The Hopefuls (21 page)

“Got it,” Jimmy said.

“This race isn't something they're paying too much attention to, so we want to give them a reason to get excited, to remember your name.”

“That I can do,” Jimmy said. He turned to me. “Beth, did you get to see the world-famous Jimmy Dillon campaign office yet?”

I couldn't help but laugh when Jimmy talked about himself in the third person, no matter how often he did it. “I peeked in there yesterday,” I said.

“Well, that won't do. Come on, I'll show you where the magic happens.”

I wasn't quite finished with my breakfast, but I stood up to follow them anyway. I carried my bowl over to the sink, but Ash intercepted and took it from me. “Don't worry about this,” she said. “Go check out the office.”

Campaign headquarters was set up in the den on the first floor. “We never used this room anyway,” Ash had said when she showed it to me. She'd opened the door briefly and then closed it again so that I'd just caught a glimpse. I had a feeling she hated the clutter in the room—there were two desks in there, facing away from each other and pushed against opposite walls, and all around were signs and stacks of papers, boxes of posters and push cards, the tiny little pieces of cardboard with Jimmy's picture, bio, and platform on them.

“See?” Jimmy said, handing one of the push cards to me. “They're small enough so people can put them in their pockets. And you can only imagine how many people are dying to carry a picture of me around with them.”

Matt shook his head behind Jimmy, but he looked amused. There wasn't all that much to see in the office, so after a few minutes I told them I'd let them get to work.

“Wait,” Jimmy said. He gave me a large pile of the push cards and winked. “So you can campaign for me.”

I took the cards from him. “Of course,” I said. “I'll start knocking on doors now.” But the thing was, from then on I always had a bunch of his push cards with me. During the campaign we all carried them to hand out at events and lunches and sometimes to random people we met. Once, I gave one to a lady in the grocery store as we chatted in the checkout line. It became such a habit over those ten months that after the election was over, I sometimes found myself reaching for them when I met someone new.

Jimmy's father had footed the bill for a photographer and a messaging and design consultant, which resulted in a two-day photo shoot where Jimmy was captured in ten different outfits and five different locations. Matt was there for the whole thing, and afterward he said to me, “I'm starting to think Jimmy secretly wants to be a model.”

The picture that they chose to use on all the promotional materials was a shot of Jimmy standing outside, somewhere in Texas, nothing but open land behind him. He was wearing dress pants and a button-down shirt that was rolled up to his elbows, and his hands were on his hips as he looked straight at the camera, smiling but looking confident. Underneath him was his campaign motto, “Let's Get to Work,” which I thought sounded cheesy at first, but grew to like. During those months, I saw this image of Jimmy about four hundred times a day—there were posters and push cards littered all over the house—and after a while when I looked at him in real life, I could almost see the slogan underneath him, beckoning me to get to work.

It also became something Jimmy said often, mostly when Matt was trying to get him to focus. That day, when it became clear that Matt was getting impatient and wanted Jimmy to stop talking to me and start being productive, he stood up straight and said loudly, “Okay, let's get to work!” saluting me as I walked out of the office.

As soon as Matt agreed to run Jimmy's campaign, he thought of little else. He did research on past commissioners, read as much as he could about the oil and gas industry in Texas, like he was cramming for a final. Matt had told me once how much he loved school, how he missed it all the time. “How very Harvard of you,” I'd said, rolling my eyes just a little. Because he wasn't talking about the parties or hanging out in the dining hall—no, he missed studying for tests, the satisfaction that came from gathering information and making it his own. And as I watched him run the campaign, this was clear.

Each night, he took stacks of paper to bed with him, highlighting and making notes in the margins. “I feel like there's so much I need to catch up on,” he said. Often, I woke up in the morning to find Matt sleeping with papers on top of him, a highlighter still clenched in his hand. Our sheets were soon streaked with neon yellow marks, but he didn't seem to notice.

Matt's approach was to have Jimmy focus on fracking and the environment. (A few months earlier, I'd never even heard Matt say the word
fracking,
and now he probably used it a hundred times a day, like it had always been a part of his vocabulary, like he was an expert on the whole situation.)

“This is our way in,” he told me when he first started researching fracking. He sounded excited, almost manic. “The Republicans don't want to touch this. They won't do anything to ruffle the feathers of the oil and gas companies.”

If I was being completely honest, I wasn't even exactly sure what fracking was before Matt started talking about it, and I'm not sure Jimmy knew much about it either. I was there when Matt first proposed this strategy to Jimmy, standing in front of him and making his case. “The week that you filed to run was the same week the earthquake hit around Fort Worth,” he told him. “These earthquakes aren't right; they aren't normal. The people in these towns are suffering and in danger. They need an advocate, and that can be you.”

Jimmy nodded slowly. “I think you're right,” he said. And that was all it took to convince him—even I'd asked more questions about it. But Jimmy was content to let Matt run with this, and from that point on he let Matt decide almost every aspect of his campaign. There were times Matt wouldn't even bother to consult Jimmy—he once wrote and sent an e-mail to all of Jimmy's supporters (from Jimmy) emphasizing the need to investigate the harmful effects of wastewater injection wells. It was only after everyone received it that Matt realized he'd forgotten to show it to Jimmy first.

“It just slipped my mind,” Matt said. “I'm sorry. We talked about it and I got so caught up in all of it.”

“No worries,” Jimmy said. “I trust you. This is why I wanted you on the team.” I watched Jimmy closely, trying to see if he was upset, but he honestly didn't seem to mind.

I walked by the den one day and heard Matt talking to Jimmy, but it sounded more like a lecture than a conversation. “I think we need to be bold, to propose an end to all fracking in the next ten years,” Matt said. “This will reach the people outside of Houston, it will speak right to them. We can get them on our side. Then once we win the primary, we'll push even harder.”

I peeked in and saw Jimmy nodding seriously, like a student in a classroom. And this was their dynamic throughout the campaign. It didn't exactly surprise me—this was Matt in his element, absorbing huge loads of information and then dispersing and explaining it to someone in manageable bites. He even did it with me. On Sundays, we'd spend hours with
The New York Times.
I tended to favor the
Book Review
and the style section, and he read just about everything else. But after he'd finish an article, he'd sort of recap it for me—giving me the highlights, answering any questions I had. I figured he liked to talk about the things he'd just read about, that it helped him sort things out in his own head. I don't think he was doing it because he felt like he needed to teach me—although there's no denying that I became a lot more knowledgeable about current events after I met him.

And why wouldn't Jimmy like this arrangement? He agreed with Matt on all the issues he was fighting for. He just let Matt do the research and break it down for him—Matt was like the real-life version of CliffsNotes.

Most of the time, Matt and Jimmy were concerned with raising money. Jimmy's first fund-raising goal (created by Matt) had been to raise $50K by the New Year, which they'd easily done. And while I thought that sounded impressive, Matt told me that compared to the Republican candidates, it was peanuts.

Jimmy had even gone to L.A. for a few days, using all of the connections he'd made while working in the White House. One young actress had a casual cocktail party at her home, invited twenty of her friends to meet Jimmy, listen to his pitch, and give him money. He had a dinner thrown in his honor by a reality TV star, famous only for being pretty and dating athletes. Matt had always thought this woman was an idiot, was annoyed that she was constantly on television, that she got so much attention. “She doesn't do anything,” he'd say. But they raised more money at that single event than they had in the prior month. And Matt never said a bad word about her again.

The week I got to Texas, Matt was working on a new fund-raising plan for Jimmy. He told me about it one night before we went to sleep, describing the incentives he had created: If you donated two hundred dollars, you'd be eligible for a raffle to win a private dinner with Jimmy; five hundred dollars got you invited to an intimate evening of drinks with him. And for a thousand dollars or more, you and Jimmy could spend the day at the shooting range together.

“Seriously?” I'd asked.

“Seriously,” Matt said. And then like Dorothy before him, he shook his head in wonder and said, “We're not in DC anymore.”

Ash and Jimmy lived less than a mile from Jimmy's parents and a fifteen-minute drive from Ash's. Viv was the first grandchild for both families, and they were always stopping by to see her or bring her a present or offer to take her to the park. Every Monday and Wednesday, Ash's mom, Beverly, took care of Viv. She'd come pick her up in the morning and bring her back right before dinner. She always let herself into the house, pausing after opening the door, calling, “Knock, knock!” before walking in. Beverly was like the sixty-year-old version of Ash, and because of this I felt completely comfortable around her. I'd met her a few times when she'd come to visit DC, and she was always pulling me into a hug—just like Ash, she was overly and immediately affectionate. I didn't mind it though. It was nice to rest my head against her soft sweater sets, to breathe in her perfume as she held me against her chest and asked me how I was doing.

Jimmy's mom called often to ask if Viv was available for “a sleepover at Grammy's.” She was always pushing the four of us to go out to dinner, trying to find a reason the baby should stay with her. Viv had her own room at Jimmy's parents' house, complete with a brand-new crib, because as Mrs. Dillon told me, “It just made good sense.”

“I thought I'd have to hire someone to watch Viv,” Ash said, “so I could start to build my Stella and Dot network here, but those women want their hands on their grandbaby so badly we may never have to hire a babysitter again.”

Mrs. Dillon (whose first name was Sue Ann, but who never asked me to call her that) was so friendly it was almost frightening. She had a wide lipsticked smile, and she found a way to compliment me whenever she saw me. “Oh, Beth, isn't that an adorable top?” she'd say, or “Isn't that color delicious on you?” I tried to explain to Matt how it was too much, how her compliments in question form seemed almost aggressive (and made me believe that she thought the real answer to all of them was no), but he didn't understand. Mr. and Mrs. Dillon had us over for dinner at least once every couple of weeks, and they both adored Matt. (And he loved Mrs. Dillon's baby back ribs so much that I doubt he would've noticed if she'd called me ugly right to my face.)

Just like Ash's mom, Mrs. Dillon had a key to their house, and she wasn't afraid to use it. “I came home just a week after we moved in to find this in the middle of the table,” Ash said, pointing to a large cast-iron Dutch oven. “There wasn't even a note. It was just sitting there, and so we had to call and ask her what it was for. Jimmy thanked her for it—he didn't even think it was weird that she came in while we were gone, and now she does it all the time.”

“Did she say what it was for?” I asked. Ash's kitchen was well stocked with beautiful things—I couldn't imagine she didn't have a similar pot somewhere in there.

“Yes. She thought the pot I had wasn't good enough to make chili. And then she said, ‘And you know how Jimmy loves his chili.' ”

I laughed and made a sympathetic face, and for maybe the first time in my life felt thankful for Babs—whatever things I had to say about her, at least she'd never let herself into our home.

Mr. Dillon wasn't friendly and didn't try to be. He always seemed to be insulting Jimmy, and Ash told me that they'd had the same dynamic since Jimmy was a teenager and a little wild. “It's like he still expects him to get expelled or have a party at the house when they're out of town. He still treats him like an unruly sixteen-year-old.” He did seem to take a liking to Matt though, always asking him his thoughts about Jimmy's opponents, listening to his answers carefully. Sometimes at dinner, Matt was the only person Mr. Dillon talked to.

On Thursday mornings, Ash took Viv to a music class, which was really just a group of babies sitting in a circle and clutching tambourines and shakers as the teacher and parents sang and clapped. Sometimes, Ash got one of the songs stuck in her head and would hum it constantly for days, then shake her head as if she could knock it loose.

When Ash asked if I'd like to come along to the class, I said yes mostly because I couldn't think of a polite way to say no. I'd been there a couple of weeks and I still found myself trailing after her during the days. I just wasn't quite sure what to do with myself—Matt and Jimmy were either in the office, traveling, or out at an event. And Ash was taking care of Viv or doing things around the house or working on Stella and Dot stuff. And then there was me. Sometimes I stuffed envelopes or prepared mailers for the campaign, and a couple of times I opened my computer and stared at a blank Word document, but I still hadn't written anything. I had a feeling Ash invited me to the class because she felt slightly responsible for me.