The Governor's Lady (22 page)
“You’re stubborn and willful. Always have been.”
“How the hell would you know, Mother? You never paid any attention.”
In the long silence, Cooper thought Mickey might hang up. Instead, when she finally spoke, her voice was a hiss. “I know what you’re up to, Cooper. It’s underhanded and deceitful.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Sneaking around behind Woodrow’s back with some two-bit college professor.”
Cooper was stunned.
How did …
? No sense in asking. Mickey Spainhour had tentacles everywhere.
Feeling herself being shoved, she pushed back. “Mother,” she said calmly, “I appreciate your concern, but frankly it’s none of your god-damn business. It’s my life.”
“And you can goddamn well live it without me!” A crash on the other end as Mickey slammed the receiver, missed the cradle, then again, and finally a click as the connection broke.
Cooper set the phone down, put her trembling hands in her lap, breathed deeply, fought back against rage, tried to calm herself. She felt overwhelmed by the old weariness, the ancient disappointment. They had gotten along so well in the days of Cleve’s dying. But now it seemed all smoke and mirrors. Mickey either got what she wanted or made people suffer.
But I’m through with that. I have to be, for my own sanity
.
She rose, drank another cup of coffee, ate cereal, finished dressing, put on makeup—shutting away Mickey and Woodrow and Pickett Lanier—and went to work.
It came on her in a rush, the great feeling of freedom. Everything seemed lively and quick and filled with possibility. If it was all a mistake, it was a mistake she had made on purpose, and she was willing to take that chance.
She kept Pickett at arm’s length. He called, at first to ask her out and then, when she made it clear she needed time and space, just to chat. “Look,” he said, “I understand.” He didn’t press. He was easy to talk to, seemed genuinely interested in her work, the day-to-dayness of her life. At odd times, often late at night, he would call, and when she answered, he would put the phone down next to him and play his guitar and sing, maybe something he had been working on. And when the song was finished, he would simply hang up.
She found a note thumbtacked to her apartment door one evening: “Off to Washington to finish dissertation research, back in August. Have a good summer. Pickett.”
She immersed herself in her work. The editor assigned her to cover the Police Department and Sheriff’s Office—a promotion with a bit more money and a lot more responsibility. She had a scanner on her desk, and the editor had another installed in her car. She spent hours chasing their traffic, even the most mundane calls, sometimes late into the night—every incident an opportunity to be around officers, get to know them, watch and listen and learn who they were and how and why and what they did. A few were gruff and dismissive with her, but she passed it off to testosterone and kept working until even the most hard-bitten seemed to grant her grudging acceptance. She welcomed exhaustion, slept soundly, and healed.
And then there he was on an August evening, sitting on the front stoop of her apartment building, legs stretched across the sidewalk, hair even longer, spilling over the collar of his T-shirt, guitar nestled against his torso, fingers drifting idly across the strings, coaxing notes and chords. He looked up, squinted at her, and then his face broke into a dazzling smile. He put the guitar aside, stood, reached out to her. “I’m crazy about you. I’m
going
crazy about you. If you don’t let me into your life, I shall surely die.”
She did let him in, fell headlong into him, both frightened and exhilarated by the intensity of it. She was stunned by the way he focused such white heat on her, making her giddy and weak.
They made love—laughing, crying, breathless.
“Marry me?” he asked after a bit.
“No,” she said, “not now.”
Instead, she went to live with him in the woods.
It had started in the distant past as a two-room log cabin and been expanded over the years with frame additions until it sprawled untidily across a clearing on a low rise, lofty pines and old hardwoods pressing in comfortably on three sides. A sagging, weathered shed in the back, a garden plot, and stretching beyond that an unbroken view across pastures, cultivated fields, groves of trees, a meandering creek, all the way to the university town several miles away. It was close enough to be convenient, distant enough to be refuge.
They lived together in the woods for three unbroken months while summer eased into fall and cooling breezes flowed through the open doors and windows. Then the leaves turned and the grass browned and there was frost. They gathered in the last of the garden. She listened to the sound of Pickett splitting wood behind the shed. They spent long evenings making love before a crackling fire and huddling in a blanket. She felt safe, protected, cherished. It was all she had ever wanted.
They had their work, Pickett with his classes and then in the evening at a clattering electric typewriter with his reams of notes, finishing his dissertation, Cooper at the newspaper, prevailing on the editor to let her give up the police beat and take on city hall, something less intense and time-consuming.
She thought of Woodrow only in rare moments. Gone now, dropped out of graduate school. She heard he had taken a job in a congressman’s local office at the other end of the state. Woodrow had loved her, but not in this way, not so completely. Pickett had no other mistress.
“Guess who showed up at my office today,” Pickett said. He was at the table with his typewriter and notes when she came in from town in the late afternoon.
She sensed it immediately, something strangely guarded about him. “Who?”
“Your mother.”
She felt a stiff blow to her stomach, a rush of the old poison. She stared at him, then turned away and walked in a daze through the back door. He caught her at the edge of the garden plot, now ugly and weed-clotted. He touched her. She turned away, shivering in the cold.
“Why can’t she just leave me alone?”
“Could it be that she cares about you?”
“If she does, she has a history of bizarre ways of showing it.”
“Well, listen to what she said. She told me if I hurt you in any way, she will—and I’m quoting verbatim—‘cut my nuts out.’ She told me to do the decent thing and marry you and make you happy.”
Cooper could only stare, speechless.
“We’ve got to talk about you and her, and us,” he said. She let him take her arm and lead her back into the house.
They talked long into the night. She told him everything—the hurt, the anger, the loneliness, Jesse. He listened and then held her. She nestled in his arms, exhausted from unburdening herself but eased by the effort, by his being there and listening and caring. She drifted into profound sleep and awoke at first light, cuddled with him on the floor in front of the fireplace.
He kissed her forehead. “Okay?”
She nodded.
“Marry me,” he said.
“Yes.”
The clock said 4:17. She had dozed fitfully but never got soundly to sleep. She parted the curtains at the bedside window and looked out. The snowfall had eased, random flakes drifting through pools of light. What had been sidewalk and street were now a solid blanket of white, broken only by the tall wrought-iron fence.
All night, and not a peep from the command center. Should she wait? Call? She seethed, let the anger boil up again.
All of them sitting over there at the Public Safety Building feeling smug, Pickett’s Posse still running the show, Pickett pushing buttons all the way from New Hampshire
.
She called. A young man answered.
“This is the governor. Let me speak to Roger Tankersley.”
“Mr. Tankersley went home just awhile ago, ma’am. Said he’d be back shortly.”
“Colonel Doster, then.”
“He’s, ah, resting.”
“Well, wake him up!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
After a minute, he came thick-voiced on the line: “Miz Lanier …”
“What’s going on, Colonel?”
“Well,” he drawled, “we don’t really know yet. It’s still dark.”
“All right, Colonel. Go back to sleep.”
“I’ll call just as soon as we—”
She hung up on him, sat a minute longer, then pulled on a robe and slippers and started down the hall toward the stairs. A sliver of light under the door to Mickey’s room. She cracked the door and peeked in. Mickey was sitting up in bed holding a newspaper, reading glasses perched on her nose, cigarette smoldering in an ashtray on the bedside table.
Mickey looked up and rattled the paper. “This damn thing is three days old. Send somebody out for today’s.” She looked shrunken, engulfed in a sea of pillows and bedclothes, but her voice was strong, some of the old bite there.
The air reeked. “Mother where did you get the cigarettes?”
“I sent a trooper out for ’em,” Mickey said, “before the snow got bad.” She laid the newspaper on the covers, took off her glasses, reached for the cigarette, fingers trembling as she guided it to her lips, took a long drag, stubbed it out. “What the hell’s going on?”
Any other time, Cooper would have turned on her heel and marched out. None of Mickey Spainhour’s damn business. But now, she had this acute feeling of impotence, and nobody to tell. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Snowed like a sonofabitch last night, didn’t it?”
“From the look of things, yes.”
“And …”
“I called out the National Guard, or tried to. Pickett stopped it.”
Mickey gave a low grunt and chewed on the information for a moment. “Stopped it?”
“He made it clear that I could issue all the orders I wanted, but it was not going to happen, not last night.”
Mickey peered intently over the top of her glasses. “He can’t legally do that.”
“Maybe not, but he did it anyway.”
Mickey pursed her lips, knotted her brow, let out a breath. “I knew this would happen. Pickett’s a control freak. No way will he let you run things. There are a thousand ways he and his bunch can undercut you, and you damn well better believe they’ll do it. When he agreed to let you run, what was the deal you struck?”
“I said I’d try to hold down the home base and do what I could to help him run for president. He needed me to do that, and I needed him to bring it off.”
Mickey shook her head. “Did you have any idea this is what would happen?”
“I should have. But after the campaign was over, he was out barnstorming the country and we never talked much about how I’d actually do the job. I’m surrounded by his people—Roger Tankersley, the cabinet.”
Mickey sighed. “You made a deal with the devil, Cooper. It was your idea to run, and he backed you, and now he assumes you’ll be a good little girl and let him stay in charge. Do you feel an obligation to go along?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well,
I
know. You’re the one with the job, and you have to decide whether to shit or get off the pot. But you’d better decide right now. Let Pickett get away with this and you’ll never have much say. He’ll make sure of that. Right now, you’ve got the snow.”
