Walsh (D) |
Slaughter (R) |
Spread |
34 |
47 |
Slaughter +13 |
New mothers and candidates for elected office quickly realize how much caffeine and adrenaline will allow you to accomplish. In the six months since Charlotte returned to Elk Hollow she hadn’t slept more than four hours a night. Now she was on her fifth cup of coffee of the day. Coffee might have been counterproductive to soothing her nerves, but without it she’d have been facedown on the floor. She longed for the coffee even before she closed her eyes at night, anticipating new exhaustion even as she dispelled the old.
The learning curve on the campaign wasn’t just steep, it was treacherous. Her first few months had felt like skiing down a sheet of ice.
“The speech needs to be at least ten minutes shorter,” she instructed Alex, a speechwriter, and Leila, who was better at writing for her than any of the new kids on her staff. “No one needs to listen to me blather on. We don’t need to talk at them for an hour.”
“Good point.” Josh crept noiselessly behind them. “Trim it to eleven minutes for good measure. Voters want you to answer three questions: ‘Can you get me more money?’ ‘Will you keep my family safe?’ And—my personal favorite—‘How are you like me?’ You never need to answer anything else.”
Everything Charlotte had heard about Josh was true. He’d thrown himself into her campaign deeply and completely, applying a laser-like focus to winning at all costs. He didn’t even mind wading through hundreds of résumés with the subject line “I’m the Next Olivia Pope.” He went thirteen rounds with a yard sign manufacturer who managed to mangle the slogan CHARLOTTE WALSH CAN FIX PA thirteen different ways. They’d already crisscrossed the state together twenty times hosting intimate barbecues and spaghetti dinners with small groups of voters and local stakeholders in the hopes that free food would make people remember Charlotte Walsh nearly a year from now.
But even after six months together Charlotte was still learning her campaign manager’s idiosyncrasies, and one of them was that Josh rarely wore shoes or socks indoors.
“I spent some time in Tibet” was his brief explanation when she questioned his bare feet.
A consequence of this was that it allowed him to slither silently around the office like a wild cat stalking its prey, making it easy for him to sneak up on Charlotte. When she turned, he was just two inches behind her. “What’s up with your eyes?” He asked this in a way that was neither insulting nor curious, but merely indicated he’d identified a problem. As he examined her crow’s feet he bent at the waist so his sweater crept up his spine and exposed the crack of his backside to the rest of the room. He smelled like Cool Ranch Doritos.
“Hmmmm?” Charlotte barely looked up from her computer screen.
“Your eyes. They’re droopy. You look tired. We should have gotten you Botox last week.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you possess all the warmth and delicacy of a Russian gymnastics coach?” Leila stood, elongated her spine, and stretched her arms high above her head to make the most of her five feet two inches, her tightly braided topknot giving the impression that she was taller. She raised her brows into symmetrical parabolas.
“Da.” Josh smirked. “Prekratite suki. Vy imeyete v vidu zhenshchinu.”
“What the hell does that mean and why do you speak Russian?” Leila recoiled at his guttural pronunciation.
“It means ‘Stop bitching, you mean woman,’ which I don’t mean, of course, because I would never say that to a woman, but it’s one of five phrases I learned when I ran a campaign in the Ukraine.”
“Oh, I think you mean it.” Leila narrowed her eyes. “Well, here in the States, a man should never tell a woman to get Botox.”
“Blame Hollywood. No one on television looks like they’re between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five. You go straight from Miley Cyrus to Helen Mirren. In the world of the high-definition screens you hold in your hand, everyone gets Botox. If Nixon could have gotten injections that made him stop sweating during that televised debate with Kennedy, he would have begged for the needle faster than you can say ‘Deep Throat.’ ”
Josh faced Charlotte and placed his index fingers at her temples as if he were about to give her a massage. Instead he pulled the skin back toward her ears. Charlotte swatted him away.
“I don’t do Botox.” She didn’t meet Leila’s eyes.
He shrugged and moved on. “Suit yourself.”
Josh padded away, his feline feet hardly making a sound on the linoleum floor of the Walsh for Senate headquarters in Scranton, Pennsylvania. They had found the place in January. The owner of the building was desperate for cash after the previous tenant, an EZ-Rent-a-Car, packed up and left Scranton with a week’s notice. It was just a single story with one large room, strip lighting, well-worn green carpet, concrete walls, and a grid of tinted windows at eye level; the building had seen better days, but the addition of tables, computers, phones, and WALSH CAN FIX IT placards and lawn signs covering every available surface provided a patina of authenticity.
They’d tacked an enormous map of the state of Pennsylvania cordoned off into sixty-seven counties and further segmented by voting district on the wall. Charlotte quickly learned there wasn’t one type of Pennsylvanian. There were plenty of coastal elites due to the Ivy League college and abundance of law schools. There were old men who used to work in coal mines and younger men who used to work in steel mills, truck drivers, hippies, rednecks, cis-feminists, queers, white trash, Quakers, the Amish, the working poor, union thugs, self-proclaimed hillbillies on the border with West Virginia, illegal immigrants, and upwardly mobile second-generation Latinos. Parts of Pennsylvania had become a breeding ground for leftist anarchists and neofascists. The state was a microcosm of America, which made it less surprising it hadn’t yet elected a woman senator or governor.
Charlotte tasked a former chief people officer from Humanity, Arlene Atlas, to help Josh hire a staff of thirty, including five county directors, two fundraisers, two data scientists, a digital strategist, and a media buyer. There were three press officers, all former reporters for Pennsylvania newspapers—one from each end of the state and one from the middle.
“It’s not normal that he walks around barefoot,” Leila remarked as Josh padded away.
“He says it keeps him Zen.” Charlotte squinted at his feet. “If this is what he’s like Zen, can you imagine what he’d be like if we made him wear shoes all day?”
“At least he has decent-looking toes.” Leila rolled her eyes with intention and freed a lock of her shiny dark hair from its bun to twirl it around her index finger. “You know I saw him reading Eat, Pray, Love the other day.”
Before Charlotte could respond, her phone chirped. A text from Max.
Dinner at 6??
It was nearly five thirty. The drive home would take at least forty-five minutes and she had more work to do. As her fingers hovered over the screen, the phone chirped again with a text and photo.
Ravenous munchkins
In the picture Max had texted to her Annie was naked and covered in glitter. Rejecting clothes and then smearing things on her body was a new stage of the child’s terrible twos, one Max had no idea how to deal with, and so he ignored it. Just about every time Charlotte looked at her kids, in person and in photos, she felt a rush of accomplishment and awe—I created that—quickly followed by anxiety: How am I messing them up? I’m definitely messing them up, right?
Charlotte examined her staff, all of them diligently pecking at three screens at once. Spending her days surrounded by brilliant kids right out of college, all of them convinced their next tweet would change the world, wasn’t so different from running a company in Silicon Valley. The office buzzed with polite enthusiasm as staffers made fundraising calls, cold calls, press calls, all extolling the virtues of Charlotte Walsh. She’d made it clear she was entering the race six months ago. There’d been no need for a primary, since no other Democratic candidate had emerged this year to take on Ted Slaughter. Before Charlotte had come along, the DNC hadn’t seen the point in seeding a candidate who didn’t have a chance. On good days, she believed their support for her candidacy meant they thought she had a chance.
Next Monday’s speech would be her first big televised speech as an official candidate, a fact that exhilarated and terrified her. Her staff would be here for at least another few hours tonight, and then again tomorrow and again on Sunday. The guilt of leaving them hardened into a knot in her stomach. But the guilt of abandoning Max and the girls felt heavier.
“I’ve missed dinner with the kids every night this week,” she said out loud to no one in particular, even though Leila was the only one within earshot. Back in California, both Charlotte and Max had worked eighty-hour weeks, but they’d always made it home in time for dinner, and they wouldn’t touch their computers or phones again until after the girls went to bed.
“You’ll never make it home in time.” Leila informed her of what she already knew.
“Are we done for the day?”
“No. You need to meet a prospective Instagram producer.”
“She’ll be working more closely with you than anyone else on the social team.”
Leila gave her a rundown. “She last worked at one of those celebrity lifestyle sites that promotes five-hundred-dollar socks and lotion made of dolphin placenta. Josh calls her a genius at aspirational marketing. I don’t think you’ll like her, but you’ll tolerate her. She has a lot of energy. I’ll go get her.”
“Good energy?”
Leila rolled her eyes. “Just a lot of it.”
Charlotte tried not to appear taken aback as the extremely pretty redheaded elf of a girl rushed at her with a hug and then held her at arm’s length like an old great-aunt and smiled, her blazing hair partially obscuring a tiny face the color of Ivory soap.
“Lovely to meet you. Just lovely.” She spoke with the contrived and practiced accent common to overeducated young women with trust funds—partially New York, a little Cape Cod, and slightly British. She wore just the right amount of lipstick.
“Hey.”
“Charlotte, meet Lulu.” Josh made a more formal introduction.
“Lulu is such an unusual name,” Charlotte remarked. “Where does it come from?”
The girl had clearly been asked this question many times. “It was my great-grandmother’s name. Lulabelle, actually. She was from Poland but was adopted by a German family during World War Two. After she died, my dad tracked down her adoption records and discovered that a family had taken her in when her birth parents were taken away to Bergen-Belsen. And that’s how we became Jewish.”
It was clear to Charlotte that Lulu used this story to convey that she was interesting in addition to being beautiful.
Josh interrupted her and offered rare praise. “Lulu’s a wizard when it comes to accessible aspiration.”
“Excuse me?” Charlotte wasn’t sure how those words were meant to create a phrase. “I’ve got an Instagram already.”
Lulu patted her hand. One of her navy-blue nails, and only one of them, was crisscrossed with white stripes. “Don’t worry, honey.” The girl took on an affected nurturing tone. “You want your life to seem just thirty percent more amazing and wonderful and beautiful than that of the person who is consuming the content—the Instagram user, the Snapchatter, whatever. That means things like family photos on the beach in Saint Lucia are alienating, but well-dressed children in color-coordinated outfits playing on the local playground are good. Those are aspirational because no one color-coordinates their children’s outfits, or even finds a clean T-shirt on most days. Another good example: I don’t want to see a picture of you hugging Jay-Z and Beyoncé. I saw a pic of you three at the Hurricane Alfred fundraiser last year. So cute. Love Bey. But it could be alienating. I do want to see beautiful lemon squares baked in the shape of Pennsylvania for the school bake sale.”
“I hate to break it to you.” Charlotte put her own hand on top of Lulu’s like they were playing that children’s game where everyone races to pile their hands the highest. “I don’t have a whole lot of time to be focusing on baking lemon squares or making my Instagram accessibly aspirational.”
Lulu didn’t blink. “You don’t have to do anything. You smile and comb your own hair and I do it all for you. I Photoshop most of it, smooth over the rough edges. Public figures have no choice but to reveal so much of their lives online these days. But it pays off. It really pays off. It’s one of the reasons Gwyneth has been so successful.”
“It’s a little different.” Charlotte tried to stifle a laugh. “Gwyneth Paltrow isn’t a politician.”
Lulu wasn’t put off. “Oh, but she could be if she wanted to. Trust.”
“Does Ted Slaughter have an Instagram?”
Leila chimed in. “His granddaughter runs it. It’s mostly pics of his daughters and their children. They don’t put pictures of him on there.” From three marriages, Ted Slaughter had eight daughters, aged nine to fifty, all of them achingly beautiful except for the fourth, who Charlotte thought made up for being homely by being the thinnest. They’d produced a pack of sixteen well-groomed grandchildren and six great-grandchildren, each of whom attended every one of Slaughter’s campaign events, often lined up by height and occasionally singing like Von Trapps.
“Of course they don’t.” Lulu shuddered. “He doesn’t photograph well! He looks like the Crypt Keeper on a good day. Besides, it’s different for male public figures. Their personal lives aren’t as interesting to the public. No one cares about how they look when they wake up in the morning. Let me tell you a little about my vision. We’ll schedule a day, maybe two, of photo shoots, make it look like a year’s worth of photos. Next, I’ll do your husband’s social media. I assume that’s fair game. We need to use him to appeal to women voters. Not that he doesn’t. He’s very handsome. But I want him softer. More pics with the kids. I want him covered in children, like a delicious lactose-free chocolate sundae smothered in toddlers instead of fudge.”
Leila cut in. “You’d need to be on the campaign trail with us. This isn’t a desk job. It sounds fancy, but it’s shit. We don’t stay in nice hotels. Strange hours, a lot of work.”
“I don’t mind,” Lulu said with conviction. “I’m good at roughing it. I did a semester at sea.”
Josh seemed amused by her answer. “That must have been really rough,” he said with the appropriate amount of sarcasm. “Your work is good though. We’ll talk about it and get back to you by Monday.” One of their aides appeared then to whisk Lulu out of the office and point her in the direction of the bus station for her return to New York.
“If she survives that Greyhound ride she can have the job.” Josh snickered. “Last time I took it some guy peed on me.”
With Lulu out of the way, Charlotte sank into her chair and yawned.
“Why don’t you have Max and the kids meet you at a restaurant in between here and home?” Leila said, two steps ahead of Charlotte.
“Good idea. You’re brilliant.”
“I’m practical.”
Charlotte tapped at her phone.
Meet me at the Fridays on Route 6??
Three blinking dots showed Max responding. Why am I holding my breath?
I started a meatloaf.
Once in a while, Max got a wild hair to do some cooking, and he relished making an elaborate performance of it. Charlotte rubbed her temples and pictured her husband chopping onions while wearing his swimming goggles so his eyes wouldn’t tear up, an act that always made the girls laugh from their bellies no matter how ornery they were by dinnertime.
A restaurant will be nice. And easy. No cleanup
fine
She hated these single-word texts, how aggressive they could feel.
Maybe put some clothes on the baby?
Anything else boss?
He’d begun referring to her as “boss” only recently, in the past couple of months, after she was no longer technically his boss. She hated it. They’d both forced themselves to pretend the move to Elk Hollow would be an exciting adventure, and in the beginning there was an enlivening sense of something old becoming new again, like the exhilaration of finding your favorite sweater in the back of your closet after not seeing it for five years. Max had almost seemed to enjoy their new life through December in Elk Hollow, when snow pummeled the valley and he could go backcountry skiing a few times a week. But a brief warm spell followed by a bitter cold front turned the snow to slick black ice, making it difficult to even go running on the trails behind their house. He was relegated to training for his race on a treadmill in the basement and finding ways to occupy the three girls in the house on weekends. At least one of the three always had a cough and a snotty nose.
“Sometimes I feel trapped,” he complained. “Like I’m a prisoner locked up with these children.”
It wouldn’t do much good to tell him he was experiencing the crisis nearly every professional woman who left work to take care of her children felt at some point.
Max had been momentarily enthused at the prospect of helping Charlotte manage her digital staff. “I can build you a tool that will identify and retarget voters with unique, highly personalized content,” he told her one night before bed. She was excited at his excitement, but Josh quickly shot down the idea. “No spouses work on my campaigns. It’s a recipe for disaster. Every day would be like an episode of Mad About You.”
Charlotte knew Max felt humiliated when she told him they didn’t need his help.
It was a lie that eating at Fridays would be easier, and Max would be in a terrible mood now when she arrived at the restaurant. Nothing about eating with a toddler and two five-year-olds in public was easy, but it was better than missing dinner with her family again.
Charlotte glanced sideways at Leila. “Come to dinner with us?”
“You want a buffer,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“You have to be starving.” Of course I want a buffer. Max and I get along when you’re around. “And I don’t want you to spend another night sleeping at the office. It’s not healthy.” Grateful wasn’t a strong enough word to describe how she felt every day that Leila had uprooted her own life in California and moved into an Embassy Suites just a couple of blocks from here to continue as her right-hand woman.
“Okay. Let’s take separate cars though. I’ll be right behind you. I want to read the speech out loud with Alex again.”
“Print out a few copies of the speech and bring it with you. I’ll go over it more tonight. It has to be perfect.” Better than perfect. It has to be the best fucking speech I’ve ever given in my entire life.
“Did Josh tell you Slaughter is giving his own rally this weekend, on Sunday?”
Now that Charlotte had watched more than fifty hours of her opponent’s speeches, his low, booming voice haunted her dreams. She handwrote pages of notes about him on yellow legal pads, clocking his strengths and weaknesses. He appeared strong, imposing, and looked the part of an old-school politician straight from central casting, with his broad shoulders and well-sculpted hair. It became quickly evident to Charlotte that he was more a chameleon than a strict party booster. As a man who adored the superlative, Slaughter shifted his shape to suit whatever crowd cheered him on. To former factory workers he was a laborer who’d gotten his first job at age fifteen, helping lay concrete for the foundations of some of Pittsburgh’s most prominent skyscrapers. He consistently promised to bring the steel and iron jobs back to the state, and when it didn’t happen, he blamed the lazy bastards in DC. To the businessmen, he advocated lower taxes, smaller government, the eradication of the minimum wage. He was a god in rural counties that benefited from his lenient policies on fracking. And despite his conservative policies on abortion rights and the fact he led the charge to defund Planned Parenthood, to the young women he was a kindly, if slightly senile and racist, grandpa. No one local wanted to waste the money to run against the man with the rare gift of electrifying his party’s base and fringe Democrats who voted on guns and abortion. Slaughter’s peculiar likability was only one of the reasons he handily destroyed anyone who dared run against him until few even bothered to try. There were even whispers that the Slaughter campaign paid out six-figure checks to keep opponents out of the race. Anyone interested in national office in Pennsylvania just ran for the House.
“I have three trackers attending Slaughter’s rally.” There was Josh again. He’d probably been listening behind them the whole time. Charlotte had only recently learned of the existence of the campaign trackers—a small army of eager junior staffers who followed the opposition on the campaign trail to document their every move. They employed ten of them in total. A single video of a candidate going off script or saying the wrong thing could go viral and do as much service or damage as a multimillion-dollar ad campaign.
“One will film it in case he says something ridiculous, which he will. It also gives us the chance to chat with the press he has covering him. You’ll get more ink than he will this week. He hasn’t had a formidable opponent in years and certainly not one as camera-friendly as you. We paint him as the status quo, a DC insider, untrustworthy, an old man without the stamina to bring about real change. What has he really done for the voters of Pennsylvania? Absolutely nothing. You’re an agent of change. You’re young and vibrant and you get shit done. We keep reinforcing that narrative over and over and over until you won’t be able to stand hearing it one more time. We’ve got this covered.”
Charlotte took comfort in his words. She knew Josh used “We’ve got this covered” as a recurring refrain to reassure the parts of her that believed what they were doing might be impossible.
“Now, I’ve also fixed your Google problem.”
“Which one?” Charlotte sighed. Facebook and Google search were the bane of a modern candidate’s existence.
“We’ve bought Google sidebar ads against search terms containing your name to show only positive articles about your accomplishments at Humanity. We bought ads against Slaughter’s name that lead to a landing page that lists all of the campaign promises he’s broken in the past ten years. Now it’s just a race to see who can throw the most money at it.”
“And how much money are we throwing at it?”
“Two hundred fifty thousand for this month.”
“Jesus Christ, Josh.”
“It’s working. And it reminds me, we need a million more by the end of this month.”
*
By six thirty Charlotte was behind the wheel. Relief at being alone, at not having to be anybody’s boss or mother for a blessed ten minutes, took over her entire body. It felt like she’d been wearing too-tight shoes for a week and had never even thought, I could just take these off.
She texted Max.
On my way
We ordered already
I’m coming as fast as I can
Don’t text and drive. Isn’t that part of your campaign platform?
Charlotte’s phone buzzed a minute later with a final text from Max.
You know you’re the most beautiful girl in the world
Charlotte felt her face grow red at the compliment before her mind went to a dangerous place. Was this text meant for me? Who else would it be for? Stop it. Do not allow yourself to go there.
She’d grown up going to TGI Fridays on special occasions—birthdays, graduations, that time her brother’s Little League team won the state championship—but she hadn’t set foot inside a chain restaurant once she’d moved to the West Coast. They mostly frequented restaurants where the phrase “farm to fork” had long ago become passé in favor of “heirloom nose to tail” and other obsequious descriptors that allowed food to cost five times what it should. In the six months they’d been living in Pennsylvania, Charlotte had reacquired a taste for the loaded potato skins, blooming onions, and endless breadsticks of Fridays, Outback Steakhouse, and the Olive Garden.
Charlotte bypassed the cheery hostess inside the door and turned right at a canoe holding two taxidermied raccoons paddling upstream. She kept a brisk pace with her shoulders back and heard her mother’s voice in her head: Girl, who you tryin’ to impress?
Max and the girls were already seated in a roomy corner booth, grabbing at a plate of quesadillas so large it could feed an entire football team. As she watched them she thought you’d never know she’d uprooted their entire lives and moved them across the country. They’d tried several ways to explain the move and Mommy’s new job to the twins, but by far the most effective explanation was Leila’s:
“If Voldemort became president, wouldn’t you want your mommy to travel to Hogwarts to fight with Harry to defeat him?” This led to enthusiastic approval from her children for both her candidacy and the state of Pennsylvania.
All three girls held separate iPads while Max tapped on his phone. They’d once had rules about screen time, particularly at the dinner table, rules Max now ignored as their primary caregiver. Charlotte could say something about it, but that would give him an opening to complain about how late she was and the rest of the night would turn to shit. She took her own phone out of her pocket to see if he was texting her.
No new messages.
“Hey, Nuggets!” Charlotte leaned in to kiss Max on the lips but missed and got the nub of his chin instead. She smiled through a jab of anxiety and tried to sound unrushed and cheery.
Annie pointed a chubby finger at her. “Mommy’s late!”
“You can’t tell time.” She kissed Annie’s tangled curls and lifted her out of her high chair and onto her lap. Max might have gotten the toddler dressed, but she’d clearly chosen the tiara, purple-sequined tutu, and pint-size Philadelphia Eagles jersey. Upon closer inspection, Charlotte noticed that both the twins and Max were also wearing sequined tutus around their waists. Her heart went to butter.
“What’d you order me?”
“Nothing,” Max grunted, his mouth filled with tortilla and cheese. “I didn’t know what you wanted.”
She blinked a couple of times before responding. “Where’s our waiter?”
Her husband slid a menu from beneath his bread plate. “I kept this for you. He’ll be back in a minute.” Max’s jaw twitched like he wanted to tell her something else, but he pushed a piece of quesadilla toward her instead. She doused the grease-covered triangle in Tabasco and opened the menu.
“Charlie Walsh? Is that you?” Charlotte looked up to the grinning face of her high school boyfriend standing a few feet from her husband. Her brain struggled to make the connection as she checked the name tag drooping from the pocket of his green Fridays-issued polo shirt tucked into black pleated pants a size too big for him. How had Max neglected to tell her that the boy who’d taken her virginity was their waiter at Fridays?
Charlotte ran her tongue over her teeth to catch any stray pieces of food. “Jack? What are you doing here? You’re working here? That’s great.” She said it with too much enthusiasm. Sunken hollows had taken up residency beneath Jack’s solemn brown eyes, and he looked like he’d recently lost ten pounds he hadn’t needed to lose.
She really ought to get up and give him a hug, but there was a child on her lap. A handshake felt too formal for someone who had seen her naked.
She’d fallen hard for Jack Seligson when they were lab partners in sophomore AP chemistry. They were a perfectly imperfect match of weirdos. He had a stutter. She was painfully shy. It took a semester for them to speak about anything beyond thermodynamics. Once he finally asked her out on a date—well, if driving around town and singing along to Queen songs, then watching Back to the Future in his parents’ finished basement counted as a date—they became inseparable.
His dad was a dentist, which made his family relatively well off. They had two cars and owned skis. Their relative wealth often made Charlotte feel like the protagonist in a John Hughes movie even though their town didn’t have railroad tracks. One night she overheard Jack’s sister talking about her to their mom when they thought the two of them had already left the house. “That Walsh girl is so sweet even though her family’s such trash,” his sister said. The memory of that comment still stung to this day.
Jack and Charlotte spent most evenings studying and eating frozen Tombstone pizza in his parents’ kitchen. She’d leave at night and he would sneak into her bedroom window three times a week for fumbling and groping, and eventually unprotected sex in the filigreed princess canopy bed her dad had rescued from the curb. They talked about forever in the abstract way you imagine forever at sixteen.
For college, Jack had gone to Kutztown and Charlotte to the University of Pennsylvania, a school she’d chosen from the stack of glossy catalogs from her guidance counselor, who told her it was the best college in the state and that no one from their town had ever gotten in. That made Charlotte desperately want to be the first. Late one night after a six-pack and before the eleven o’clock news, Marty had told her he’d find a way to pay for the Ivy League college if she could get herself accepted and even though it was the well-meaning fib of a well-meaning drunk, she’d believed him. She’d worked her ass off, joined all the extracurriculars, including volleyball, where she got her nose smashed in the day before prom. She made valedictorian and got into Penn with a small amount of financial aid. Even though she’d made it happen through sheer force of will, Charlotte was surprised when they accepted her. Marty apologized over and over that despite his bluster, he couldn’t cover the rest of the tuition. Charlotte took out more than $100,000 in student loans in her own name and worked the night shift at Arby’s to cover the room and board.
At Penn her hall mates were the privileged offspring of the men and women who ran Wall Street, giant media conglomerates, and small countries. They were kids who took both their opportunity and their hope for granted. Charlotte’s advantage was that having grown up without those things gave her a resourcefulness and adaptability those kids didn’t have. She was never going to lose her mind when the dorm ran out of hot water, when the commissary didn’t stock tampons, or when a professor told her that her ideas were pedestrian.
Captivated by the conspicuous arms race for status at Penn, for the first time Charlotte knew she needed to do something both interesting and important with a capital I. The first semester of freshman year, high on possibility, she vowed she’d never live in Elk Hollow again, that she would join the elite ranks of her classmates’ parents, the ambiguous moneyed class that ran the world: the winners.
One of her roommates, Blair, pruned bonsai trees and bragged that Simon Le Bon’s cousin had been her babysitter. She gifted Charlotte a six-month-old Calvin Klein clutch because the tan shoulder bag Charlotte used was “sad.” Her other roommate, Anne Stratton, could have bought and sold all of them, but you’d never have known it looking at her in her flannel pajama bottoms, moth-eaten sweaters, and beat-up Doc Martens. She never talked about how her grandfather was the eleventh-richest man in the world and her father the ambassador to Japan. Her family minted their own money, which in turn minted its own money. She offered Charlotte her first lesson about wealth: When you had a lot of it you didn’t show it off.
“My mom’s name is Anne—well, Annemarie,” Charlotte said dumbly when they met, struck by the girl’s easy beauty.
“Do you like her? Your mom?” Anne asked as she spread a ragged wool blanket over the top bunk beneath a concert poster for Mano Negra in Mexico City. Charlotte thought hard about her answer, knowing it could set the tone for their entire relationship.
“She can be a real bitch sometimes and she’s addicted to pills.”
Anne smiled and lit a Parliament, not bothering to open a window.
“We’re going to get along just fine.”
It was Anne who took her to get an IUD and her first bikini wax, who convinced her it was ridiculous to keep dating a high school boyfriend a hundred miles away. Anne drove her to Elk Hollow for Marty Walsh’s funeral during their junior year and sang along to “Danny Boy” with drunk, sweaty union men. It was Anne who got Charlotte the job with Rosalind Waters a few years after college because Aunt Roz and Anne’s dad used to be poker buddies. Then, just six months after Charlotte moved to Maryland, Anne died in a collision with a tractor trailer on the icy Merritt Parkway. It was a heartbreak that Charlotte folded away, aware that if she let it, it would have upended her. Instead, she threw herself into work—Anne’s voice always echoing in her head: You got this, bitch! Still, it was like losing a limb—you always felt the absence—and for years she ached for a friendship so familiar and perfect. To a fault, she held all new acquaintances to the standard of Anne, one they would never be able to live up to. When Marty and Anne were gone Charlotte felt like an orphan, like there was no one left in the world who would willingly take care of her.
Now Charlotte looked up at Jack’s easy grin and felt an echo of delayed guilt that she’d never properly broken up with him, had just stopped returning his phone calls.
Last Charlotte saw on Facebook, Jack was married to a girl who was a year behind them in high school and had three kids, teenage boys. He was a teacher at the local high school, lived in the house he grew up in, inherited from his parents, and he played on a softball team called the Elk Hollow Buglers, comprised mostly of middle-aged teachers.
Early last year, when she’d felt defeated about herself and her marriage, she’d sent him a two-word message on Facebook: Hey you. He hadn’t responded. If he’d received that message or if he still held a grudge for how badly she’d treated him twenty years ago, he didn’t show it now as he stared at her holding a hot-sauce-drenched quesadilla. Now his grin was wide and honest.
Why was he working at Fridays?
Max cleared his throat. “You look real busy tonight. Charlie wants to order something quick. The girls are getting sleepy.” Of course Max blew Jack off. Her husband always had a real chip on his shoulder about him. Max was two years older than both of them, but she’d hardly known him back in high school. Max, then known as Maxwell, had been tall, quiet, and shy, preferring the company of computers over people and doodling dragons all over his textbook covers. He had a slight lisp and a gray tooth. He’d gotten a full scholarship to Penn State, where he’d become a whiz in computer science and engineering, and then escaped the East Coast for the Bay Area. That began Max’s transformation from dweeb to big swinging dick. Of course, a man’s teenage insecurity could linger forever like a bad smell. Did I consider that when I made him come back to the place where he’d once felt small and insignificant? Am I still punishing him?
Jack addressed the elephant in the room with a hollow chuckle. “I’ll bet you’re wondering what I’m doing here. I’m still teaching. So is Emily. But last year Em got sick. Cancer. School’s insurance doesn’t cover a lot of the treatments, so I picked up shifts here and odd jobs there.” When he cracked a lopsided smile, Charlotte remembered what it felt like to bite his lower lip and caught herself feeling a stitch of jealousy toward Emily, whose husband was so willing to do whatever it took to keep her healthy, whose eyes still smiled when he talked about her.
“You can only donate blood so many times.” Max’s lame excuse for a joke fell flat.
“And it’s less stressful than dealing meth,” Jack volleyed back, making Charlotte laugh.
Her stomach lurched at the idea that two people who’d dedicated their lives to teaching children didn’t get adequate medical care to treat cancer. She couldn’t think of what to say and immediately felt guilty about their own health care—Cadillac insurance accompanied by a concierge doctor on retainer for $80,000 a year who had the ability to get any member of her family an appointment with any specialist in the country at a moment’s notice.
She hoped her smile didn’t show her pity. “And it’s so hard to get good meth across state lines.” She hated herself the most when she tried to make jokes. “Do you want to sit down? Has the health care in the district always been this bad?” She rooted around in her purse for a pen with which to take notes.
Charlotte logged Max’s scowl and chose to ignore it. She stared at Jack’s hands, which were larger than average and made her think of his penis, which was long but narrow, and then she saw her child push her lemonade in the waiter’s direction and she felt hot and ashamed.
“Would you like to share my lemonade?” Rose offered. The twins were learning about sharing in their Elk Hollow public school, which Charlotte preferred to ecstatic dance and Greek tragedies. The offer was almost always followed by “Hereyougo. Takeit.”
“Charlie, you should order your food.” Max took his own sip of Rose’s drink and began spinning his phone like a top on the table, letting it clang against their water glasses.
She looked at the menu again and remembered Jack was working. “I should have a salad. How about the Cobb. Can I get it as soon as possible? So I can eat with my kids.” Her stomach grumbled. “Stop. Scratch that. I’ll have the steak fajitas. I’d love to talk to you more later about health care in the state.”
He nodded. “It’s a long story, the health-care problem for teachers here. But, yeah, it’s a mess. They scaled the benefits back in the past year. Your food can all come out at once. I’m glad you came in tonight, Charlie. I read on Facebook that you’re running for Senate and I think that’s great.”
If he’d read that on Facebook, then he must have gotten her message and ignored it. She felt a blush creep up her neck at the knowledge of this and his praise, in addition to the feeling of pride that she could be the one who could fix his problems.
“We need people like you—people who left and were successful. You’ve got my vote.” He’d smiled more at her in the past five minutes than she’d seen Max smile all week.
“Thank you,” she said to Jack. “And I want to hear more about you and your situation.” Charlotte groaned inside. Situation is a terrible word, the kind of word used to describe someone’s second marriage to a woman young enough to be his daughter. “Maybe Leila, my chief of staff, could call you and we could set up a meeting to talk about what it’s like for teachers here and how I might be able to help.”
“I’d like that. Let me go back to the kitchen to get those fajitas.” He produced a couple of stubby red and blue crayons from his back pocket and placed them in front of the girls. “You know the tablecloth is paper. You can draw your mom a pretty picture.”
Thank God Leila arrived just then. When Max shifted his attention to her his sneer morphed into a smile. Max was never a jerk when Leila was around. He was always trying to impress her, to endear himself to her in a way Charlotte found touching instead of irritating, because she loved the girl so much. Max changed the subject completely. “Ella, Rose, Annie, and I were having a serious discussion before the two of you got here. Leila, would you rather be a giant rabbit or a tiny elephant?”
“Tiny elephant, no question.”
“Give it a real think before you answer. Imagine the inferiority complex a tiny elephant might develop,” Max said.
“But it would be so cute,” Leila said.
“Would it?” Ella asked with surprising intensity. “Would it really?”
Leila plucked Annie from Charlotte’s lap and lifted her shirt over her head to blow wet raspberries on her stomach as she squeezed in next to Max.
He slung his arm over Leila’s shoulder. “Lee, did you pick this place knowing that Charlotte’s ex-boyfriend was a waiter here?”
No question, no matter how random, ever rattled Leila. “I picked it for the extra-large margaritas and tasteful taxidermy. Which ex-boyfriend?”
“High school. I don’t think I ever mentioned him,” Charlotte said, turning to make sure that Jack was out of earshot before she filled Leila in on their encounter.
“But can you believe it?” she asked the two of them once she’d gone through Jack’s story.
“That your high school boyfriend is starting to lose his hair?” Max snorted. “I can believe that.”
Max’s hand moved instinctively to the back of his own head, where his usually thick hair was just starting to thin, where there were maybe even the beginnings of a bald spot.
“No. Can you believe that he’s working here?”
“Like he said, it’s better than dealing drugs. The world’s going to hell. Isn’t that why you’re running for office? To change the world and improve the lives of the middle class.” Max assumed the teasing and slightly patronizing tone their Silicon Valley friends and associates used when discussing the general population of America. Max, much more than she, preferred the tech-world bubble, the idyllic utopia detached from the rest of the country where dreams still came true and where if something bad happened, if your search engine failed or your start-up fell to pieces, CEOs and entrepreneurs still walked away with millions of dollars and the ability to launch their new dream the next day. He’d forgotten about what real desperation could look like, and that disappointed Charlotte, how thoroughly Max had lost touch with his roots.
Charlotte turned her attention to the girls. “Tell me about your day.”
Annie twisted her head around to look at her mother. “I pooped in the toilet.” Charlotte looked at Max.
“She didn’t,” he mouthed. The baby laughed so hard her face turned purple.
Charlotte flagged Jack down with an overly enthusiastic wave of both her hands when Max left the table to go to the bathroom after dessert. “Let me get your number?”
“I’ll send you a Facebook message with it.” He grinned at her. Was it an acknowledgment of her stupid note to him?
“He’s cute,” Leila remarked once he was out of earshot. “Like a mixture of Coach Taylor with post-Matrix Keanu Reeves.”
Charlotte rolled her eyes as if to say that she didn’t notice those kinds of things, even though she had immediately noticed the exact same thing. Leila looked past her shoulder to the door of the men’s bathroom to see if Max was about to return to the table.
“Meeting Jack gave me an idea for your speech next week.”
“Oh yeah?” Charlotte said, picking up her napkin and twisting it into a rope. Just the mention of the speech quickened her pulse.
Leila gave her a reassuring wink. “Stay calm, girl. It’s a good one. But it’s definitely going to piss Max off.”