Chapter Twenty-Two #4
Callie Novak found me before the crowd fully broke, notebook still closed, which I noticed.
“I’m not going to ask you for a quote,” she said.
“I already have my lede, and it isn’t yours to give me anyway, it’s his, and it’s better than anything I’d have gotten by asking a question.
” She looked at me a moment longer than the sentence required.
“For what it’s worth, I’ve covered nine of these.
I’ve never once seen a governor name his own staffer’s mistake in the same breath as his own.
That’s not a press strategy. I’d know. I’ve watched enough press strategies to recognize when I’m finally not looking at one. ”
“Thank you for saying so.”
“I’m not saying it to be kind. I’m saying it because it’s true and I’m allowed to notice true things even when I’m on deadline.
” She almost smiled, the closest I’d seen her come to unguarded.
“Run your own version tonight. I’ll link it in mine.
I told you once I’d rather be right than first. Today I get to be both, which almost never happens in this job, and I intend to enjoy it for the length of exactly one news cycle before I go back to being cynical about all of you again. ”
Somewhere behind us, Walt had made his way to the edge of the family section, and when the crowd finally broke for the reception line, he reached me before Pierce did, both hands closing briefly around mine, no words in it at all, which from a man who had spent fifty years finding the right sentence for everything told me more than any sentence could have.
Pierce came down off the dais two at a time, still fielding a legislator’s handshake with one hand while he reached for me with the other, and for once he didn’t split his attention between the room and me.
He let the legislator’s hand go a beat early, which I noticed, and which told me, watching him choose it in real time, that the habit itself had actually changed rather than merely being described as changed.
“You came,” he said, quiet, just for me, under the noise of a crowd already dispersing toward the reception tents.
“I said I would.”
“I know. I’m still going to keep being surprised by it for a while, if that’s all right.”
“It’s more than all right,” I said. “It’s the whole point.”
Senator Renwick found me near the edge of the reception line, unhurried, a woman who had clearly decided that whatever this conversation cost her, having it in public cost her less than avoiding it would.
“Ms. Ashby.” She said my name correctly, which I noted.
“I want to say, for the record, since I said the other thing for the record months ago: I was fishing that day. I had a nose for where the story was soft and nothing else, and I used it anyway, because a nose is usually enough to get a headline even when it isn’t enough to get you the truth.
I don’t enjoy admitting that. I’m admitting it because your husband just stood up there and did the harder version of what I only pretended to demand of him, and I’d be a worse legislator than I already am if I couldn’t tell the difference out loud. ”
“I appreciate you saying it.”
“I’m not apologizing for asking the question. Somebody needed to ask it, even fishing.” She almost smiled, the first unguarded thing I’d seen from her. “I am admitting I got the answer wrong before I had one. That’s a different sentence, and I think you, of all people, know exactly how different.”
She moved on before I could decide how to answer that, which I suspected was deliberate; some people prefer to leave a true thing sitting in a room rather than dilute it by staying to watch what you do with it.
They’d set up a folding table at the base of the steps for the signing, plain and government-issue, entirely at odds with the marble around it, and a crowd that had mostly started drifting toward the reception tents reversed itself and came back when word went through it that the ER bill was going first. Pierce sat, and a staffer laid out a line of pens the way I remembered from footage of other governors’ other signings, one pen per stroke of his name, souvenirs for whoever had stood close enough to the promise to deserve one.
He didn’t hand the first pen to a legislator, or to Trent, or to me. He looked out at the crowd until he found a woman near the front rope I didn’t recognize, sixty-some, a coat that had seen a decade of winters, and asked her name.
“Ruth Pemberton,” she said, startled to be asked at all.
“Mrs. Pemberton, were you at the kickoff rally in March? Larkspur Falls, the high school gym?”
“I was. My husband drove me. He’s the one who—” She stopped there, and I recognized exactly which sentence she’d decided not to finish in front of a camera, the same way I’d recognized my own unfinished sentences all fall.
“Then this one’s yours,” Pierce said, and held out the first pen before he’d even signed with it, an old political ritual turned, for one unrehearsed second, into something that was simply true.
She took it with both hands, the way you take something you didn’t expect to still exist by the time anyone finally got around to giving it to you.
He signed the rest with the pens that followed, unhurried, and handed the last one to Walt, who took it without a word and put it directly in his breast pocket, the same pocket where I’d once seen a bank’s envelope go instead.
Behind us the statehouse doors stood open, sunlight cutting straight down the center aisle, and for once neither of us moved to walk through them separately.