Max could have been on a plane back to San Francisco already, but Charlotte doubted it. For all his flaws, her husband was a good father and he wouldn’t have left their girls without saying goodbye.
Charlotte put on a baseball cap she found in the footwell of their van and pushed the brim low over her face as she walked into O’Puddy’s. With her khakis and white button-down, she didn’t pass for a regular. Linda, the rusty-haired cocktail waitress who’d fixed her Shirley Temples as a little girl, still worked the bar, and whistled as Charlotte squinted through the smoke. A decade ago, Pennsylvania banned smoking in most bars, but places like O’Puddy’s took pleasure in discounting the law.
“Looky what the pussycat dragged in. Hey, girl,” Linda hollered in a throaty voice. “Get over here.”
Linda had been her father’s favorite bartender forty years ago. Maybe she’d been more than that. Thin as a rail with penciled-in eyebrows and blue eye shadow caked into the folds of her eyelids, she wore a purple tank top with lace straps, the flesh below her arms dripping like cake batter that had boiled over the pan. The waist of her jeans was high and tight around the flabby bulge of her stomach.
“Sit down, girl. What can get I you?” The smell of stale beer soaked into carpet made Charlotte’s stomach turn.
“I’m good.” Charlotte looked around the bar. No sign of her husband. In the back of the bar three guys played a game of dominoes in one booth. A man slumped low in his seat at the next table over, his head resting on the table. No one moved to wake him or ask him to leave. A television bolted into the corner showed a golf tournament being played somewhere warm, tropical, and far away from here, maybe Hawaii. A second TV was tuned to a conservative news network, where an orange-faced pundit opened his mouth in an angry sneer that looked theatrical with the volume turned down. Beneath him were the words AMERICA IN CRISIS. When is America not in crisis these days? A mailman recently off his shift parked his metal cart next to his barstool. Toby Keith’s “How Do You Like Me Now?!” warbled out of a dusty jukebox: Do you still think I’m crazy standing here today?
“Come on, honey. Have a drink,” Linda pressed her. “It’s five o’clock somewhere.” It was currently two o’clock in Elk Hollow, Pennsylvania.
Feeling pressure to be polite, Charlotte settled onto one of the few empty stools. “I’ll have a whiskey and Coke.”
“That’s my girl. You want a cherry in it for old time’s sake?”
“Yeah, for old time’s sake.”
“Hey Walsh,” the man to her left said. He could have been fifty or eighty. Ruptured veins along his nose splashed pink down his nostrils and across his cheeks. He was probably closer to her dad’s age, Marty’s age if he’d still been alive, which would have been what? Seventy? Seventy-one? He weighed close to three hundred pounds and sported a close-cropped haircut that let her know he was former military. His right eyelid drooped toward his cheek, making him appear weak or stupid, but Charlotte could tell he was neither of those things.
“You taking a break from the campaign today?”
His drinking buddy spilled his elbows over the bar and turned to get a better look at her. “You’re the girl runnin’ for governor.”
“Shut it, Mick. She’s runnin’ for Senate.” Mick shrugged and took a sip of his drink. His hands had a slight tremor. “What’s the difference.” It wasn’t a question. “She ain’t gonna pay my mortgage.”
“No, thank you. I have one.” And she wanted to finish it as quickly as possible. She waved for Linda. “Hey, Linda, you seen Max?” Linda tipped her head to one side to try to find the relevant information in her brain.
“Not this week. I saw him last week. He came in here for a beer last week, I think.”
“Today, though? Have you seen Max today?”
Linda considered it again. “I don’t think so, hon. I been on since eleven. I don’t think I woulda missed him.”
“I don’t think you would have either.” Charlotte took too large of a swallow. Her eyes warmed with the drink. Two more gulps like that one and it would be finished.
“Maybe Paul’s seen him.”
“I’ll give him a call.” She knew that she wouldn’t. The last time she’d talked to Kara that morning, Paul was off on another bender. He’d sent a few texts confirming he was still alive, but he had yet to come home.
Confusion rippled Linda’s forehead. “He’s right there. Just go ask him.” She pointed a turquoise fingernail toward the back of the bar. Charlotte looked back again at the man asleep in the back booth. Why hadn’t she recognized him before? The wiry neck, the thinning black hair. It was her brother, all right.
The man with the red nose and short hair was smiling at her like he needed to say something. He wasn’t drunk, but his eyes were watery and glassy.
“We’re on your side, kid. You’ll get us new jobs. We believe in you.” He was missing an incisor on the left side. “I voted for Slaughter for the past thirty years but you got me. I trust you. You won’t give us the runaround with that job-retraining bullshit. Who the hell do those people think I am? They think I’m gonna learn to install solar panels for a bunch of fuckin’ yuppies. I got good skills. I don’t need new ones.”
She wanted to say something big and profound, but the words wouldn’t come. His belief in her filled her entire body with dread. She would never be able to create jobs this man would qualify for. The best she could do would be to bring more distribution centers for e-commerce companies, maybe plant the seeds for a Rust Belt Silicon Valley, but what would that do for him? She kept peddling hope no one could deliver. Her hand tingled as she took another gulp of the whiskey and was surprised to see the bottom of the glass. Linda grabbed the empty, and before Charlotte could protest, she’d refilled it.
“Thanks,” she said with real humility, feeling foolish for not having anything better to say. This could have been the first unscripted conversation she’d had with a voter in months. “I’m gonna do my best.”
“You’ll be great, kid. I didn’t have any daughters. I got three good-for-nothing sons. They all left here. But that was for the best. The young people should leave. But if I had a girl I’d like if she woulda been like you. Real smart-like. Doin’ something with her life. Your dad woulda been real proud. I bet da old bastard is lookin down or up from wherever he is right now and thinkin’ he done one good thing raisin’ youse.”
The mention of Marty and the whiskey softened her and made her feel a real affection for the man. She cursed the tears welling in the corners of her eyes. This campaign had begun as a way to heal, but instead it had peeled back layers of emotion she’d believed were long buried.
“Thank you. I should go. But thank you. I appreciate it.” She grabbed both his hands in hers and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. It was rough, and the taste of tobacco smoke and Old Spice lingered on her lips when she pulled away. “I really am going to do my best.” She noticed a pack of crumpled Newports on the bar next to the man’s sweaty beer mug.
“Can I take a couple of those for the road?”
He handed her the entire pack. “You look like you could use more than two.”
Charlotte stood to walk back toward her brother. I’ll wake him up. I’ll tell him he’s got to go to rehab. I’ll pay for rehab. His head lurched to the side and he let out a long, low burp, followed by the kind of smile a baby enjoys after relieving himself.
Or maybe I don’t have to be the one to fix him. Maybe it isn’t my job to fix him.
She turned to Linda. “Make sure he gets home okay.”
It wasn’t until she reached the car that she pulled her phone from her pocket and noticed the four missed calls from Roz.
“Where are you?”
“Looking for Max.” Charlotte noticed a tinny, faraway quality to her voice. “Where are you?”
“I’m on my way to Elk Hollow.”
“Who called you?” She had never imagined when she first met Rosalind Waters more than twenty years earlier that she would feel such relief at knowing her mentor was coming to help her.
“Leila and then Josh. How are you holding up?” Roz’s voice contained the right amount of empathy.
“I’m not.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“How much did they tell you?”
“Everything. Thought it would be easier for them to tell me than for you to have to fill me in. They wanted my advice.”
“I can’t picture Josh wanting anyone’s advice.”
“He didn’t ask for it.”
“How close are you?”
“Just past Philly. Plymouth Meeting. I’ve always thought Plymouth Meeting was a terrible name for a town.”
“Blame the Quakers.”
“They got a lot of things right and a couple of things wrong. We would probably have been better off if they’d stayed in charge. What are you going to say to Max?” Roz’s big voice echoed through the car speakers.
“I don’t know. Beg him to do what we need to do to help me stay in this race?” Charlotte said automatically. “Should I stay in this race?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“What would you do?”
“I’d stay in the race.” Roz didn’t say anything else for a minute. Charlotte heard her flick the turning blinker and spin the steering wheel. When she spoke next she changed the subject. “Have I told you that I haven’t written the opening chapter of my memoir yet?”
“Shouldn’t you do that first? Isn’t that how a memoir starts? With a beginning?”
“I couldn’t figure out how to start so I skipped it and wrote through it. When I got past the beginning I was able to push through the next four hundred pages. I keep coming up with opening lines like ‘There are a few things you probably don’t know about me.’ ”
“It’s no ‘Call me Ishamel,’ but it isn’t bad.”
“I’m also thinking, ‘It’s the worst of times and also the worst of times. . . .’ ” Roz’s brawny laughter filled the car. “My book’s about regret. It took me twenty years of therapy, twenty-seven chapters, two different editors, and a new ghostwriter to realize that. It’s about the road not taken, the road I wasn’t allowed to take.” Charlotte envied Roz’s ability to be so introspective.
“But you had an incredible career. You were a governor, a congresswoman. You were the ambassador to the UN.”
“I could have been more.”
At the turnout for Bear Cove, she saw Max’s car parked just beyond the guardrail where the road turned to dirt. Charlotte pulled in next to it and lit one of the Newports.
“I found him.”
“Are you ready for this conversation?”
“I don’t have a choice.” Before they hung up, there was one last question she needed to ask. Roz’s regret had to have something to do with Richard, with all his baggage and bullshit holding her back all these years. “Why didn’t you ever divorce Richard? All those other women for so long. Once you made it to Congress, why didn’t you leave him?”
“The truth?”
“Of course.”
Roz breathed in and out several times. “Richard married his gay best friend.”
It took a beat for Charlotte to connect those dots and when she did she felt as though a trapdoor had been pulled out from beneath her. Roz was gay. It was such a simple thing to know and such a complicated thing to learn decades after befriending a person and thinking that you knew everything about them.
“Roz . . .” In shock, Charlotte didn’t even know where to begin, what to say. A flood of regret washed through her as she wondered what she could have done to help Roz confide in her earlier.
“Charlie, listen to me. Please, listen to me. For the most part we were very happy. We both got what we needed and wanted—children, stability, the respect of our peers. It was a different time.”
It hit her just how long Roz had kept this secret. Charlotte wondered whether this meant that Roz had never really trusted her at all. Her heart ached for her friend and mentor who’d felt like she had to live a lie all of these years.
“I didn’t know,” Charlotte said softly, completely unprepared for this conversation.
“Of course you didn’t, honey. No one did. I was a very good politician. You’re maybe the third person I’ve told. I’ve got entire chapters written about it locked in a drawer and I still haven’t decided whether they’ll see the light of day.”
Charlotte understood too well the toll a secret took on you and couldn’t begin to imagine keeping one as big as this.
“There’s more to tell. We have some wine to drink when this race is over. But right now let’s focus on you, okay?” Roz’s voice had turned bright and it was easy for Charlotte to imagine her smiling. “Now go talk to your husband. Your marriage is worth saving. So was mine, for that matter. No one can judge someone else’s relationship. It’s all too goddamned complicated. Human beings are too goddamned complicated. But for some reason, we need our politicians to be simple and neat, particularly our women. Speak to Max, and then we’ll talk.”
*
It was a two-mile hike uphill to reach the lake and the cave that constituted Bear Cove, and Max’s favorite place was another mile above that, near a smaller pond made from a spring far underground. He still believed he was the only person who knew it was there at all besides Charlotte and now the girls, who delighted in capturing small turtles in the clear mountain water and covering their faces in mud and pretending to be baby bears.
She was out of breath, but the crisp air sobered her up by the time she reached the first lake. She shivered in her too-thin shirt damp with her sweat. The Poconos were known as rolling mountains, more hills than the kinds of rocky peaks they’d become accustomed to on the West Coast, and yet Max’s favorite spot involved a climb of nine hundred feet.
His knees came into view first, sticking up in the tall grass of the meadow as she came around the last bend in the steepest part of the incline. Her husband’s eyes were closed but she could see the easy rise and fall of his chest. A fifth of Jameson sat half empty beside his left foot. A second lay in reach of his right fingers. The grass and dirt beside him was wet and smelled like something foul. The odor of stale pond water waiting to be replenished by the winter snow caught in the air. She didn’t say anything when she sat down. A family of pill bugs struggled beneath her thighs. She shifted her legs and flicked them away with her index finger. She and Max stayed like that for five minutes. The stillness felt raw and painful and necessary.
She finally spoke first. “Did you really marry me because you felt sorry for me?”
He didn’t answer right away. Then he ignored her question.
“Did you start smoking again?”
“No.”
“Give me one.”
Charlotte brought the crumpled pack and the matches from her pocket, removed two cigarettes, lit one with the last match, and used the first to light the second.
“I miss smoking.”
“Me too.”
“It was great. Why’d we stop?”
“We grew up. It kills you.”
Another long beat of silence, maybe five minutes.
He squinted at her as a cloud passed and darkened his face. “I didn’t marry you because I felt sorry for you.”
“Then why’d you say it?”
“Why do people say anything? I felt like shit. I knew it would piss you off. I know you think it. I know you better than you think I do.”
“Then why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’d you marry me?”
“You were the smartest and most capable woman I’d ever met. You were my best friend. I never wanted to marry a woman like my mother, someone who needed a man to get through life. I knew you’d always want to take care of yourself. You made me laugh. You made me happy. I knew I’d never be bored.”
“Were you attracted to me?” It sounded so shallow.
“I’ve always been attracted to you. We had a good sex life. It wasn’t why I married you, though.”
He wasn’t drunk, but he wasn’t sober either. His words traveled slowly.
“Will you please sit up and look at me?”
“I can’t.”
Charlotte folded her arms across her chest, holding herself close. “That’s mature.”
“No. I can’t. I threw out my back on the way up here.” Max hadn’t thrown out his back in a decade and the last time he’d been hang gliding in Marin. Were their bodies really reaching the point where a strenuous walk could put them out of commission?
“Were you ever going to tell me about my son?”
His son. He has a son. There’s a little boy thousands of miles away who is half Max. When she allowed herself to think about it, the weight of what she’d done sunk her heart lower in her chest.
It was her turn to be quiet. The truth was, she’d hoped she’d never to have to tell him. She’d believed she could keep the boy a secret for the rest of their lives and had somehow trusted Margaret to do the same. It had been audacious and cruel. She saw that now.
“I wanted to.”
“No, you didn’t.” There was something comforting in his accusation, in how well it proved he knew her.
“You’re right. I didn’t. I wanted it all to go away and I wanted to forget about it.”
“And you knew it was terrible, that you were doing a terrible thing?”
“I knew it was terrible for you. It was right for the girls and me. Especially for the girls. I couldn’t imagine them growing up knowing about this half brother, especially Annie, so close in age. It’s the kind of thing that fucks kids up for the rest of their lives, Max.”
“They’re going to know now.”
“I know that and I hate it. I still hate you for what you did. I still hate you for a lot of things.”
“Now we’re even. I hate you for a lot of things, too.”
Charlotte shook her head and stared up at the sky. She felt as though they’d aged twenty years in the past twenty days. “Do you want a divorce?”
He moved his arm away from his eyes for a moment and rolled his head toward her. “I don’t know. Do you?”
“I don’t know either.”
They didn’t speak for a while after that. She twisted the cap off his bottle and took a long pull.
“I’m staying in the race.”
“I’ll bet you are,” he said, his voice tinged with bitterness.
“I can’t do it without you.” What did she expect from him? She knew what she wanted. She wanted him to stand by her side and smile and nod and cover up her lies.
“And what if I disagree? Then what? Then you withhold my daughters from me? Make them hate me?” He had become a broken man, a man stripped of his ego, his strength, his defense mechanisms. She had done this to him.
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“You shouldn’t have said that.”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“Yes, you did. You have to tell me the truth. From now on. You tell me the fucking truth.”
“I meant it.”
He winced as he propped himself up on his elbow and reached for the bottle, now closer to her than to him. “I wouldn’t put it past you to do it, either. It was a righteous threat. It would work. You can have me eating out of your hands. That’s how you fix things, Fixer. You dangle my children in front of me and threaten to take them away.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that. I still love you.” It was the truth. She did still love him, loved him despite all the pain he’d caused her in the past two years, despite the fact that he could still ruin everything she’d worked so hard to achieve. “Do you love me?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is whether I agree to do this for you.”
“Will you?”
Charlotte stood. Her legs were stiff. She bent her knees and let her head fall down toward her feet to stretch the backs of her thighs. When she dangled her arms down toward the ground she brushed a crumpled leaf from Max’s chest. “We’re supposed to do an interview together tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll decide by then.”