Chapter 11
Callum
Kellerman had the floor and was being pleasant about it, which was how Kellerman worked. Twenty minutes of pleasant, and then a hook.
"Senator, I just want to be sure I've got this," he said. "The rural set-aside sits at fifteen percent, hard floor, no waiver. You brought me that number in January. That's your number."
"It's my number," Callum said.
"Then I'm a yes and we can all go get lunch."
The room did the small laugh it does.
Callum looked at the pad. He looked at Kellerman, who had given him eleven minutes on a phone call in January and had not asked for one thing since, which meant the ask was coming later and would be large.
"I want to say something on the record and it's going to cost me," Callum said. "That floor is wrong."
Dara's pen stopped.
"I set it at fifteen to get votes. That was the whole reason and I'd appreciate it if nobody in this room pretended otherwise.
And somebody on my staff told me at two in the morning in February that a floor written that way reads as a ceiling to the first budget office that wants it to.
In eight years every county under nine thousand people gets exactly fifteen percent, and they call it the Fairbanks number.
" He put both hands on the table. "She was right.
I told her she was wrong for about ninety seconds, then I stopped arguing.
I've spent six weeks looking for a way to say this that didn't cost me your vote. There isn't one. I want to reopen it."
Nobody said anything for a beat and a half.
"Well," Kellerman said. "Hell."
It cost him the vote. It cost him three weeks and a Friday piece in the Richmond paper about a senator undermining his own bill. It cost him a very cold conversation with the chair. It was worth every minute of it, and he could not have said why in a sentence anybody would print.
His cousin Adair called about the Richmond piece before his own chief of staff did.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine."
"Because there's a version of that story where you look unsteady, and Everett's already asked me whether you're all right, and Everett doesn't ask about people."
"Tell Everett I'm fine."
"Callum, you know you could put nine million dollars into a Senate race in this state and never notice it left the account."
"I'm aware."
"I'm not telling you to. I'm telling you that you're the only person in this family who acts as though the money isn't there. It makes everybody nervous. One day you're going to want it, and it'll be too late to start."
"Adair."
"Yes."
"If I ever spend it on a race, I want you to call me and say the word Renata."
There was a pause about a second long.
"That's a filthy thing to say to a person on a Tuesday," Adair said, and hung up.
Dara caught him in the hallway.
"Do you want me to walk that back," she said. "I can get a statement out by four that reframes it as a strengthening amendment. I've got the language."
"No."
"Callum, I can make that a fine story."
"I know you can. That's the problem." He kept walking. "If it needs a statement, I didn't say it right the first time."
"That's not a media strategy."
"No, it's not."
She stopped in the hall and let him go, and he heard her say something to the ceiling behind him that he chose not to ask about.
His father came the following Tuesday.
Graham Fairbanks did not call ahead and did not sit in the waiting area. He came through the front, greeted a twenty-three-year-old at the desk by name, and was in the chair across from Callum's desk with his coat still on before anybody told Callum he was in the building.
"I read the Richmond paper," Graham said.
"I figured."
"That was a foolish thing to do in a markup and I'd have done it eleven years later than you did." He put his hat on his knee. "That's the whole compliment. Don't fish for more."
Callum shut his laptop.
They talked about nothing for eight minutes.
"That pool house is still going."
"Mom says you've decided it's a myth."
"It is a myth. There's no water in there." Graham turned his hat a quarter turn on his knee. "Your mother has a man coming Thursday. I've agreed to be out of the house."
"That's the right call."
"It's the only call." He looked at the window. "Hobson had his knee done."
"I heard."
"He'll tell you about it. Let him. It's the most interesting thing that's happened to him since 1996. Graham was sixty-seven, heavier through the shoulders than he used to be, with a tremor now in the left hand that he handled by keeping the hand on his hat.
He had run for nothing in his life. He'd sat on four boards, given away a substantial fraction of what his father left him, and turned down a Cabinet appointment in 1994 for reasons he had never once explained to anybody in the family.
Callum had grown up assuming that was modesty.
He had been about thirty-four before it occurred to him that a man who is afraid of what he'd become in a job might simply decline the job.
Then he stopped talking and looked at the window for a while.
"Renata Voss," he said.
Callum went cold from the collarbone down.
"I'm going to say this once and I'm going to say it badly," Graham said. "I've had thirty years to make it sound better and every version I make sounds better is a lie, so you're getting the bad one."
"Dad."
"I liked her more than I liked your mother.
" He said it to the window. "For about six years.
That's the truth and there's no soft way in it.
She was quick and I was quick. Your mother was tired, and I was the reason she was tired.
Every morning I got in a car and drove toward the person who thought I was interesting. "
The radiator under the window ticked. Somewhere in the front office a phone rang twice and stopped.
"I never touched that woman," Graham said. "I've watched people tell that story at Christmas as though it's the good part. It's not the good part. It's the smallest possible fact."
"How did you—" Callum's voice did something. He waited. "How did you fix it."
"I didn't."
"Dad."
"You want me to tell you there was a night.
" Graham turned his head. "There was a night.
There was a driveway. There was rain, and I stood out in it.
It makes a wonderful story, your grandmother cried, and it fixed exactly nothing.
Your mother let me back in the house that night.
That's all that happened. Everything else took four years. "
Callum had his hand over his mouth.
"Four years of showing up when it wasn't working," Graham said.
"Four years of her not being warm at me, and me not getting to be hurt about it out loud.
I was hurt about it. I had no right to be.
Both of those are true and I want you to hear them.
You don't get to be wounded by the wound you made.
That's the whole discipline. That's the entire thing I have to teach you and it took me a decade to learn it and it isn't clever. "
"And after four years?"
"After four years she was warm at me again." Graham's jaw moved. "And I did not get all of it back. Not ever. There's a room in your mother I have never been let into since 1999 and I'm going to die outside of it. I earned that. She has been a good wife to me for twenty-six years anyhow."
The tremor had come up in his hand. He set the hat down on the desk and put the hand flat on his knee.
"Your mother didn't forgive me," he said. "She decided. Those are two different things, son, and if you get them confused you'll spend the rest of your life waiting for a feeling instead of doing the work."
He got up. He picked up his hat.
"Does Mom know you're here?"
"Your mother sent me," Graham said. "She'd have come herself, but she said I owed you this one and she was right."
At the door he stopped.
"You'll do it badly," he said. "I did it badly. That's not a warning, it's a permission. She isn't grading the delivery."
***
Thursdays, then. That was the arrangement, and he did not have a single idea what to do with it.
The first one he prepared for. He caught himself doing it on the road out of Roanoke, building the opening, and he pulled into a gas station outside Bedford and sat in the lot for six minutes until the whole thing came apart in his hands. He got back on the road with nothing.
They sat at her kitchen table for fifty minutes and he said almost none of it.
He told her the markup went badly. He told her Kellerman was a no now and probably a no in the fall.
She asked one question about the floor language and he answered it straight.
It was boring. It was the truest hour he'd spent in that house in three years.
At fifty-five minutes he stood up.
"You've got twenty minutes left," Winslow said.
"I know."
He drove home. He got in at eleven and stood in a dark kitchen and ate a piece of bread standing up, which is a thing he had watched his father do a thousand times without ever once wondering about it.
The second Thursday it rained and the cleat on the dock had pulled loose, so he fixed it, in the rain, with a wrench out of her trunk, and did not mention that he'd done it. It was still holding on Saturday when she went down for the light. She didn't say anything about that either.
The third Thursday she said fourteen words to him total. He counted, afterward, in the car, and then despised himself for counting.
The fourth Thursday she made coffee before he got there.
Two cups out on the counter, and he had them counted inside thirty seconds.
He did not say one word about the two cups, and it took everything he had, and he understood while he was doing it that saying nothing about the two cups was the single most useful thing he had done for his marriage in four years.
On the drive home he wanted to call his mother and tell her about the two cups. He did not. He understood that as progress too.
The fifth Thursday he told her about a hearing witness, an old woman from Lee County who had brought a jar of brown water to a committee room, set it on the table, and not said one word. Winslow put her chin in her hand and made him describe the jar twice.
The sixth Thursday he brought a folder and did not open it. On the eighth she asked what was in it. He said a draft of the fall calendar. She said give it here. He did. She marked four things on it and handed it back. Neither of them said one word about what that was.
He left at fifty-five minutes. He always left at fifty-five minutes.
He sat in the car at the top of the gravel with the engine running and the radio off, which he had also started doing. He looked at the light in her kitchen window through the trees. Then he put it in gear and drove ninety minutes home to an empty house.