Five Fortunes (41 page)

“No, I’ve got that nailed down for the moment. There’s a serious chance I’m going to lose the primary. Little one—what
have
you been doing to yourself? You’re wasting away! No wait, no wait, I know what I’m supposed to say. Just Don’t Lose Too Much!” And they both roared with laughter.

Jill was disappointed not to see more of Laurie, and slightly appalled at the way she was scheduled. She seemed to have no time to herself, and hardly time to sleep. But she enjoyed watching her mother fit into the group around Laurie. They
were
a team. She began to think she’d ask for a summer job, if they were still in the race by summer.

By nightfall, the ballroom of the hotel was as ready as it would ever be, and Jill knew more about the logistics of dinner for three hundred than she had ever wanted to know. There was a rumor the President would drop by during the cocktail hour, and the Secret Service was driving everybody crazy. Jill, already dressed, sat nervously on the bed playing Canfield and waiting for her mother.

Amy came out of the bathroom still blotting her mascara. Jill stood up to be admired.

“Is it all right?”

“Honey. You look marvelous.” And she did.

The President did not manage to appear at the cocktail party. But the ladies of the Senate turned out to a woman, and Laurie looked radiant. She was standing in the middle of the room with Senator Lorenz. Jill, nursing a glass of Evian in the corner, saw Laurie change color. A tall man, slim, with thinning dark hair and deep-set eyes, had come in by himself and made his way to Senator Lorenz.

324 / Beth Gutcheon

“Well, hello, John,” the senator said, with obvious pleasure. The man called John seemed to blush, a surprising and very appealing thing for a man to do. Then he smiled, and that was even nicer.

Clearly, he was fond of Senator Lorenz.

“This is the shyest man in the Cabinet,” the senator said to Laurie.

“And absolutely the smartest. You never go to parties, John. What are you doing here?”

“Laurie’s an old friend,” he said. Senator Lorenz looked with surprise and interest at Laurie.

The man had turned to Laurie and taken her hand. He held it, and after a moment made a small courtly bow.

“John,” said Laurie. She seemed quite tongue-tied.

He said, “It’s nice to see you again.”

“And you,” said Laurie. She was suddenly wearing a huge smile.

I
t’s complete crap, of course,” Carter said to DeeAnne.

Carter was pacing up and down in the corner closet they called the Conference Room. DeeAnne and Mae Ruth watched her.

“Nix has a perfect legal right to file that lien, to be sure he gets paid.

They’re just pissed that he got there first.”

“Well, of course,” said DeeAnne. DeeAnne had recently had an eye tuck and the top half of her face was all swollen. She was working out of the Conference Room instead of in the outer office, and she wore immense dark glasses that covered most of her face and made her look like a bug, with her trim little close-cropped head on her long stalk of a neck. To create a diversion from her battered eyes she had painted her lips and fingernails the color of eggplant.

“They’ve registered the indictments…they’re in the permanent record. We’re all getting our pictures in the paper.”

“I hope they spell the name of the agency right,” said Leesa.

“This isn’t funny!” Carter snapped.

DeeAnne and Mae Ruth looked at each other. Mae Ruth shifted her substantial bulk in her chair. She was wearing a flowered dress, an outfit she favored because she claimed it made her blend in with the furniture. “I can stake a building lobby for hours and nobody knows I’m there. I decide to walk down the hall, they say, ‘There go one of the sofas, heading for the ladies’ room.’” Her daughter Romie was a suppler, bouncier version of Mae Ruth, but she too would likely be a woman of serious size some day.

325

326 / Beth Gutcheon

“Who’s representing you?”

“Oh, Nix is taking care of that. That’s not the point. The point is…”

“What?”

“The point is, I was planning to file adoption papers.”

DeeAnne took a deep breath and let it out through her nostrils.

Mae Ruth shifted in her chair again, and uncrossed her ankles.

“Flora? You going to adopt her legally?”

Carter stopped racketing around the room and faced her.

“Yes, I was planning to. Did you think I wasn’t?”

There was a silence.

“I thought you were looking for the aunt. Shanti’s sister,” Mae Ruth said.

“I am. I’ve run all the arrest records. I’ve sent her picture to Vice in New York. They haven’t turned her up yet.”

“I thought you were going to New York yourself to look for her,”

said DeeAnne.

“I am, if I have to. I thought it would be easier than it’s turned out. But in the meantime…so what? I mean, so what if I find her or if I don’t? Are you saying you think a junkie would be a better mother than I am, just because she’s a relative?”

“No,” said DeeAnne. “I wouldn’t say that at all, I think you’re a fine mother. But I do think the sister’s got some rights in the case.

And so does Flora. I think the time will come when Flora’s friends are all going to be having breasts and fighting with their 4parents and getting into their identities.” She pronounced it “I-Dent-It-Ees.”

“And all the kids who look like Flora are going to have hip young mamas watching
Fresh Prince
with them, and reading to them about Harriet Tubman, and Flora’s going to be coming home to this sixty-year-old white woman who’s going ‘Why you wearing your hair like that?’”

“I never would.”

“And she’s going to be saying, ‘You mean my mama had a sister, who looked like her, and looked like me, and you didn’t try to find her?’”

There was a long silence. Carter looked at Mae Ruth, and found
Five Fortunes / 327

that her friend was looking back, full of thoughts she’d been storing on this subject for a while now. She sat down.

“This is a motherless child,” said Carter. She was surprised her voice was so steady. “And fatherless.”

“I understand that. And I think you’ve given her a shot at being a healthy human being again someday, where if she’d been hauled off to some foster home she might never have been all right.”

“Or she might have been fine…” said Mae Ruth. “My oldest girl’s husband, he was raised in a foster family and he’s a fine young man.”

Carter sat, silent. She thought about her own family, with her one brother so much older than she, and with so little in common. She could say that she herself had been practically an only child of older parents, and she was all right…(right?) Or she could admit how jealous she had been of her friend Chrissy Cuddeback, with her crowded, noisy house full of brothers and sisters, and how she’d spent so much time with them that she made her mother cry by saying she wanted to take confirmation classes with Chrissy. She hadn’t meant to make her mother cry, she just hadn’t been real clear on the fact that taking Holy Communion was an issue if your family was Jewish.

“Flora loves me,” said Carter.

“Without question,” said DeeAnne. And Mae Ruth nodded.

“But I still wouldn’t file adoption papers while you’re under indictment,” said DeeAnne.

“I
know
that,” Carter snapped.

L
aurie came back from Washington with about half the money she needed for the last weeks of the primary campaign. The PACs were taking a wait-and-see attitude; Idaho was such a Republican stronghold there were only thirteen Democrats in the whole state legislature. If Laurie could beat Prince, they’d get serious about whether she had a shot at Turnbull. Meanwhile, the Republican Senate Campaign Committee had sponsored a negative ad: Laurie Lopez, a very nice woman who ought to be home with her children.

To make matters worse, Laurie had caught a rotten cold on the plane coming back from Washington. She’d been going on four hours sleep a night for a month, eating take-out food and rubber chicken dinners. In the warmth of May, when even in the Idaho mountains the last patches of crusty snow were gone and the shivery aspens were leafing out, an astonishing baby-green color only seen in spring, Laurie’s infection turned into walking pneumonia, and her doctor said if she didn’t go home to bed and stay there, he was going to put her in the hospital.

The mood at the Boise headquarters was tense. Altogether, there was the unshakable impression in the countryside that Laurie was the candidate of the big city, of overpaid yuppie scum. Even the independent candidate, Carrol Coney, was gaining ground on her; he had taken to campaigning from the back of a mule, town to town, and the press was loving it.

328

Five Fortunes / 329

“We have to keep running against Turnbull,” Lynn urged many times a day. “We have to ignore Prince and Coney.”

“It’s getting hard to do, with the numbers Prince is getting. If he keeps climbing at this rate, he’ll have us.”

Laurie was back on the stump three days after the doctor sent her to bed.

“You look like a dead lily on toast,” said Amy.

“I’m on drugs,” said Laurie. “Don’t tell the children.” From that moment on, she didn’t stop, that Amy could see. She was up and out at seven every morning, speaking at prayer breakfasts, visiting sewing circles, standing in shopping malls in the rain shaking hands.

Prince was invited to give the Boise State University graduation speech. Laurie staged an event at a high school in Grangeville; nobody came.

Turnbull didn’t even bother to campaign in person; he stayed in Washington until two days before the primary. But his ads were everywhere. Jimbo Turnbull gets things done. Jimbo Turnbull—when experience counts. Jimbo Turnbull. Jimbo Turnbull. Seniority. Seniors for Turnbull. Jimbo Turnbull, family man. Jimbo Knows You, and He Knows How.

Some of the ads were paid for by Turnbull’s war chest, and an equal number by the Republican Senate Campaign Committee. In the last week before the vote, the national press showed up. Laurie finally got some key endorsements, from the
Post Register
and the Lewiston
Tribune
, and she seemed to stop sleeping at all. She was out in public all the time, working restaurants, visiting feedlots, talking with voters at the Iris Show in Nampa, shaking hands.

She had her groupies. There were the middle-aged women who had loved her husband. There were the college kids, in droves. The national press did stories about her political legacy, and the Sunday
New York Times
did a piece on the plane crash that had killed Roberto.

Jimbo Turnbull took to calling Laurie Sissy, a childhood name no one had ever used except her brothers. The press loved it, and took to call-330 / Beth Gutcheon

ing her Sissy too, so she sounded like a little girl doing battle with the grown-ups.

On election night, the ska band in the party room for Laurie’s young supporters was loud, which was probably an advantage.

Next door in the room where the press and the grown-ups were gathered, people were drinking wine out of plastic cups and saying brittle things to each other. The volunteers had been working like animals all day, manning the phones, driving vans of voters to and from the polling places. They could not believe that after all their effort they could fail. But the exit polls were terrifying. Although any number of local races were called within minutes of the close of voting, the Democratic Senate race showed Laurie and Lloyd Prince within half a percent of each other. In rural areas Prince was leading strongly, and in Boise, Moscow, and in Blaine County, Laurie’s early numbers were not as strong as they had hoped.

Upstairs in her suite, Laurie sat with the children, and with her father and brothers and Cinder, Amy, Lynn, and Geri.

“Early days,” said Hunt, looking defeated. Bliss was drinking vodka. The twins were playing slapjack. Laurie got up suddenly about eight-thirty in the evening and went into the bedroom. When Amy went in a half hour later she was astonished to find the candidate sound asleep. Her skin was burning.

It was twelve-thirty in the morning before all three networks had declared Laurie the winner. When she went downstairs to thank her supporters, there was pandemonium. Her family lined up behind her, even the twins, who had never been up so late in their lives.

She made her speech to the campaign workers and press and then went next door and made it again to the young volunteers, a great many of whom seemed to have gotten completely drunk or fallen in love or both. Then Laurie went back upstairs to her bedroom and shut the door.

The next morning she was up in time to do the morning television shows. She spent the day thanking supporters and talking to the print

Five Fortunes / 331

press; she stayed up to do
Nightline
from a local news studio. The day after that she was checked into the hospital and it was ten days before her doctor let her out again. By then, she said, she had an entirely new angle on health care.

And Lloyd Prince had announced that he would run as an independent for the Senate in the general election.

Hello, stranger.
wrote Sweet2. The InstantMessage appeared in the middle of Jill’s screen while she was reading an article about Rush Limbaugh on-line.

Hello! Where have *you* been?
Jill answered.

I lost control of my computer.
came the answer.

?????
Jill returned.

It’s a long story. What are you doing up so late?

I’ve been on the net, watching elections returns.
Jill tapped.

What election? Where?

The Idaho primary. My mom is working for Laura Lopez.

Cool! Did she win?

The results still hadn’t posted last time I looked.

It’s past midnight in Idaho.
typed Sweet2.

Let’s go look again. What’s the address?

Jill typed in the website address, and Sweet2 answered,
I’ll meet you there.

332

Five Fortunes / 333

Jill clicked back into the Internet and read a jubilant announcement, entered onto the net by (though she didn’t know it) an ecstatic and completely drunk Aaron Jackson.