“What’s the matter?” Tami asked.
Jake looked up from his plate of pasta primavera. “Huh? Oh, nothing.”
The two of them were having dinner at Ristorante Dino, two blocks down Connecticut Avenue from their condo building. It was one of their favorite hangouts: the food was reliably good, the service charming, and the wine list decently priced.
Tami said, “You’ve been pushing your food around your plate instead of eating it. What’s bothering you?”
He looked across the table at her. Tami gave him her tell me your troubles expression.
“Oh, it’s Frank.”
“He wants to run for president.”
Nodding, Jake replied, “And he wants me to come up with an issue that can get him noticed, get the media to pay attention to him, win him votes.”
“Like the energy plan.”
“Yeah. As if ideas sprout out of my head like popcorn popping.”
With a teasing smile, Tami asked, “Well, don’t they?”
“Hell no,” Jake protested. Thinking back on it, he added, “Even the energy plan was really Lev’s idea.”
“Really?”
“Lev set it up for me, got me interested in it.”
“But you did all the real work,” Tami said. “You put it all together.”
Jake nodded glumly and reached for his wineglass.
“So now you need to come up with an idea on your own.”
“Yeah.”
She took up her own glass and clinked with his. “You’ll get there, Jake. You’ll find it.”
“Maybe.”
“Of course you will.”
Tami watched as he drained his glass, then refilled it. At last he returned his attention to his dinner. The restaurant was doing well, almost every table filled. Local customers, Jake thought. This is a neighborhood restaurant, not some glitzy joint that depends on tourists and visiting VIPs. Winter and summer, Dino does okay.
It was late spring. In a few weeks the summer heat and humidity would turn Washington into a steam bath. Congress would adjourn for the summer. The city would be abandoned to the tourists.
Jake remembered last summer, when Tami’s family had come for a weeklong visit. One afternoon while Tami showed her parents, aunt, and uncle where she worked, Jake had volunteered to take care of her two young nephews. Tami had called it a suicide mission: keeping a pair of preteen boys occupied. But Jake had solved the problem easily by taking them to the National Air and Space Museum. The boys were fascinated with the airplanes and rockets and spacecraft on display, close enough to touch.
As he coiled a few strands of linguini around his fork, Jake recalled the boys’ wide-eyed interest. The anniversary of the first Moon landing is coming up in a couple of months, he said to himself. Sometime in July. Let’s see, that was in 1969—more than fifty years ago.
Tami broke into his thoughts. “So do you think that Franklin can win the Republican nomination?”
It took an effort for Jake to focus his attention on her. Is she just making conversation or is she really interested?
Jake replied, “He’d be a dark horse.”
“Dark horses have won before,” she countered. “Eisenhower, Carter, even Obama was just a first-term senator when he ran. And won.”
Jake nodded. “It’s possible, I guess.”
To her surprise, Jake ordered after-dinner drinks: Sambuca, dry and anise-flavored. Tami toyed with hers while Jake knocked his back in two gulps.
He could see that the drinking bothered her. Jake paid the check, then got to his feet.
“See?” he said, holding out his hands to her. “Stone-cold sober.”
Despite her concern, Tami giggled.
As they walked slowly along the traffic-clogged avenue back to their condo, Jake looked up and saw a nearly full Moon grinning lopsidedly at him.
Pointing a wavering arm at it, Jake said to Tami, “You know, there are boot prints on that sucker.”
“American boot prints,” she said.
“And we haven’t gone back there in more than fifty years.”
“The Chinese are planning to land people on the Moon, aren’t they?”
Jake nodded. She knows damned well the Chinese plan a lunar program. She’s a damned good newswoman, even though she’s out of the news media now.
“We haven’t been farther out in space than a few hundred miles since the Apollo program was stopped,” he said aloud. “Up to the International Space Station. Far as we go. No farther.”
“Why not?”
“Politics, mostly. There’s no big voting bloc pushing for it.”
“Why don’t some of the private rocket companies go to the Moon?” Tami asked.
“Good question,” said Jake. “Damned good question.”
Then he looked up at the Moon again and muttered, “Boot prints.”