The Hopefuls (22 page)

The class was about a fifteen-minute drive from the house—still in Sugar Land, of course. One of Ash's friends, Charlotte, was enrolled in the class with her daughter, which was why Ash signed up. “But I'm so happy I did,” she told me. “I can just tell that Viv loves it.”

Sugar Land was originally a sugar plantation, a fact that I found appropriate and creepy. There was a fake sweetness to the place—there were beautiful homes and cute little downtown areas, but it felt so manufactured. Everything was clearly plotted out, had been planned down to the last shrubbery. As Ash drove to the music class, I stared out the window, fascinated by all that we passed. The more time I spent in Sugar Land, the more I understood how strange DC must have seemed to Ash; how she must have felt like she was in another country.

There were ten other babies and toddlers in Viv's class, and she was by far the best dressed. Ash always dressed Viv with a little more care when they were going out, and that day she was in a smocked dress with a monogram on her chest. (Viv was not a baby who wore stained onesies or mismatched socks.)

After thirty minutes of singing and clapping (which had originally sounded like a short time to me, but felt oh so long while I was experiencing it) a few of the moms went to a coffee shop around the corner. I sat and chatted with them as they ordered lattes and fed smooshed-up fingerfuls of muffins to their babies. The strollers were shoved in around the tables, and it was impossible to move without bumping something or someone. Charlotte's daughter reached over and knocked a cup of water across the table, and when I jumped up to grab some napkins, I banged my knee against a stroller, causing the child inside to start screaming. By the time I returned to wipe up the spill, Viv was fussing and Ash was packing up. I handed the wad of napkins to Charlotte and then stood there, feeling like a mother's helper who isn't really old enough to be of any help at all.

At the end of January, Matt hired an intern named Katie, who'd just graduated from TCU that December and was the most serious twenty-two-year-old I'd ever known. She came to the house to meet Matt wearing a pantsuit, her long brown hair pulled back in a low ponytail. Katie was pretty, but wore minimal makeup and no jewelry, and had a very no-nonsense vibe about her. Whenever Katie was around, I could see Ash look at her out of the sides of her eyes, just itching to adorn her, to “fancy her up,” as she liked to say. Ash even gifted a necklace to Katie, a long gold chain with blue stones, one of her most popular pieces from the Stella and Dot collection. “I thought it would look great with your eyes,” Ash said, and Katie said thank you and put it right into her bag. We never saw it again.

“I graduated a semester early, not the other way around,” Katie told me when we first met, although I hadn't asked. “I was just ready to be in the real world. But I loved school. Go, Frogs!” As she said this, she crooked two fingers at me, like she was making a peace sign but was too lazy to hold it straight. (I learned later this was a hand signal for the TCU Horned Frogs, but at the time had no idea what she was doing and just smiled.)

Katie's family was friends with the Dillons, and she was interested in working in politics, planned to move to DC in the next year or so, and (most important) was happy to work for free, all of which made her a great fit.

“Hopefully we'll be able to pay you as the campaign goes on,” Matt told her, but she just waved a hand in the air.

“That would be great, of course,” she said. “But I'm not concerned about it. I'm here to learn and I'm happy to help however I can.”

That was all Matt needed to hear to make Katie his favorite person in the world. He put her in charge of social media—she started handling the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, and also started writing most of the e-mails that were blasted to Jimmy's supporters every few days. I was on this list, and woke up most mornings to a message in my in-box, with subject headings like “We need your help!” Or “Texas, it's time!” At the bottom of each note was a plea for money and a link to the online fund-raising, asking the recipient to give anything he could, even if it was just five dollars. I started to feel fatigued at how often these e-mails arrived, and I can only imagine that everyone else receiving them did too. But the campaign had to keep asking for money, so they kept arriving. A couple of times I donated, if only because I felt like Katie deserved a response for all of her hard work.

When Katie started, Matt told her they'd get another desk in the den for her as soon as possible. “In the meantime,” he said, “you can set up in the dining room or use one of our desks if we aren't here.”

“That works for me,” she said. I saw Ash wince as Katie set up her laptop on the dining room table, banging it down on the wood. Ash rushed over with a place mat to put underneath it. “Here,” she said, “this will make you more comfortable.”

The next day, a tiny desk and a folding chair arrived at the house and were shoved in the corner of the den. “That was fast,” I said to Ash, and she rolled her eyes. “I'm willing to sacrifice quite a lot of things for this campaign,” she said. “But I don't see why my dining room table has to be one of them.”

I have to say, Jimmy's Instagram got a lot better once Katie joined the campaign—she was always in front of him with her iPhone, capturing the moment that he shook someone's hand or smiled during a speech. One night, when we were all sitting around after dinner, staring at our phones, I mentioned how good her pictures were. Matt agreed. “She's got a talent for communications,” he said. “She's always got the right image to go along with our message.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “Plus she's great at picking the filters that make me look my best.”

Matt and Jimmy spent most weekdays at events around Houston—or at least within a couple of hours of the city—meeting with local groups, stopping by union lunches or DAR teas. On the weekends, they'd travel farther and Ash and I would usually go with them, the four of us (plus Viv) piling into a car and driving to rural areas in East Texas, hitting as many cities as we could in one trip, places I'd never heard of before: Longview, Lufkin, Tyler, and Henderson.

If we were coming back that night, or if it was an incredibly busy trip, Katie would sometimes come along, but mostly if we were staying overnight, she hung back so we didn't have to pay for an extra room. (I'd never seen Matt so thrifty in his life, but he was constantly making sure we were doing things the cheapest way possible, stretching all of the campaign money as far as it would go.)

When Katie wasn't there, I was in charge of the social media, taking as many pictures of Jimmy as I could, sending out tweets, posting on Instagram. The first time I'd done this, Katie had approached me when we returned and not so subtly suggested that I could do a little more. “Make sure to tag all of the places where he is,” she said. “We want to get as many eyes on these posts as possible. You can never take too many pictures.”

She spoke to me in a tone you'd use to explain hashtags to your grandmother—patiently and with just a touch of condescension and amusement, as if she couldn't believe how little I knew.

Since that day, I'd taken my role as traveling social media person very seriously, once almost tripping Jimmy as I took pictures of him walking into a radio station in Waco.

Ash once told me that Mrs. Dillon loved to talk about when Jimmy was in preschool, how she knew even then there was something special about him. She said every day when she dropped him off, the kids would come running over to greet him. Once, he got there late and all the kids were already sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, and as Jimmy went over to join them, they all reached their arms up to him, to touch him as he walked by. “Like Jesus,” I said, and Ash nodded. “Exactly.”

I had a friend who had worked in the Clinton White House who told me that when Bill Clinton walked into the room, the whole place was electric. “He gave people goose bumps just by arriving,” she said. “Take my word for it—it's almost like he's magic.”

And I'd seen it with Obama—the charm that doesn't feel sleazy, the smiles that seem genuine, the eye contact that makes you believe he's paying attention, that maybe he even remembers you from the last time you met. Each year at the Christmas party, Obama gave a speech and made sure to thank the family members of his staff, telling the spouses that he knew the sacrifices we were making. Now, don't get me wrong—I know he made this same speech at least a dozen times, repeating the lines at all of the Christmas parties they hosted. But still, it felt like he was speaking directly to me, and I cried every time—and it wasn't (just) because of the strong eggnog they served there.

Where do people get the ability to do this? What is it that makes some politicians so attractive? Why did people like Hillary so much more when she cried? Why is it that Obama sings and it's amazing, but Mitt Romney sings and looks like a nightmare you'd have about a wax figure come to life? And why, in God's green earth, could Sarah Palin wink and talk about pigs and somehow make everyone around her forget that she'd basically admitted she didn't read?

I don't know the answers to any of these questions. If I did, I'd be earning millions somewhere as a political consultant, teaching awkward people how to be relaxed, making the unlikable appealing.

What I do know is that Jimmy had it—that thing that some politicians have and some don't; that thing that can't be named or explained. I heard him make the same promises to people, over and over, and they still sounded true. He'd shake people's hands and say, “Let's turn Texas blue,” and make it seem possible. It was amazing how people turned their bodies toward him as he walked into a room, how his smile made them feel warm. Everyone just wanted to be around him. Even me.

The first time I saw Jimmy talk to a group about fracking, he was unsure and a little shaky. He spoke in vague terms, and it was clear (at least to me) that his grasp of the situation was tentative at best. But just two days later, he sounded more confident, and by the end of the week, it was as if he'd been making speeches about drilling and wells and fracking his entire life.

Sometimes Matt dominated our dinner conversations with new things he'd learned—another town that just discovered water contamination, or a case that the current Railroad Commission had unfairly decided. And I started to notice that Jimmy repeated what Matt told us when he spoke to voters, that he copied whole phrases and stories word for word, even getting outraged at the same parts, acting as if he were the one who'd discovered this information.

“Do you notice,” I asked Matt one night, “how Jimmy copies exactly what you say?”

Matt shrugged. “Yeah, but that's kind of the point. I write his speeches. We go over all of his talking points together. That's my job.”

“No, I know,” I said. I tried to find the right way to explain myself. “It's just funny to see him say exactly the same things you said the night before.”

“At least he's not going off script.”

“Yeah…but, I mean, doesn't it ever bother you? Like you're doing the work and he's cheating off of you?”

Matt looked up at me, considering the question. “That's just how it works. It's the same thing I've always done, to an extent. I'm supporting the candidate.”

“You're right,” I said. “I don't know why it feels weird.”

“It feels weird, because this time it's Jimmy,” Matt said. “That's why.”

At the end of Jimmy's campaign, there were a million things I was unsure of, and just one thing that was definite: Matt's words sounded better when they came out of Jimmy's mouth. And it wasn't fair, it was just the way it was.

A
sh was different in Texas. For one thing, everyone called her Ashleigh and some people (mostly her family, but a couple of friends too) called her Ashleigh Mae, which sounded ridiculous because it rhymed. Ash-lay Mae—even I couldn't say it without taking on a southern accent.

But it wasn't just that, of course. It was that her personality changed, so that she seemed not quite the same person I'd befriended in DC. I didn't notice it right away, not really. But the more time we spent there, the more I began to see that she acted a little more proper, was a little more done up, a little snobbier. Also her accent was much stronger, almost like she'd been hiding it all those years in DC, and sometimes when I'd hear her call up the stairs, “Vivienne Rose, I hear you fussing and I'm on my way,” she sounded like someone I'd never met before.

I began to think of her as Texas Ash, sort of like Malibu Barbie—basically the same, but with a few tweaks and extra accessories.

She took her role in Jimmy's campaign very seriously—her role (as she saw it) being to stand next to him at events, dressed perfectly, smiling at everyone. Not a week went by that she didn't go shopping and come back with bags of new clothes. “I just don't want to keep getting photographed in the same thing over and over,” she said, like the paparazzi were following her everywhere, like she was Michelle freaking Obama.

And then there was her need to be a super housewife. Ash had always loved entertaining and cooked a lot (or at least more than I did), but now she seemed obsessed with what to make for dinner, insisted on preparing breakfast for us, which I found so strange—couldn't we all just pour ourselves some cereal? Her table was fussier, always set with place mats and cloth napkins, a vase of flowers in the middle. Whenever I tried to help her in the kitchen, she either shooed me out or assigned me a small task—grating cheese or chopping peppers—and then hovered over me to make sure I was doing it right.

A lot of the girls Ash had grown up with lived in Sugar Land too, and even though she always introduced them to me as “my dear friend Ainsley” or “Charlotte, one of my oldest friends in the world,” I suspected she didn't actually like any of them all that much.

They called themselves the Dozens, because there were twelve of them, but actually there were thirteen and the last poor girl to join the group, Mary, was always reminded that she ruined it a little bit for everyone when she came along. When I'd meet one of them, Ash would say, “She's a Dozen” or “She's one of the Dozens,” like it would mean something to me.

They went on annual trips together and out for “ladies' nights,” where they'd inevitably all pose together for a picture, one big group of tiny blond girls, clutching Cosmos and smiling widely for the camera, and sometimes I wondered if the whole point of their friendship was just to post these images, to prove to the world that they had a bunch of pretty friends.

There was an undercurrent of competition with these girls—everything from house size to how many children they had. I wanted to think that Ash was above it all, but once when we were over at her friend Louise's house, she went on and on about Stella and Dot, talking about how thrilled she was that she found success in a career that still let her spend loads of time with Viv. “You know, it's not about the money, obviously. I think working makes me a better mother,” she said. “Not to mention how important it is for Viv to see an example of a strong female.”

Later, although I was pretty sure I knew the answer, I asked Ash if Louise worked. “Oh no,” Ash said, “she's a SAHM.”

“A what?” I asked. She'd pronounced it all as one word, and for a minute I thought she was telling me that Louise was part of some strange religion, maybe one that didn't allow women to have jobs outside of the home.

“A stay-at-home mom,” Ash clarified. “That's what she does.”

In all the years I'd known her, Ash hadn't told me much about these girls. I'd seen a couple pictures of them in their house, and I knew she'd been a bridesmaid in a few of their weddings, but she always just referred to them as her high school friends and didn't elaborate. Now talking about the Dozens was about 90 percent of her total conversation. She updated me on every aspect of their lives, spent at least an hour talking on the phone with a few of them a day, texting constantly, trading information about the others. None of those girls could so much as have an episode of diarrhea without the other twelve knowing about it.

As soon as Ash started talking about one of the Dozens, I could see Jimmy's eyes glaze over. He was polite when he saw them, smiling and kissing them on their cheeks, but I could tell he didn't think much of any of them.

“I don't give a shit about where Kelsey got her furniture recovered,” Jimmy said during dinner one night. He wasn't exactly yelling, but his voice was loud and annoyed. “Seriously, Ash. No one fucking cares.”

Matt and I glanced at each other and quickly looked back down at our plates. We'd both been pretending to listen to Ash (which was what we did when she talked about her friends), and I could tell he was just as surprised as I was at Jimmy's outburst. Jimmy didn't often get angry, and I don't know that I'd ever heard him talk like that to Ash—they bickered sometimes, sure, but I'd never heard him sound so frustrated at her, so disgusted really.

“All right,” Ash said. “I was just telling a story. You don't need to get angry about it.”

“That's not a story you were telling,” Jimmy said. “I don't know what that was, but it certainly wasn't a story.”

“Okay, Jimmy.” She gave me a funny look across the table, like she couldn't believe how weird he was being, but I knew what he meant. When Ash talked about those girls there was always an agenda. It was never just a story. We never left an interaction with any of them where Ash didn't immediately start talking shit, telling me about a failing marriage or an accidental pregnancy that resulted in a shotgun wedding, which everyone suspected wasn't accidental at all. All girls—all people really—talk behind their friends' backs. I knew that. And most of the time, I think that's just human nature—people don't mean to be malicious, but it happens out of jealousy or frustration or sometimes genuine concern. Hadn't I spent hours talking to Ash about Colleen's marriage, dissecting each part, trying to understand how she ended up with Bruce?

But this felt different. Before we moved to Texas, I would've described Ash as kind, and now I wasn't so sure. We still had a great time together, just the two of us, but I couldn't quite get over the extra bite in her voice when she gossiped about her friends, as if she were secretly hoping they'd all fail miserably at life.

Matt and I were sharing a small space, but it felt like we were talking less. He was always distracted when we were together, either actually on his phone or computer or sometimes just lost in his head, planning the next event, trying to think of ways to get Jimmy's name out there.

One night, I asked him what he was working on, not because I actually cared all that much, but because we needed something to talk about. The campaign was the one thing that would make him chatty, and it happened again that night. He went on and on, telling me about a nun he'd contacted who was working to educate people about fracking in the Eagle Ford Shale and how she might do a joint event with Jimmy. He got so excited when he talked about these things. Whenever I told him about my day (and granted, I didn't do anything all that interesting most of the time), I could feel his attention wander.

“It's impressive how much you've learned,” I told him. “Seriously, it sounds like something you've been passionate about your whole life.”

“It's so disturbing, Beth,” he said to me. “I just didn't really know much about it before. I don't think a lot of people do, even here. But we have a chance to change that.”

I moved closer to him in bed and kissed his shoulder. “Did anyone ever tell you how smart you are?” I asked. “And also, how nice?” I ran my hands over his stomach, letting my fingers brush under the waistband of his boxers. But he just pulled my head toward him for a hug and started reading an e-mail on his phone, wordlessly shutting me down, letting me know that having sex with me was less interesting than a nun and some oil drills. Not exactly what I'd hoped for.

Matt arranged for Jimmy to be gone the weekend of February 14—first at a gumbo festival just outside of Austin on Friday night, and then at four different events in the city on Saturday. When Matt scheduled this, he hadn't realized (I assume) that February 14 was, of course, Viv's first birthday, and so when Ash saw the schedule she had a minor meltdown.

“You can't be gone for her birthday!” she said. She was standing in the office in front of the large whiteboard calendar that hung on the wall and kept track of Jimmy's schedule. She and I had been on our way out to lunch and had stopped in to tell the guys we were going—it was just a coincidence that she looked up at the calendar.

“I'm so sorry, I didn't even think about it,” Matt said. He glanced over at Jimmy, who I knew had approved the trip. It was one thing for Matt to forget his goddaughter's first birthday, but Jimmy should've seen this coming.

“It's a weekend trip,” Jimmy said. “I just figured we'd all be going.” He didn't sound concerned.

“Can't you go down there on Saturday?” Ash asked. She was looking at Matt, who was staring at papers on his desk. “I wanted to have all the grandparents over for dinner on Friday. I figured we wouldn't be able to have a real party for her, but I at least wanted to do that.”

“We'll do it when we get back,” Jimmy said. “She won't know the difference. She doesn't know what day it is—she doesn't even know where her nose is.”

Ash opened her mouth as if she were going to say something more, but then just turned and walked out of the room. I followed her and we went to lunch, where she said to me, “There's no point in fighting it. He's going to get his way anyway.”

But that night at dinner, Ash got up when we were just about halfway through, claiming that she had a headache and needed to lie down. A few minutes later, Matt excused himself to go down to the basement to answer some e-mails. He seemed so distracted, so focused on work, that I'm not even sure he noticed the tension at dinner.

“And then there were two,” I said to Jimmy, raising my eyebrows at him across the table. He stood up and went to the refrigerator, pulled out two beers, and held one toward me. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

I got up and started carrying the dishes to the sink and rinsing them off. “You don't have to do that,” Jimmy said, carrying his plate over. “Or at least let me help.”

“We're not guests anymore,” I said. “You can't keep treating us like we are.”

“Fair enough,” Jimmy said, grinning at me. He sat back down at the table.

“I'd do this more if Ash let me, you know. Last week, she took our dirty towels from Matt's hands as he was going to put them in the wash. She insisted she do them herself.”

“Yeah, she's a little anal with everything in the new house,” he said.

We didn't talk for a few minutes as I loaded the dishwasher and wiped the counter. Finally, when I sat back down at the table, I said, “It's so quiet.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “But if you listen closely you can hear the sounds of fracking statistics and angry birthday party planning coming from all around us.”

“Don't be mean,” I said, but I laughed.

Jimmy grinned and clinked the top of his bottle against mine. “We don't have to tell anyone, but let's just admit that we're the best ones.”

Later that week, I was in the basement on my computer wasting time, which I was becoming an expert at—it was amazing how long I could spend on Twitter and Facebook, going from one random article to the next. I'd just gone down a rabbit hole that involved articles about what the members of the Baby-Sitters Club would be doing as adults, when I heard Jimmy call my name from the top of the stairs. I walked over and looked up.

“I have to make a Costco run to get some stuff for Viv's party,” he said. “Want to join?”

“Sure,” I said. “Give me two minutes.” Ash was at her mom's and Matt and Katie were in the office, but we were pulling out of the driveway before I realized that Jimmy hadn't told Matt where we were going. “He's working on my talking points for the radio interview next week, and all three suggestions I made were shot down quickly. So I figured I'd let him handle it. I mean, what do I know? I'm just the actual candidate.”

Jimmy whistled in Costco as he pushed the giant cart through the aisles. He stopped at a display of televisions, and I said, “I thought we were getting stuff for Viv's party.”

He sighed. “We are, but Costco is about the experience.” He put his arm around my shoulders as if he were a wise man trying to teach me something important, and he kept wheeling the cart along with his free hand. “You need to be open to new things, ready to be so dazzled by a Vitamix blender that you buy it on the spot.”

I laughed. “So you're responsible for that blender?”

“They made smoothies in the store and gave samples to everyone. I was hooked.”

“Have you used it?” I asked.

“All in good time, Beth.” Jimmy stopped to put a large container of cheese puffs into the cart and I asked him if Ash had given him a list, since I was pretty sure she'd sooner die than set out a bowl of cheese puffs for guests. “Not exactly,” he said. “It's more of a surprise.”

“Right,” I said. “How do you think that'll go over?”

Jimmy shrugged. “She can't be more pissed than she is now.”