So Close (9 page)

              Most likely, given the long hours and meager singles scene, I wouldn’t have—had it not been for my covert vantage point.

              “Yeah, I’m not going to stay out late.”  He tried to back pedal into casual.  “I have the kids in the morning,” he referred to the boys he mentored in a basketball program for boys with incarcerated parents.  “Can’t let them down.”

              “No,” I agreed.

              “Okay.”

              “Okay.”  I smiled, letting him walk away baffled once again.  It was strange in such a small office that he didn’t know that I was the ‘admin’ our email-monitoring firm forwarded all ‘flagged-material’ to.  I knew that after mentoring said kids he was going to go back to his place and “beat off to Alexis Texas.”  I knew that he called his dad a pussy and that only the day before he’d told his old roommate from Yale that he wanted to “spluge” on my face. 

As long as he didn’t engage in illegal activity, or anything that could harm Tom’s reputation, I didn’t need to take action.  Not going out for drinks was action enough. 

              “Hello?” I picked up a call transferred to my desk.

              “My boss’ new boyfriend is a pain in my ass.”  It was Rebecca.  She worked for a real estate law firm a floor above and we’d met on line for salad my first week.  I hadn’t really had close friends growing up.  Not knowing who my daddy was meant the girls whose daddy’s had run off could put me below them on the pecking order of shit.  Delilah said they were just jealous of my looks—whatever the reason I learned early on to avoid them.  So I was surprisingly delighted to discover that Rebecca was actually ‘Becky’ from a fly swatter of a town and she was also determined to live a food-stamp-free life.  I didn’t have to sugar anything with her.  

              I dropped my voice.  “Henry let the boyfriend’s Chihuahua piss on your bag again?”

              “The boyfriend,” she hissed into the phone, “Does not have a legal degree.  Or a paralegal degree.  Or a broker’s license.  They met when he gave Henry a lap dance for fuck’s sake.  Should we just be giving fucking lapdances?!”

              “Drinks tonight?” I asked.

              “Strong ones.  And burgers.  Meet you downstairs.”

              The light on my phone blinked and I jumped calls.  “Are you sending her money?” Grammy wiped the smile off my face like she had reached out with one of her starched handkerchiefs.

              “No.”

              “Amanda Beth, don’t you lie to me.”  

              “I’m sending money for Ray Lynne, but that’s not the same.” 

I dreaded Delilah’s calls.  Always late at night, her voice small and flat.  Ray Lynne wailing in the background.  Knowing Billy couldn’t possibly be sleeping through it.  “Just twenty bucks.  For Pampers, Mandy,” she’d ask and I knew she was staring straight ahead, getting through the request, same as me. 

              “Amanda,” Grammy’s voice broke in exasperation.  “She will never take responsibility if you make this easy on her.”  Nothing about those calls was easy for either of us.  “She needs to learn how to hold onto a job.” 

“She will never take responsibility—”

“Exactly,” she cut me off.  “It’s foolish, you wasting your hard-earned money.”

“I was going to say no matter what you or I do,” I tried to reassure us both.  “That’s my other line, can I call you tonight?” 

“Okay.”  She sounded like she was trying to calm herself.  “You get back to work.”

“I’ll call you later, I promise.”  I disconnected, my vision flattening at the steady red light on the phone.  This wasn’t going to get any easier as Ray Lynne got older, I knew that much from Billy.  The more I took care of her—even from a distance—the more care I would be expected to take.  I’d told myself that when Billy was a teenager I would finally be invulnerable to my mother’s needs, but now, with Ray Lynne, I was back to the first square on the game board. 

I pulled out my phone to stare at my bank account.  I believed there was a number high enough that it would put me at ease, enough money not to be broadsided by Delilah’s miscalculations, but whatever it was I wasn’t anywhere near it.  I’d lived my whole life in a state devoted to vacation and it felt at that moment I would never know what that was.  “Hello?”

“Amanda, it’s Lindsay Davis.”

“Mrs. Davis.”  I sat straighter.  “How are you?”

“No one should have twins at forty-five.  This was a terrible, terrible idea.”  I could hear wailing. 

I took a quick swig of coffee to regroup.  “I’m so sorry.  Can I help you?” I took one last look at my account and made myself lock my phone.

“My nanny hurt her back.  She can’t come in.  She can’t send anyone.  She may, in fact, I realize as I’m saying this, be quitting.  I would quit.  I would like to quit.”  Her voice bounced as she spoke and I heard that familiar pause of a mom switching her kid to her other hip.  “Chip has been up for three nights.  Collin has an ear infection.  My skin hurts I am so tired.  It wasn’t like this with—”  She paused.  “Before.  She was so easy.”  She made a long breathy ‘haaah’ sound.  “I promised myself I would never say stuff like that, wouldn’t compare, but I am so fucking tired.”

“How can I help?”

“I’m supposed to leave for the airport in five hours if I’m going to make Tom’s supporter dinner tonight.  My friends are busy with a luncheon and my parents are travelling.”  She was thinking it through as she spoke.  “I can’t leave the boys with someone they don’t know—we’ll all have to go together.  In the tiny plane.  Shit.  How can I call the agency with them sobbing their guts out in the background—who would come?  Please.  Help me find someone.”

I knew how to do this—I’d been doing it forever.  “I could go with you.”

“What?”

“Trust me.  I know everything there is to know about toddlers in confined spaces.”

Lindsay had been all set to move with Tom to DC when he was elected, but they discovered the pregnancy within days of his win and she was put on bed rest shortly thereafter.  Once the twins arrived, she’d opted to stay close to her mother and friends as she found her parenting footing afresh.  

              For the first year Tom had shared a place with a few congressmen who also had young children and flew home a lot, but in June he’d found an apartment of his own and the staff had worked around the clock for a weekend to get it set up. 

I’m not sure what I was expecting the Davises Riverside house to look like.  It was—not small, certainly, not by Tallyville standards.  But tiny compared with anything else in the neighborhood.  And they seemed to be bursting out of it like a roasting tomato. 

She met me in the foyer, which was crowded with toys and strollers.  “Come on in.”  She looked around, the way you do when someone arrives for the first time, seeing messes that had blurred into camouflage.  “God, yes, we should clear some of these out of here.”  She stepped backwards, bumping her calves into a plastic castle.  I looked up at the wall, where someone had rolled stripes of paint, testing shades of earth tones.   “Oh, yes, that.”

“Are you re-painting?  I like that mushroom color.”  It had a check mark on it—it seemed to be the winner.

“We’d thought we’d maybe—well—”  She lifted her hands into her hair.  “It’s a few years old to be truthful.  Every year we thought we’d move.  But I was working and Ashleigh had band and then Ashleigh had PSAT prep, then SAT tutoring—every year it seemed like something—and even though Tom—we had more money—I just didn’t know where I’d find the time—because you know it’s all on the wives.  I’d be the one looking at houses, ordering the movers.  So we decided when Ashleigh started college I’d make the time.”  She looked away.  “Now we can’t bear to be here and can’t bear to leave.  But you’re helping, right?”  Her voice brightened.  She scooped up Chip and blew a raspberry on his cheek.  “And this time—I’m not missing a second of this.”  She looked exhausted.  Worse than any day on the campaign.  Her hair was dirty.  Her robe had stains on it. 

“Here.”  I held out my arms for him. “Let me take them and you go get ready.”

I took the kids into the living room, which was filled with even more rainbow-colored plastic.  Two of everything.  Collin had been a pound bigger at birth and the differences were obvious.  Chip was excited to try walking by holding onto the couch.  Collin just wanted to bang things into other things—the coffee table, my leg, Chip’s head.  Chip was either going to go grow up to be in an abusive relationships—or a cage fighter. 

“Okay, I think that’s the last of it.”  When I helped Lindsay get everything loaded into the front hall I saw that same Hello Kitty pencil case sticking out of her tote.  “It was Ashleigh’s.  She gave it to me for a business trip when she was little—of course I didn’t use it.  I had a Chanel one.  I was a grown-up.  I found it after.”  The limo honked, saving me from figuring out what to say to that.

The plane belonged to a donor of Tom’s who had put it at his disposal.  Despite its walnut paneling and ‘concierge’ it was no bigger than a tube of toothpaste and I quickly went from feeling thrilled that my first flight ever was going to be private to wishing we were in a cargo plane.   Especially since the space was magnifying Chip’s screams as if he were shouting down a paper towel tube.  The upside was that trying to keep the kids from drinking before take-off so they’d drink during take-off distracted me until we’d suddenly reached our cruising altitude, the air thinned, and the twins passed out.

              Then I realized Lindsay was crying on the seat across from me.  “Don’t mind me.”  She swished her palm in front of her face.  “I’m overwhelmed and peri-menopausal.”

              I handed her a cocktail napkin.   

              “Thank you for handling Teddy Huvane’s septic issue,” she said as she blew her nose.  “He’s an old friend of Tom’s from law school.”

              “No problem.  I was happy to help.”  The city of Miami had declared eminent domain and dug a trench on his property to run a gas pipeline—severing his septic line in the process.  But then the city tried to say it was the county’s problem—and the county said it was the city and he was going in circles and about three seconds from building an outhouse on the Mayor’s lawn.  Then I remembered seeing an article in the Miami Herald that the Mayor had a thing for Sharon Stone, who was scheduled to testify in Congress about funding stroke research.  I got him flown up and Tom made the introduction.  He expressed his gratitude by fixing Huvane’s septic line. 

              “Charlene says you’re indispensible.”

              “Aw, that’s sweet—”

              Lindsay dabbed at her eyes.  “She has told me exactly what she’d like to do to Chris Harrison in no uncertain terms.   But she has never once paid anyone a compliment so don’t dismiss it.”

              “Thank you.” 

              “I’m sorry you’re always seeing me when I’m a hot mess.”

              “You are not a hot mess,” I answered, stunned she could see herself that way as she sat there in her khaki cigarette pants with a fitted blazer trimmed in the same fabric.  Even with the thirty or so extra pounds from her pregnancy she was effortlessly chic.  The children were wearing complimenting outfits.  Everything I’d helped her pack in their diaper bags was organic.  “My mom is a hot mess.  You are super together.” 

              She considered me for a moment.  “I bet your mom is beautiful.”

              My cheeks burned.  “My mom never got anyone elected.”

              “Speaking of which, can you pass me that black duffle?  I need to go through the briefing binders.  People are really loving Tom, but he needs to be more strategic right now if he wants to propose his own bills later in the session.  Aligning himself with the senators who have the ear of the President might have to take priority over voting along party lines.”

              “Can I look?”  I asked as she reached into the bag, not sure if they were confidential.

              “Of course!  I didn’t know you had an interest in the actual nuts and bolts of policy.”

              “Well, I want to be useful.  While I love Charlene, I don’t necessarily want to
be
Charlene—that thing that stays the same while everything around me moves on,” I took a risk admitting this to her.

              “I doubt that could ever happen to you, Amanda.”  She slid her glasses on. 

Tom was stuck in meetings so Lindsay and I got the kids through the sweltering evening heat to his new apartment off Dupont Circle.  I held Chip in the elevator as we all cooled off and Collin tried to walk up Lindsay’s leg.  “Have you seen it yet?” I asked.  Lindsay shook her head while Collin made another run at her.  “I want to start spending more time up here—I thought I could handle them on my own in Jacksonville, but I—well, I can’t.  And we miss each other.  It’s too hard to be apart for so long.”  She smiled and shrugged.  “So I told him we need a family place in D.C. starting this summer and here we finally are.  I think this is going to be good.”  She nodded to herself the way tired people do.  “I think it’s going to be the fresh start.”

She opened the apartment door while I dragged out the bags and car seats.  Lindsay kind of froze in the entryway, then looked back down at the keys as if she was confused.  “Mrs. Davis?” I asked as the kids toddled in ahead of us—Collin making straight for the precarious glass coffee table with the shiny metal sculpture at its center.  It was flanked by leather couches facing an enormous flat screen perched on a dangerously low console.   Other than the framed pictures of Lindsay and the kids, with its parquet floor, galley kitchen, framed sports jerseys and precarious standing lamps, it was an unremarkable bachelor pad. 

“I’m just . . .”  She didn’t finish as her eyes landed on the photo of Tom hugging her on election night.  “Okay, so this
is
. . .”  She walked to the door off the living room, opening it to a small bedroom while I headed off Collin.  The next door opened to the bathroom and the last to a linen closet.  “Can we at least get the AC on—I feel like I’m having a panic attack.”