18
By the time we opened the doors at seven, there was a line.
“Who are all these people?” Stuart asked me.
“Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies. You can’t expect me to give up all my secrets so you can use them against me.”
He continued studying the crowd with a sour face. “Half of them aren’t old enough to vote yet, and half are likely to drop dead before the election.”
He wasn’t wrong. It was a mix of elderly folks and college kids, some of the former being held up by the latter. When I told the interns to get their grandparents out, they listened.
“So let’s fix that.”
“Fix what?”
“The ‘not old enough to vote.’ Add that into the next round of Michael’s speech. Let’s get eighteen-year-olds the right to vote.”
“Why would we let kids vote?”
“Because they’re not kids. They’re old enough to drink and go to war. And if Michael shows them that he cares about them as human beings who deserve equality, they’re going to work their fingers to the bone to get him elected.” I turned to look at Stuart, who was staring at me. “What?” I touched my face, making sure my lipstick hadn’t smudged.
“It’s not a terrible idea,” he admitted begrudgingly.
“Well, of course it isn’t. It’s mine.” Sam had twenty years on Michael, who wasn’t yet old enough to be president. And that age gap was the best thing Michael had going for him, according to my father. It had worked in Kennedy’s favor, and the nation was enjoying our young, handsome president. But young people didn’t just want to look at a young president. They felt like he was theirs. And they would be excited to vote. Not that it helped us now , but that word-of-mouth endorsement from the younger crowd was worth almost as much as a newspaper one.
“Don’t get all cocky on me,” he said. “One good idea doesn’t exactly threaten my job.”
“By my count, we’re up to four.”
“Four?”
“Keeping the larger venue and filling it,” I said, ticking off the first item with a raised finger. “Hiring interns. Courting younger people. And—” I stopped myself.
“And?” he asked suspiciously.
Best not to tell him about the edits I had made to the speech yet.
“And borrowing decorations for the hall,” I finished, glaring at him defiantly. He wasn’t fooled and started to say something, but I took his arm and looked at his watch. “Shouldn’t you go introduce him? Unless you’d like me to do it.”
“Absolutely not,” he said, shaking me off. “Why don’t you have your own watch?”
“Long story,” I said, shooing him toward the podium at the front. “Now get over there and make our man sound good.”
He bristled slightly at the “our” part, but I gave him a little push, and he went to the podium, where he tapped on the microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, turning on a charm that I hadn’t seen any evidence of before. “I want to thank you for coming out tonight to meet Michael Landau. This is a special venue for us—Michael and I grew up just down the street and helped lobby for them to build this recreation center. Which, in fact, was one of the first issues that made him think he should run for office.”
I felt my brows coming together and forced my face into a neutral position. Michael should be the one saying this. Not Stuart. He couldn’t give a static speech everywhere and have Stuart provide all the local color. So far I’d give Stuart my vote—and I couldn’t stand the man.
But we would deal with that later. Baby steps and all. For now, I wanted to see if Michael actually delivered my jokes. And if so, how they landed.
Stuart finished his introduction, calling Michael the next senator from the state of Maryland, and walked back to me as Michael entered to moderate applause. Stuart gave him a good start, but he wasn’t there yet. Granted, I wasn’t sure many people in the room knew why they were there. If the interns had promised entertainment, this likely wasn’t what they had in mind.
Stuart smirked at me, and I resisted the urge to give my criticism now, despite how strongly I wanted to wipe that look off his face. “Very nice,” I murmured instead, disarming him as Michael addressed the crowd, his prepared remarks in front of him.
“Good evening. My name is Michael Landau, and I am running for the United States Senate representing the great state of Maryland.”
Don’t repeat your introduction, I said to myself, making a mental note. We know who you are now .
Michael continued: “President Kennedy said last year, in his inaugural address, that we should ask what we can do for our country. My friends, what I can do for our country is make sure that Maryland has an effective seat at the table.
“We may be one of the smallest states in the nation, but we were also one of the first. And our voice— your voice—deserves to be heard. Marylanders have a lot to say, which can sometimes be drowned out by the bigger states talking louder.
“We sometimes fall through the cracks simply because people don’t know how to characterize us. We’re south of the Mason-Dixon Line, so we’re Southerners. But we didn’t secede. Enslavers and abolitionists lived side by side in our state, sometimes pitting brother against brother.
“We are a land of some of the earliest and greatest cities in our nation, from Baltimore to Annapolis, but also of farmers, of fishermen, of crabbers, of politicians, of federal workers, and of descendants of some of the first Americans.”
I looked around the room, watching people’s faces. They nodded along as they found descriptions of themselves. He was hitting the right notes with that part.
“But, my friends, my neighbors, my Maryland, many of us have been forgotten by the people in power.
“Make no mistake, the threat of Communism looms large, threatening to take this union we have created and break it anew. But that cannot be the only focal point of our government while folks at home go hungry.
“I firmly believe that if we shift our focus to tending our own garden, the fruit that labor bears will pay off in maintaining our democracy, in defeating the Soviet Union, in keeping this great nation living up to its promise.
“With that said, I also believe that the ‘what’ of what we need to do is more important than the ‘who’ of who will be doing it. And if Sam Gibson is going to get the ‘what’ done, then I want you to go ahead and vote for him.”
The crowd murmured, and I watched Michael to see if he would be able to sell the next part.
“Sam Gibson loves to talk. And he’s good at it. But the record doesn’t lie. And Senator Gibson has used those oratory skills to filibuster no fewer than six bills that would have benefited Maryland residents.”
There was more murmuring. Either this was news to the crowd, or they didn’t know what it meant. Based on some of the faces, it was a mixture. I waved an arm to get his attention and Michael glanced at me, clearly annoyed. Explain that, I mouthed, shaping the syllables carefully. He looked at me, processing what I meant, then at the crowd, evaluating before looking back at me with a nod.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Stuart hissed in my ear.
“He’s losing them,” I whispered back. “Tell me people don’t look confused.”
“What that means,” Michael said, veering off his prepared remarks, “is that he’s spending hours talking to prevent a vote. And he did that about a measure to compensate farmers, he did it for one of the civil rights acts that he eventually signed, and he did it about a measure expanding access to healthcare, among others.”
More murmurs. But now he had them.
“I may be young,” he said, then he stopped, reading the unfamiliar line that came next. He shot a somewhat amused glance at Stuart, then continued. “Although I’m old enough that my mother wishes I’d settle down and get married already.” He got the desired chuckles, finally smiling himself. “But I remember what segregation looked like. And I know I don’t want to support someone who hesitates when it’s time to sign bills that ensure equality.”
By the time he told the next joke poking fun at himself, he got real laughter. And when he read the line about Sam acting like Mr. Toad in The Wind in the Willows , he had to pause for a good two minutes for the crowd to contain themselves.
Stuart was fuming.
The speech ended, and Michael shook hands, his politician face plastered on. A good two-thirds of the crowd stayed to meet him.
Finally, the hall cleared. We were fifteen minutes past the nine o’clock end time, but the county worker who ran the center was still in conversation with Michael when I instructed the interns to begin packing up the decorations to return to the club.
“I need to be back by ten,” I told Paul. “You may need to be in charge of finishing this.”
“Turning back into a pumpkin?” Stuart sneered.
“Don’t be daft. I’m Cinderella, not the coach.”
Michael extricated himself from his conversation and came over. “Are you leaving?” he asked. “I thought we could all go for a drink to celebrate how well that went.”
“The fairy princess over here has a curfew,” Stuart said curtly.
“First of all, Cinderella has a fairy godmother, she’s not a fairy herself. Second, I don’t have a curfew . I have a mother who is watching my children for me.”
“How many kids do you have?”
“Oh for the love of—it doesn’t matter how many brats she has. It matters that she changed your speech without telling us.”
Michael held his hand up at his waist in his small “wait” gesture as Stuart seethed. “He’s not wrong,” Michael said, choosing his words carefully, eyes still on me. “In the future, let me know so I don’t stumble on any new parts.”
“In the future?” Stuart asked. “Are you serious?”
Michael turned to his friend. “How many people did we have here tonight?”
“The hall holds two fifty,” he muttered. “But a lot of them were too young to vote.”
“And people were standing in the back. So it was more than two hundred and fifty.” He glanced back at me before continuing. “And the jokes hit the right mark. They built up. And by the time they got to the Sam one—they won’t be able to look at him without seeing Mr. Toad now.”
“To be fair, that was my son’s joke,” I said. “Credit where credit is due.”
“Michael. She’s got her kid writing your speech. Come on.”
“Oh, he can’t write more than his name. He’s only five.” They both stared at me. “A very precocious five.”
“Beverly?” Paul called. “Where do you want the bunting?”
“In the car,” I said, rummaging through my bag for the keys. “Here. I’ll drop it off before work tomorrow.”
“We’ll see about that,” Stuart said.
But Michael turned on him. “We said we’d give her a chance,” he said. “So far, she’s delivered what she promised.” He looked back at me. “Thank you, Beverly. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I resisted the ever-so-mature desire to stick my tongue out at Stuart. “See you tomorrow.”
I didn’t need my mother’s car. I could have flown home. But it wasn’t time to get cocky. We still had a lot of work to do if Michael was going to steal Sam’s Senate seat.