Jo watched Sam Jackson’s performance on the Rivera show from the living room, the sound turned down so the little girl in the back room wouldn’t hear. She wondered if the girl was aware of what her father was. It seemed unlikely; little girls looked up to their fathers, didn’t they? Jo never had, but then her father had walked out of her life when she was six and moved to L.A. with his new wife. The fact was that she’d seen him rarely before he left, and almost never afterward.
After the show, she and Henry sat on the porch out front, Jo drinking tea and Henry into his wine. The weather station was calling for rain and the wind was up from the west, the night sky black.
“How are we going to convince him we have her?” Henry asked. “If those phone numbers didn’t do it—”
“He knows we have her,” Jo replied.
“Then what is he up to?”
Jo remained silent, drinking her tea.
“What are we going to do, Jo?” Henry persisted. “None of this has gone like it was supposed to. We can’t keep her forever. I mean, what are we doing here?”
“Helping him get elected,” Jo said resignedly.
“Well, that wasn’t the idea, was it?” Henry said.
“No. That wasn’t the idea.”
Henry sighed and had more wine. He could drink bottles of it, it seemed, and not show any effects other than getting sleepy. He was like that with his pot too, although Jo had noticed he’d refrained from getting high since the little girl had arrived, at least in close proximity to the house. A hell of a time for him to become a role model.
“Do you call again tomorrow?”
“No,” Jo said. “We have the market in Monticello. Too close to home. And I don’t know that we’re accomplishing anything anyway. We need a new plan, Henry. The problem here is the guy doesn’t care about his daughter. Who the hell would ever have imagined that?”
“But the mother cares,” Henry said.
“The mother doesn’t know what’s going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“He never told her our demands.”
Henry paused in the act of taking a drink. “Why wouldn’t he?”
“I’m guessing because he knows she’ll meet them,” Jo said. “But I doubt she or anybody else is going to be able to talk him into apologizing to anybody for anything. Especially not when he’s running for office.”
“So where does that leave us?”
Jo got to her feet and looked out over the field of cabbages and acorn squash in front of the barn. “It leaves us in a bind, Henry. And I have no fucking clue how to get out of it.”