12
Instead of going home, I took the bus one stop further and walked a block to my parents’ house.
For a moment, I stood, looking up at the columns of the house I had grown up in. It had never occurred to me in my childhood that I would suddenly find myself ensconced in the political arena. A politician’s wife? Yes. Despite my mother’s warnings to marry someone out of the public eye, I think Larry’s aspirations were part of the appeal.
Unfortunately that was entirely where the similarity to my father ended.
I shook my head. It did no good to wonder what might have been. I’d made my choice, it ended poorly, and I had made the next choice to clean up my own mess.
But despite my assurances to Michael and Stuart, if I was going to win this campaign, I needed help.
So I climbed the front steps and let myself in.
Only to stop short in the foyer. “Papa?” I called out in alarm. Shoes littered the front hall along with discarded suit jackets. A plate with the days-old remains of a sandwich sat on a console table, and there were muddy shoeprints leading down the hall toward the kitchen. I followed them, dread mounting. Clearly someone had broken in. I should call the police, I thought. What if whoever had broken in was still here? But concern for my father propelled me forward. “Papa?” I called again.
“Beverly? Is that you?”
I heaved a sigh of relief. “Yes. Where are you? Are you okay?”
He walked into the kitchen from the living room in an undershirt and a pair of wrinkled pants, barefoot and unshaven. Which, quite honestly, was nearly as jarring as stumbling upon his corpse would have been.
“Papa, what happened?”
He looked at me in confusion, and I wondered if, rather than an intruder, he had suffered a stroke or some other mental lapse. I was going to send Mama home right away. He couldn’t be alone in this state.
“Nothing happened,” he said mildly, pulling out his seat at the kitchen table, which was covered in dirty dishes. A glance at the sink showed it was overflowing.
I gestured to the house and then to him. “Then why is everything like—this?”
He shrugged. “Your mother took care of the housekeeping.”
A euphemism at best. “Did Rosa quit?”
“I haven’t the faintest. Your mother always arranged with her, and I don’t know how to contact her.”
I blinked heavily, then took a deep breath. “I’ll talk to Mama when I get home.”
My father looked at me sadly. “I don’t think that will help.”
“Why not?”
He sighed. “Because she said she’s not coming back.”
“She—what? No, that’s not right. You misunderstood.”
“There wasn’t much to misunderstand. She said she hasn’t been happy with me in a long time, and she was tired of pretending.”
I closed my eyes and counted to five. “She told me that she was moving in for a while to help with the kids.”
“And how does Larry feel about that?”
“I don’t think that matters much now ...” I trailed off as I hit the end of my sentence. Papa didn’t know I had thrown Larry out. My mind went back to the look on my mother’s face when I asked if she would have stayed if she caught Papa in similar circumstances. What on earth was going on? “Did you cheat on Mama?” I blurted out.
“Cheat? Beverly Gelman—”
“Diamond,” I added automatically.
He shook his head, angry now. “If you think I ever even so much as looked at another woman, I—”
I held up a hand, stopping him. “I had to ask. I—well, I told Larry he had to move out. And that’s why Mama told me she was living with me.”
“I never liked him,” Papa said.
I resisted the urge to ask why he hadn’t pointed out that little tidbit before I married him and had his children. That was a conversation for another day. And this bombshell that my mother’s living arrangements in my house were permanent would need to be dealt with immediately. Free childcare or no, it wasn’t sustainable in the long term.
“Well, then I’m glad that particular situation worked out to your advantage,” I said. “I will figure out how to fix this with Mama. But first I need your help, and then we’re going to clean the house because you can’t live like this.”
“Do you need money?” he asked.
“No. That’s why I’m here. I got a job.” His brow furrowed, but I held up a hand again. “I don’t want to hear any of those prewar complaints. Besides, it’s a job you’ll approve of.” I think .
“What is it?” he asked warily.
“I’m going to be Michael Landau’s campaign manager.” It wasn’t technically a lie. I was eventually going to have that job. I was determined. And I had never met a challenge I couldn’t conquer—if you didn’t count the country club position or the makeup counter, neither of which I did. I couldn’t help the religion I was born into any more than I could help my mother going shopping and losing her mind in the middle of a department store.
He looked at me, processing this, before a smile spread across his face under the unfamiliar white stubble. “That’s my girl.” He reached across the table and patted my hand fondly. “Your mother won’t like that at all.”
“Neither will Larry, which is the bigger victory.”
“You’ve got an uphill battle there though. Sam is going to win in a landslide.”
I tilted my head, hearing the unspoken word. “Unless?”
His grin widened. “Grab a notepad from the drawer under the phone,” he said. “We have some brainstorming to do. But I have a feeling if anyone can do this, you can.”