“She's too funny,” he said. “Is she always that funny?”
More often than not. “Not always,” she said defensively. “They just
show
it when she is.”
He slowly crumpled his beer can, then tossed it into the trash can by the bureau. “I don't know. She should be more serious.”
Damn it, maybe Hawley's strategy was workingâespecially if Greg's opinion was representative. “Maybe it would be
good
for the
country to go back to being optimistic again,” she said. And fearless. And
friendly
.
Just for a change.
“Yeah.” He put his hands in his pockets. “I don't know. I guess my parents kind of like Griffin.”
Who was the almost-certain Republican nomineeâand the sort of glad-handing, ear-marking politician Meg particularly disliked.
Greg shifted his position. “I'll be eighteen by then.”
“I'm not even going to ask,” Meg said.
“Don't,” he agreed. “Hell,
I
don't even know.”
“âcan't help wondering whether her nuanced position on trade will play well here in theâ” one of the panelists was saying.
Meg changed the channel, stopping on ESPN. “Sports are nice, too.”
He grinned, and they watched for a few minutes, companionably silent, Meg having no idea who was playing, or whether the game was important, except that it was two college teams. Villanova and somebody.
“I guess we should go downstairs,” she said, as the game switched to a commercial.
“Come here,” he said.
She looked at him blankly. “What?”
He leaned over and kissed her, his arm going around her waist, and Meg automatically kissed back, but recovered herself almost as quickly and pulled away.
“Why'd you do that?” she asked.
He kept his arm around her waist. “What do you mean?”
“Because you like me, because I'm a girl, or because you feel sorry for me?” she asked.
He laughed. “All three.”
“What?” She moved away from him. “Where do you get off feeling sorry for me? There's no reason to feel sorry for me.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “Because I like you.”
Yeah, right. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You mean, because I'm a girl.”
“I like girls,” he agreed. “What's so bad about me liking girls?”
“Nothing.” She swallowed, knowing that she wanted to keep kissing him, that he still wanted to kiss her, and they probably weren't going to do it again. She wouldn't have let him get
much
further, butâconsidering where they were sittingâit would have been nice to stretch out, and relax, and maybeâ
“Oh, sorry,” a guy said from the doorway. “Thought this was the bathroom.” He shrugged at them, and continued down the hall.
Which definitely broke the moodâalthough not the tension.
“Well,” Greg said, after a minute. “I guess we should go back down.”
Damn. Meg nodded. “Yeah.”
They got up and walked awkwardly together, a couple of feet apart, not talking.
“You're going to love Princeton,” she said finally.
He smiled, touched her hand for a second, and they separated to rejoin the party.
ON THE NIGHT of the caucus, her house was filled with people from the campaign, some of her parents' friends, and a small pool of reporters, photographers, and camera people. Originally, Meg and her brothers had been scheduled to go to Iowa, but her parentsâmainly her motherâdecided that it really wasn't worth their missing school. Meg thought that was too simplistic, and figured that either her mother thought she was going to win and that it would be more important for them to skip school at certain points further on in the campaign, orâand this was what she suspectedâbecause her mother thought she was going to lose, and didn't want all of them to be there to see it.
Whatever the reason was, they stayed home with Trudy. Four televisions had been set up in the living room, with each one tuned to a different cable news station, except for the one set to show C-Span all night. People had brought pizza, and things to drink, and it was more like a party than anything else, although most of the campaign people had their laptops open, and also took turns manning the phones, which never seemed to stop ringing.
After helping Trudy make sure that everyone had everything he or she needed, Meg sat on the rug in front of the televisions with Steven, who was gobbling pizza, Neal, who was looking around with huge eyes, and Beth, who was spending the night. Kirby lay in front of them, wagging his tail every so often and eating the crusts Steven gave him, which he always called “pizza bones.” Weird kid. The cats were all closed up in her parents' bedroom, so that no one would let them outside by mistake.
There was a flash, and all four of them jumped.
“Good,” the
Globe
photographer said. “Can you all maybe turn a little so I can see everyone's faces?”
“Are we going to be famous?” Neal asked.
Perish the thought. “Come on, Meg,” Meg said to Beth. “Aren't you going to smile for him?”
Beth shook her head. “I don't want to. I'm a Republican.”
“Yeah, but she's your
mother
,” Meg said.
Beth sniffed. “She's a bleeding heart, that's what she is.”
“Girls,” Steven said sternly, imitating their father.
“We're boys,” Meg said.
“No way,” Steven said. “You're too ugly to be boys.”
Meg laughed. “Yeah, well,
you're
too ugly toâ”
“What do you all think of this?” Her mother's best friend, Andrea Peterson, stopped next to them, and they all sat up politely.
“I think it's neat,” Steven said, helping himself to more pizza.
“I think it's loud,” Neal said, still looking around.
“What about you, Meg? Don't you think?” Mrs. Peterson asked.
“Only twice a day,” Meg said, grinning back. “And I used them up already.” She liked Mrs. Peterson. They had been friends since college, or, as Mrs. Peterson put it, “back in the days when Kate was a simple political science major.” “Simple is right,” her mother would usually answer, and they would both laugh. Mrs. Peterson was one of the very few people around whom Meg ever saw her even slightly relax. “Oh, Mrs. Peterson, you know my friend Beth, right?”
They both nodded.
“Do you want some pizza, Mrs. Peterson?” Steven asked, reaching onto the coffee table to get a clean plate.
“No, thank you.” She touched her waist. “Not all of us have your mother's infuriating metabolism.”
Her mother was, indeed, dependably thin, although after Neal was born, she'd had some trouble losing the last fifteen pounds of her baby weightâmuch to the delight of the media, and a very
snarky columnist actually called her “Senator Chunky” once. Whereupon, her motherâwho did not, it went without saying, accept this with good graceâhad almost instantly dropped the fifteen pounds, and now generally erred on the side of being
too
thin.
She had also, after being accused of using Botox, said testily, “No, thank you, I enjoy moving my eyebrows,” but Meg had noticed thatâalthough she didn't seem to be aware that she did itâshe sometimes brushed her hair self-consciously across her forehead.
“My God, I never thought I'd be over here watching her run for President.” Mrs. Peterson's smile widened. “I'm invited to the Inaugural Balls, right?”
“Yeah,” Meg said. “You can stand in for me.”
Beth looked surprised. “You wouldn't go to the Inaugural Balls?”
“No way,” Meg said. “Wear some frumpy gown on national television and have a bunch of Senators dance with me because they feel sorry for me standing all alone? You've got to be kidding.”
Mrs. Peterson laughed. “What if the gown isn't frumpy?”
“Stand there all alone in some skimpy gown on national television?” Meg said. “Not a chance.”
Mrs. Peterson laughed again, and then someone across the room motioned her over, and she gestured “Excuse me” to them and left.
“You really wouldn't go?” Beth asked.
Meg shrugged. “At this point, it isn't exactly an issue.”
“Well, yeah,” Beth said, “butâ”
“Hey, where're the smiles?” Preston sat down next to them. “Candidates' kids have to smile.
Constantly
.”
They all smiled.
“Oh, good, very good,” he said, taking a swig of beer and looking terribly handsome in dark brown flannel slacks, ankle-high leather boots, a V-neck tan lamb's wool sweater with no shirt underneath, and a brown fedora. “Some scene we've got here.” He tilted the hat over one eye, and then looked at them with the uncovered eye. “You know why your mother's going to win?”
“Because everyone loves her,” Neal said happily.
“Not just that, little guy.” Preston took the hat off and put it on Steven, who tried to adjust it to the exact same tilt. “Because the lady's got style. People like style.”
Neal looked down at himself. “Do I have style?”
“Sure, kid,” Preston said. “You've got the makings of one fine-looking dude.”
Well, if jeans and beat-up, hand-me-down Lacoste shirts were considered chic, then, on most days, she was in good shape, too.
“What about Steven?” Neal asked.
“Ab-solutely. And Meggo here,” he draped an arm around her shoulders, “Meggo's got it, too.” He nodded at the grey sweatpants tucked into her hiking boots. “Very nice. All you need is here.” He touched the neck of her ragg sweater. “A nice scarf here, and you'll have 'em at your feet.”
“Who?” Neal asked.
“The world, kid.” He looked at Beth. “Good, the friend has style, too. Only, you might want this up.” He adjusted her collar, then studied the result. “Good. Very good.”
Neal flipped up his own collar. “Does Daddy have style?”
“Russell?” He shook his head. “No, I think Russell-baby needs some help.”
“You call him Russell-baby?” Steven asked from underneath the hat.
Preston shrugged. “Sure. What else? You can call him that, too, kid. Tell him I said it was okay.”
Luckily, Preston had a deep sense of ironyâor he would be too damn goofy and glib to have any credibility whatsoever. “What's wrong with the way Dad dresses?” Meg asked, amused.
“Well, Meggo, it's like thisâbourgeois. Upper bourgeois, maybe, but bourgeois. Moccasins, Oxford
everything
, still wearing the old B-school jacketsâ” Preston shook his head sadly. “No style whatsoever.”
He had a point, although her father had, of course, gone to
L
-school.
“Can you help him get style?” Neal asked, sounding as if he wasn't sure whether he should be worried or giggling.
“Sure,” Preston said. “Give me a few weeks of intensiveâ”
“We're now able to projectâ” the anchorperson on the third television began.
“Shhh!” half of the room hissed, and Meg felt a sudden tension rippling up her back.
“âSenator Katharine Powers, with an unprecedentedâ”
The room exploded into thirty or forty different cheers.
“âholding strong with almost thirty-five percent of the vote,” the anchorperson went on, “with her nearest competitor, Senator Thomas Hawley, taking away only twenty-seven percent of thisâ”
Meg stared at the pandemonium in the room, at people jumping and yelling and hugging each other, and then at Steven and Neal and Beth, who all looked as stunned as she felt.
“The early caucus results are in, and tonight, we've had an historicâ” a commentator on one of the other televisions was now saying.
“This makes her the front-runner!” someone shouted.
“We're gonna do it!” someone else yelled. “We're gonna go all the way!”
Neal yanked on Meg's arm. “Does this mean she's President?”
“It means she might be,” Meg said, looking at the piece of pizza Steven had dropped facedown on the rug. The pizza looked like she felt.
“I thought she wasn't supposed to win,” Beth said quietly.
“She wasn't,” Meg said, feeling almost dazed. “All the polls saidâ” She shook her head. Projectedâholding strongâunprecedentedâ
historic
â
“Isn't it great?” someone shouted at them. “Aren't you proud of your mother?”
They all nodded, Meg gulping some Coke to calm her stomach.
“Now, we'll move to the Des Moines Marriott, where Mark Wilson is on the scene,” a commentator on yet another one of the televisions said. “Mark?”
“Thank you, Lila,” a man holding a microphone in a noisy, crowded hotel lobby said as the camera switched to him. “This is Mark Wilson, and I'm standing in theâ”
“Shhh!” several people in the room said, the celebration stopping so everyone could gather around to listen.
“Sources have said that the Senator will be coming down toâyes, there she is,” he said. “We'll be moving in toâ”
Meg watched as the camera focused on her mother, surrounded by people and flashbulbs, dignified in a deep blue dress. Her father was standing next to her, looking a little shell-shocked, but grinning, regardless. He said something to her, she smiled, and Meg thought she saw their hands touch before her mother turned to face the cameras. She waved briefly with her left arm and most of the hotel lobby, as well as the living room, broke into applause.
“Senator, how do you feel?” a reporter shouted.
“Very happy,” her mother said. “Very excited, veryâvery inarticulate.”
The people in the lobby laughed in obvious camaraderie.
“Did you expect to win, Senator?” another reporter asked, managing to get his voice heard over the others.
“I make it a practice never to
expect
anything,” her mother said.
“Where do you go from here, Senator?” the same reporter asked.
Her mother's grin got a little bigger. “New Hampshire,” she said.
After the caucus, her mother was on the covers of
Time, Newsweek,
and
U.S. News & World Report
âwhich really freaked Meg out. Everywhere she went, she either saw a picture of her mother, or heard people talking about her, or was otherwise reminded about how odd her family's lives had become. There seemed to be kind of a bandwagon effect, and suddenly, people who had never given her mother a
second thought were behaving as though they had been life-long supporters, and had always suspected that she might make a serious run at the Presidency one day.
Since New Hampshire was an easy drive, they all spent the next weekend with her mother, and Meg found herself doing some old-fashioned, retail campaigningâwhich mostly involved handing out leaflets and buttons. Steven was all set to run around shaking hands, but when asked to concentrate on leafleting, worked with exhausting enthusiasm. At first, Neal helped them, but he was kind of afraid of the crowds and would spend most of his time with their parents, holding on to whichever oneâalmost always their fatherâhad a free hand, probably winning hundreds of votes with his smile, which was currently missing two front teeth. Steven kept telling people that it was because of a gruesome hockey accident.
On Sunday afternoon, while they were at a shopping mall near Concord, she and Steven ran into Senator Hawley's childrenâthree swaggering and obnoxious boys wearing ties. They surrounded Steven, knocked his box of buttons out of his arms, and told him he'd better get the hell out of there if he knew what was good for him. Meg hurried over to help, and the two older boysâboth of whom were bigger than she was, although probably only one of them was her ageâmade comments that were both chauvinistic and obscene. This infuriated Steven, who was ready to take on all three of them, and Meg was starting to get a little nervous, when one of the boys yanked her leaflets away from her, scattering them on the ground. For some reason, this struck Meg as being funny as hell, and as she stood there laughing, the three Hawleys apparently realized what jerks they were making of themselves and left, an angry Hawley staffer meeting them on the way and escorting them to a different section of the mall.