passed through home like a train through an outstation, stopping briefly to exchange dirty laundry for clean, kiss cheeks, and promise a better stream of phone calls next week.
For Sarah it felt like another deployment, which in a sense it was. Only instead of fighting rifle-toting jihadis, Bryce was engaging reporters with microphones and opponents wielding bare-knuckle criticisms. The field of battle wasn’t the high desert, but church picnics with red-checked tablecloths and fusty VFW halls. The refrigerator calendar looked like a party favor, the coming months speckled in colored pencil—Sharpies had been outlawed the first week.
Also like a deployment, Bryce was missing Alyssa’s milestones. In the Army it had been birthdays and Thanksgivings, the first day of grade school. Now the highlights had shifted, but they were no less notable. A boy had shown up at the front door to take Alyssa to a school dance. Her team won its first tournament the week before Christmas, and after celebrating with pizza, she and Sarah had bought a six-foot Douglas fir, tied it to the roof of the car, and decorated it by themselves.
The only recompense, if it could be so considered, was that Bryce’s campaign was on a roll: by the second week of December, he’d officially cemented his status as the GOP front-runner. The man who’d formerly had that target on his back, a senator from Utah with a penchant for gaffes, had twice in the last week forgotten where he was campaigning, referring to Greensboro as Charlotte, and telling a crowd in a Des Moines retirement home that he was happy to be in Michigan. Allowances might have been made for a younger man, particularly one enduring the travel gauntlet of a presidential campaign, yet for a seventy-four-year-old who’d spent forty years in Washington, no mercy was shown. His nearest opponents referenced his missteps obliquely, but brought them up all the same, while those languishing on the bottom of the polls all but diagnosed him with dementia.
Against the advice of his strategists, Bryce took a higher road. He refused to address the matter at first, and when pressed by the media he allowed that all candidates made mistakes, himself included, and reminded everyone of the senator’s “many decades of honorable service.”
From the comfort of her living room, Sarah watched it all unfold with surreal detachment. She couldn’t help but take pride in Bryce’s performances, and noted how he was growing into the campaign. A tentative public speaker two years ago, he was finding his stride, and increasingly Bryce reminded her of the best commanders in the Army. Straight-shooters who told you the good news and the bad, and who never lost sight of the mission. His speeches were buoyant and patriotic, a salve for a divided America. By mid-December Bryce was steamrolling his opponents, with the pundits all but giving him the nomination.
Sarah followed it all from a distance, Alyssa by her side most evenings. They watched the first debates with a bowl of popcorn, and listened as the talking heads give their considered opinions, most of which fell in Bryce’s favor. Seemingly every segment of news was led by the graphic, “The Race for the White House,” with the iconic building in the background. The most high-profile address on earth. A place once occupied by the likes of Lincoln, Kennedy, and Reagan. All of whom had been shot, Sarah thought lamentably.
As she listened to jabbering reporters, waxing anchors, and one endearingly animated daughter, Sarah found herself hardening into an opinion on her husband’s run that would have surprised them all.
The candidate’s wife hoped very much that he would lose.