Adam bounced a basketball invitingly on the floor of the sunroom. “The doctor says you can go outside today, as long as you take it easy.”
Katie didn’t look up from her novel. “I have to let my hair dry.” Adam had offered to bring out a hairdresser to “adjust the color” on her hair, but Katie had mysteriously located some hair dye and had re-dyed her hair a color that appeared near normal. He’d decided to ignore the issue. If Ellie was right, and she’d done it to get attention, the best thing he could do was pretend he didn’t notice. That way he wouldn’t be rewarding negative behavior.
Parenting wasn’t much harder than training rats, once you figured out the rats—and teenagers—were a lot smarter.
“How about a trail ride later? As long as we bring your inhaler…” He tried not to panic at the thought of her more than fifty yards from the medical team. Maybe a doctor could ride along with them.
“Dad. You know I hate horseback riding.”
“You do? Since when?”
“Since you sent me to camp when I was twelve. Remember?”
Adam vaguely remembered getting a panicked phone call from her, but he’d put it down to preadolescent angst and had insisted she stay at camp. He’d scheduled it during an unavoidable overseas trip. The camp in Wisconsin had seemed like a more exciting babysitting option than their housekeeper.
Clearly, Katie hadn’t agreed.
“Can I finish my book?” she said. “I’m at the really exciting part.”
“I was hoping to spend some time with you. We are on vacation.”
“Then can’t I do what I want?”
“You need some fresh air. You’ve been inside since your asthma attack.”
“The air is deadly here. I almost died, remember? I think we should go back home.”
He sat down next to her and spun the basketball between his hands. “The residence is being painted,” he reminded her, but she shook her head.
“I mean Chicago. That’s home. I’m not allergic to Chicago.”
“Katie. I told you—”
“How do you expect me to get into college if I graduate from a substandard high school?” she asked. “Don’t you want me to go to Harvard or Yale?”
“I don’t care where you go to college, and you’re not attending a substandard high school. They have a very fine honors program. Their graduates have been accepted to top universities. The Naval Academy, West Point—”
“You want me to join the army?”
“I want you to do what you want to do—” Too late, he realized his mistake.
“I want to go live in Chicago! With Granddad.”
Adam stowed the ball under the coffee table. “I could tell you a few stories about living with Granddad. It’s not all fun and games.”
She looked up. “You have told me stories. About the time you got wasted and crashed the Ford.”
“Yeah, and I got grounded for six months. No driving until I turned eighteen. The old man was tough.”
“I guess you didn’t turn out so bad.”
Touched by the rare compliment, he started to respond, but then he figured out where she was going. “Forget it. You can’t go live with Granddad, regardless of the fact he raised me to be the man I am today.”
Katie crossed her legs under her and leaned forward, forgetting to hide her curiosity. “Is that why you joined the army when you were eighteen? Cause Granddad wouldn’t let you drive?”
Adam laughed. “I joined the army because they promised to pay for college.” He didn’t tell her his father had told him college was for sissies. And when Adam had told him he’d wanted to go to law school, his old man had told him to join the union instead, get on at the auto plant, or maybe try mechanics school.
His father had worked the line at Ford, forty years of showing up for work on time, putting in his hours—hard, manual labor. Not a lightweight desk job like Adam had aspired to.
Taking down the toughest crime gang in Chicago had failed to impress his father, who could rebuild a carburetor in less time than Adam could finish off a Rubik’s cube.
He didn’t want to tell Katie all that, though. She adored her grandfather, who kept a fridge full of her favorite pop and bought her Happy Meals with his retirement check.
“How about a game of Scrabble? I’ll spot you thirty points.”
“I hate Scrabble.”
Adam picked up the ball, examining the spot where LeBron James had signed it. A real autograph, not one of those imprinted endorsements. He doubted Katie would be impressed, even if LeBron James walked into the room and dunked the ball into the overhead fixture.
The phone attached to his hip buzzed. He ignored it.
It buzzed again, and Katie looked up. “Aren’t you going to get that?”
“I’m on vacation. I don’t have to answer it.” He twirled the ball. Horse riding, basketball, and now Scrabble—he was shut out. What did teenagers do with their time these days? He should establish a commission to study the question. Parents everywhere would be grateful. His poll numbers would soar.
An aide appeared at the door. “Sir, we’ve got a link up from the White House. The attorney general is on video. She’s got news about the situation in Idaho.”
He couldn’t avoid this. A short time ago federal agents had surrounded a compound in Idaho where a survivalist was holed up, threatening to kill seventeen women and children. Someone else’s children.
His own daughter would have to wait.
He turned to her, but she had her face in the book.
The crisis in Idaho averted, Adam rode Golf Cart One to Leatherwood, where a basketball game was in progress: White House staff vs. Secret Service, and it looked like his team was getting whipped.
He’d been telling his staff to get more exercise, but most of them were more interested in writing policy papers about Latin American economies than in manhandling an elliptical machine. He’d made it a point to hire the best and the brightest, regardless of political party, but now he wished he’d given a thought to hiring the tallest and fittest.
He heard Ellie’s voice. “That’s another three!” she called out. Though she wasn’t very tall, she was hustling up and down the court so fast he had to check to make sure she wasn’t wearing rollerblades.
He waded into the fray. “Hand it over, punk,” he told the six-foot-three agent dribbling the ball. After snatching the ball, Adam raced to the end of the court. Ignoring the defender in front of him, he tossed it neatly into the rim.
He wished Larry were there to see how easily he’d managed that hole-in-one.
He spun around and high-fived his speechwriter, Melissa. “Okay, team, let’s win this one for the Gipper!”
“The who?” he heard his scheduler ask the congressional liaison.
Presidential prestige was put aside on the basketball court. Adam took his share of ribbing. But unlike golf, he was no newcomer to this game. When he’d started out in the prosecutor’s office in Chicago, he’d regularly played pick-up games at the local gym. Ten years earlier, he’d been quicker, meaner.
Now, at forty-five, he had to rely on his wits.
“Hey! Watch those elbows!” he said to Ellie, who was guarding him, sticking to him like wet Kleenex. He tried to pass the ball over her head, but she jumped up and swatted the ball just as it slipped from his fingers.
“Having trouble hanging onto the ball? Sir,” she added with a grin.
As they loped down the court, chasing the scramble of players clustered around the ball handler, he glanced at her feet. “Your shoe,” he called. “It’s untied.”
She stopped, looking down at her perfectly tied laces, but by then he’d already broken free and was catching the pass from the point guard. In seconds he’d nabbed a spot under the net, but before he could lob the ball in, Ellie skidded in front of him.
She had youth, and size, and now the zeal of the persecuted on her side.
“Cheater,” she muttered as she threw an elbow.
He laughed. The rough and tumble of politics was no match for the raucous contact of a good pick-up basketball game. He hadn’t enjoyed himself so much since Inauguration Day.
Ellie raced to the net with the ball, arced it over the rim, and whooped as it sank through the net.
And then backed straight into Adam’s arms.
“Whoa,” he said, gripping her around the waist for just an instant longer than she needed to get her balance. “You okay?”
“I’m okay—but you desk jockeys are losing. Big time,” she added gleefully as the tall blond agent on Katie’s detail landed the rebound.
Adam nodded toward the sideline, where his teammates, sweaty and gulping water, were converging for a time out. “They’re checking email on their phones. After that, we’re mopping the floor with you punks.”
Despite Adam’s best efforts, White House staff lost by thirty or forty-two points, depending on whose scoring method was used: His budget director insisted on amortizing the earlier goals to bring them in line with inflation.
The weekend, however, Adam had to claim as a success. He’d intended the Camp David getaway to help build a cohesive team among his staff, some of whom had played for opposing sides of the political aisle.
It was an experiment, his presidency. No one had thought it could work, especially the cable news pundits.
More than anything, Adam liked proving the pundits wrong. He liked a challenge, whether it was bringing down the slipperiest crooks in Chicago or leading a teetering democracy back to its superpower status.
He remembered the calls from other world leaders right after the inauguration. It had been hard to take their sympathetic tone—the prime minister of one famine-ravaged nation had even offered to send a goat for grazing on the White House lawn.
His plate was full, but with help from both ends of the political spectrum, and from those who’d stayed well outside of politics, he’d managed to right the ship of state.
On the way back to Aspen, he stopped just outside the building, staring down into the calm waters of the pond.
Sometimes he wasn’t sure what he was doing here.
The people who’d recruited him to run—leaders of industry and think tank heads and influential senators—they’d all been afraid to take the plunge themselves. They’d figured someone so highly decorated for bravery wouldn’t think twice about taking on a politically risky job—it would have been too easy for another politician to go down with the ship. But what they didn’t know was that he’d been decorated not for bravery, but for sheer stupidity. The smart thing would have been to get the hell out of the clusterfuck he’d found himself in in that Central American jungle, yet he’d stayed. Stayed and fought, and by some miracle he’d never understood, emerged with his skin intact, barely.
What he’d done hadn’t required courage, but no one had ever believed his protests. Deep down, Adam was just as scared as anyone. He swallowed, remembering the stone-cold fear he’d felt the other day when he’d walked into Eucalyptus, not knowing if Katie lay dying…or brain-damaged. That was a feeling he never wanted to experience again.
Now that the government was running more smoothly, he needed to spend some time with his little girl, before she grew up and he lost her for good.