Sweet Love (4 page)

Arnie says, “You’re a candidate, too, you know.”

“A pretty high up one,” Kirk adds, smiling.

Okay, now I really wish I hadn’t said that stuff about swimming upstream to spawn and die and that long monologue about my family life. Sitting up straight, I clasp my hands on the table, paste on an efficient smile, and say, “Wow. I had no idea I was still in the running. After getting that form letter . . .”

“You didn’t get the memo?” Kirk asks.

“No. I did not get the memo.”

Owen shoots a reproving look at Eva, who puts her head down and takes a note.

“Well, you should have,” Kirk says. “I apologize. I realize we’ve given you no time to prepare for this interview.”

Cripes. I can’t believe I’m really up for consideration. It’s just beginning to hit me. “That’s fantastic,” I gush. “I would be really excited to join the national election team. But, if you don’t mind, why me?”

Kirk chuckles and tells Owen he’ll handle this. “Easy. You’ve been here close to twenty years. You’ve covered a wide range of issues near and dear to the voters’ hearts, such as health care reform, rising gas prices, the economy, and the outrageous cost of housing.

“I loved the profile you did last year on veterans returning from the Iraq War. It was a delicate issue you handled without pandering to either side. In addition, you’ve done a bang-up job covering several statewide campaigns, especially, of course, your award-winning exposé of Carlos FitzWilliams.”

“Thank you.” Though hearing FitzWilliams’s name again reminds me of Michael’s diatribe.
Ratings-grubbing ice queen with no heart or soul or principles. A picture-perfect sellout.

Doesn’t the fact that it might get me on the national election team prove his point?

“And, finally, your coverage of Amy Michak’s disappearance is outstanding. Thorough, incisive without being exploitative. That’s such a hard line to walk. By the way, I have a couple of theories about her abduction, if you’ve got the time.”

“For you,” I say, “anything.” Because you, Kirk Bledsoe, are my new best friend.

“Then there’s the matter of demographics. Indications are that this election could hinge on—if you pardon my bluntness—middle-aged women like you.”

When he says that, I imagine frowning church ladies with blue hair and plastic purses. Certainly I’m not one of them . . . am I? I look to Arnie, who’s stifling a laugh.

Now it’s Kirk’s turn to be shamefaced. “What I mean is, you share some of their concerns in your own personal life. Like them, you are feeling the burden of aging parents and, at the other end of the generational spectrum, teenagers who are testing the limits.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why, my seventeen-year-old is a perfect angel, does everything I ask, and is as neat as a pin.”

Kirk smiles. “Sense of humor. Don’t lose that. You’re going to need it. Your life is going to be a roller coaster when you get on board August first.”

August first. Right around the corner. Em will have to move in with Donald for the nonce, right when she’ll be applying to colleges. By the time I get back, the applications will be in and I’ll have missed so much. And what about Mom and Dad, if something happens to them? It’s not like Paul’s around to step in. They’re my responsibility, Dad with his angina and Mom with her cancer woes.

Owen is saying something about keeping this under my hat until the background checks are completed.

Oh. I don’t like the sound of that. “Background checks?”

“Precaution.” Kirk waves this off as if a stranger prying into your most personal records is the most normal of circumstances. “Considering the fate of the world hangs on the next election, our new raft of reporters has got to be of the most impeccable character and totally clean. No drugs. No alcohol or sexual problems that might compromise their objectivity.”

“No ethical issues,” Arnie says, giving me a warning look.

What’s he eyeing me for? “I don’t have any ethical issues, Arnie.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” Kirk says. “Still, it’s better to wait until we’ve made a formal announcement. Already one of your colleagues, not necessarily at this station, has blown it by blabbing that he or she got the job when, actually, the background check turned up a tick.”

Valerie, I think, shocked. What could she have done?
Paid too much for retail.

For the next twenty minutes Kirk outlines my duties in case I’m chosen: how I should start reading everything ever written on both candidates, their campaign finance reports and voting histories, naturally, their speeches, archived articles in
The New York Times
and
Washington Post
, reports from watchdog groups and underground news sources. Chances are I’ll get very little sleep in the upcoming weeks and may find myself in tricky situations that could try my sanity, once I’m on the road, he tells me.

“The national press corps is ruthless,” Kirk says. “Hard-bitten and cynical. That’s why we’re looking for new blood, unjaded local reporters who can provide an authentic perspective more in tune with the average viewer’s. It’s not gonna be easy, Julie.”

I tell him it sounds divine and, honestly, I’m so excited I feel like running to a mountaintop and twirling around in a crazy Julie Andrews kind of way. After believing that my years of slavery weren’t going to get me anywhere, that I was too old to go to the network, my hard work is finally paying off. And right when Em has only one more year of high school, too. The timing couldn’t be better!

“It’s everything I ever wanted,” I tell him. “Travel. National politics. A pivotal election. Nonstop action. Backroom ruthlessness.” Suits. Heels. Limousines. White House press badge. Oh my God. I feel like I’ve just stepped into a Mitchum ad, it’s so heady. “I mean, there’s a fifty percent chance I’ll be shoulder to shoulder with the next president of the United States.”

Kirk says, “Talk to me in six months. Then we’ll see how glamorous that is.”

Eva comments on the time as Owen and Arnie excuse themselves to go to another meeting, leaving Kirk and me alone at last. Ominously, Kirk follows them and closes the door.

“There’s just one last thing I want to ask before we wrap up,” he says, sitting down.

Darn. I knew there had to be a catch. That’s always the way it is with me. So close and yet so far.

“Going back to the Carlos FitzWilliams story, I heard your source on that was a guy you were dating—FitzWilliams’s own campaign manager.”

Involuntarily, I grip my armrest, Kirk’s line about “impeccable character” still fresh in my mind. “You mean Michael Slayton?”

“Down in Washington, I paid extra attention to Slayton because he was from our hometown. As I recall, his star was rising and then, abruptly, it fell to Earth after your report aired.”

Kirk is suddenly not so gray and avuncular. He’s mean and suspicious as his gaze bores through me, right into my inner being. Not for nothing is he Washington bureau chief.

Willing my voice not to shake, I say evenly, “I’ve known Michael Slayton all my life. He grew up in our neighborhood. But I can honestly tell you that he and I have never had anything more than a platonic relationship.”

“That’s not what FitzWilliams told me.” This comes out cold. “That’s why he fired Slayton, for deceiving him, for falling in love with a reporter who was out to nail him.”

I blanch. "FitzWilliams said that?” What a creep. To cover his own ass, he smeared Michael’s and my reputation.

“Well, Kirk,” I say. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned being a reporter it’s that every politician lies. There’s not much I believe in this world unless I see it happen in front of my eyes.”

“True,” he agrees. “And that’s what makes you an ideal choice to cover the presidential candidates. That said, FitzWilliams does raise a disturbing . . .”

“If you’re asking who is my original source,” I say, trying to keep my anger in check, “the one who led me to the women FitzWilliams hit on, it was . . .”

“I don’t need to know that. . . .”

“It was my mother.”

Kirk raises a brow. “Your mother?”

“At Mario’s, the beauty parlor she goes to every Friday to have her hair washed and set. Her stylist was best friends with one of the girls and everyone was talking about what FitzWilliams was doing. It was a drop from heaven.”

Kirk’s shoulders slump in relief and he gives me a big grin. “Oldfashioned beauty parlor gossip. So there never was anything between you and Slayton.”

Was there ever
, I want to blurt.
I threw myself at him when I was seventeen and declared my love and he oh so gently turned me down, forever smashing my girlhood crush
. “Absolutely not. And there never will be.”

“Good,” Kirk says, nodding. “So I assume you’ll have no problem if I ask him myself.”

My gut twists into a clench. “No problem at all. You have free rein,” I bluff, with forced cheer. “I am an open book.” Though I wish I weren’t. I wish I were closed and locked like my daughter’s diary, safely tucked away for no one to read.

As my mother says, your forties are when you finally pay for your past mistakes, the cigarettes and sunburns, the Big Macs and smooth-talking men. She may be right. They may be gaining and getting closer. But I’m still in the lead.

And if I want this new job, I better start running, fast.

Chapter Three

It’s hard to remember when I didn’t worship Michael Slayton.

Even now, despite our rocky history—or, rather, cataclysmic history— my instinctive reaction when I hear his name is to flush like I did when I was ten. Other girls might have swooned over the latest cover of
Tiger Beat
, but I was ga-ga for the boy next door.

The Slaytons (or “the crazy Slaytons,” as my mother insisted on calling them) lived five doors down from our old house on Clark Street in a firetrap of peeling gray paint and untamed brambles.

They were an odd family, to put it mildly. I can’t ever recall seeing Mrs. Slayton in something other than a breezy shift, and Michael’s father was forever on the outs with various institutions such as the Newton police. Also, he reeked faintly of a chemical smell, something between rubbing alcohol and turpentine.

Understandably, my parents weren’t overjoyed when Paul chose Michael to be his best friend. Michael was too wild with his unkempt jet-black hair and dirty jeans. But he was smart. Wicked smart. An unbeatable chess player and an expert on Shakespeare‚ able to quote complete soliloquies, much to the puzzlement of us neighborhood kids who had never heard of a nunnery. (How delighted we were to find it was another word for brothel!)

Elizabethan whoring aside, we didn’t hang around Michael for his recitation of Hamlet’s damnation of Ophelia. We hung around him because he was always building something. Usually something wonderfully dangerous—an elaborate tree house with trapdoors, go-carts with magnets in the noses, a pulley system to haul him (and Paul) from his front porch to the third-floor window. Javelins, rope swings, bottle rockets, homemade skateboard ramps fastened with rusty nails. There was no end to his inventive energy.

Miraculously, my brother and he never landed in the emergency room except for once‚ when Paul’s foot fell through a rotted hole in the Slaytons’ kitchen floor and his ankle snapped. That was the night my mother discovered the dirty truth about the Slaytons.

I was nine and Michael was thirteen, like Paul, and we were leaving the hospital on the fateful brisk October night with Paul on crutches, his ankle in a cast. Mom asked Michael if he would like to come to our house for dinner and his face went blank. He stood stock-still in the parking lot and said, “Dinner?” as if we had asked him to travel to Mars or swallow tacks.

“You do eat dinner, don’t you, Michael?” Mom asked softly, smoothing down her homemade denim wrap skirt. She was no fan of the Slaytons, but she knew an underfed boy when she saw one.

“I eat dinner,” he snapped. “I make myself a grilled cheese every night. And sometimes,” he added proudly, “hot dogs.”

That did it. Who were these “crazy Slaytons” who lived on grilled cheese and hot dogs and ripped holes in their kitchen floors? Magical people, I decided, feeling cramped by my mother’s strictly enforced eight-thirty bedtime and warnings to stay off the parlor furniture.

From that point on, Mom assumed responsibility for Michael’s basic needs. Without ever so much as hinting that he wasn’t the most loved and adored child, she got him to fork over his dirty clothes and take showers and eat at our table five nights out of the week, never sending him home without a late-night snack of banana cake or tapioca pudding in Tupperware. Gentle reminders that comfort and order were never far away.

It also got so she routinely added an extra lunch for Michael in Paul’s backpack, pushed him into a barber’s chair, and even took him to our dentist. Paul and I pretended not to notice and Michael’s parents never objected.

“So sad,” my mother said, clucking her tongue. “It’s like they just don’t care.”

But I cared. I cared a lot. To have the enchanting Michael Slayton at our house taking a shower—naked!—in our bathroom, to sit right across the table from him almost every night was some sort of miracle.

I began to think of Michael as mine. My destiny. We had a special bond, a sweet bond. With a wink, he’d sneak me cookies under the table and teach me the Ruy Lopez opening in chess, his long fingers gracefully moving his pawn to d4. Someday, I vowed, those artistic fingers of his would clasp mine and on bended knee he’d ask me to be his wife. His Heathcliff to my Catherine.

Thirty years later I get chills remembering that, still.

I don’t know if Michael was aware of my desperate crush. If he suspected, he was too considerate to point it out. As for me, I suffered in silence until he left for Princeton on full scholarship, returning during school holidays and summer breaks with one beautiful, perfect girlfriend after another.