Chapter Twenty-Three
We left the reception before the schedule said we could, which Trent told me, sotto voce, near the coat check, was going to generate exactly one paragraph of mild grumbling in tomorrow’s coverage and absolutely nothing worse.
“Governor leaves his own inaugural ball early to drive his family home for a school night,” he said.
“I’ve read worse headlines about better men.
Go. I’ve got the mansion staff handling the rest of it.
Nobody in that building is going to miss either of you as much as your own kitchen table will. ”
“You could leave too,” I told him. “It’s your night as much as anyone’s. You earned some of it honestly, this year.”
“I know. I’m going to stay another hour, shake the hands that need shaking, and then I’m going to go call my daughter and tell her the whole true version before some reporter’s paraphrase of it reaches her first.” He straightened his own coat, the old habit of a man perpetually checking whether he looked like someone worth trusting.
“That’s my version of driving home early.
We all get our own kitchen table eventually, Ms. Ashby.
Mine’s just eleven minutes long and happens on a Sunday. ”
I squeezed his arm once, the same gesture Adaeze had given me in a hallway months before either of us had known what it would cost to become something like friends, and let him go find his handshakes, and went to find my own family instead.
Sadie was asleep before we’d cleared the capital’s outer beltway, coat still on, cheek against the window the exact way she used to fall asleep on the drive home from her grandparents’ when she was small enough to be carried in from the car without waking.
Pierce drove. I hadn’t sat in the passenger seat of our own car with him behind the wheel in longer than I could immediately place, some casualty of sixteen years of him being driven everywhere that actually mattered, and it felt, oddly, like one of the more intimate things that had happened all day — an ordinary competence, unwitnessed by anyone with a camera, that belonged to nobody but the three of us and a stretch of dark two-lane highway.
“You didn’t have to leave early,” I said, somewhere past the county line, the same stretch of road I’d driven alone on a much worse night, months and a whole life ago. “Nobody would have blamed you for staying through the toasts.”
“I know nobody would have blamed me. I’d have blamed myself.
” He didn’t take his eyes off the road, which I’d learned, over sixteen years, was usually where he did his most honest talking, some old habit from debate prep that let him say a harder thing when he didn’t have to watch my face receive it.
“I said this morning I wasn’t going to be a governor who forgets what’s waiting for him at home.
I wasn’t going to make that true starting next week.
I wanted it true tonight, on the first night I had the chance to prove it or not. ”
“That’s a good instinct.”
“It’s your instinct. I borrowed it. I’ve been doing that a lot lately, and I’ve decided to stop apologizing for it and just say thank you instead.” He glanced at me, quick, back to the road. “Thank you.”
We drove another twenty minutes in a silence that had none of the old management in it, the kind I’d have once felt obligated to fill with something useful, and found, instead, that I didn’t want to fill it at all — it was simply comfortable, the plain comfort of two people who’d finally stopped performing calm for each other and had arrived, without discussing it, at the real thing.
“What happens to Trent now,” I asked, somewhere near the last exit before home, mostly because I wanted to know and partly because I wasn’t ready yet for the quiet to turn into the harder conversation waiting for us in our own kitchen.
“He stays, if he’ll have the job after today.
I told him tonight I want him running the actual operation, not managing my image, and that if those two things ever come back into conflict again, I want to hear about it from him directly instead of watching it happen the way I watched the hospital line almost disappear.
” He said it like a decision he’d already turned over more than once, not one he was making for my benefit in the car.
“He told me he’d stay on one condition. Wants an actual line in his contract that says he can put something in writing and have it become part of the public record if I ever ignore it twice.
I told him that was an insulting thing to have to negotiate for.
He told me it was the only kind of insurance he trusted anymore, after this year, and I couldn’t argue with him. ”
“That’s a good deal for the state, whatever it costs your ego.”
“I’m aware. I signed it anyway, in the car, before the reception even started, because I decided somewhere around the woman with the pen, at the folding table this morning, that I’d rather be governed by my own guardrails than by whatever’s left of my pride once a crisis actually arrives.
” He glanced at me, quick. “You’d have been proud of me for asking him first, instead of deciding it alone and telling him after.
I noticed myself doing it and thought about you the whole time. ”
“I am proud of you for that. I’ve spent a month making you earn every compliment the hard way, so hear this one clean: that was well done.”
“I’ll take it. I earned that one, I think, even by your standards.”
The house was dark when we pulled in, same as it had been on the worst night of my life, except this time the porch light was on because I’d left it on myself before we’d gone, on purpose, a small private correction nobody else would ever know to notice.
Pierce carried Sadie in from the car, fifteen years old and half a foot taller than the last time he’d done it, and she stirred just enough to mutter something about her shoes before subsiding again against his shoulder, and I watched him climb our own stairs with our daughter asleep in his arms and thought, with no architecture built underneath the thought at all, that I had spent a month cataloguing every way this man had failed to show up, and here, finally, unphotographed, was the plainest evidence yet that he’d started actually doing it instead of narrating that he would.
He came back down after tucking her in, tie long gone, jacket over one shoulder instead of on, and found me at the kitchen counter where I’d ended up without quite deciding to, leaning back against it with my arms loosely crossed, nothing in the posture that needed defending or explaining to anyone, least of all myself.
“Can I ask you something,” he said, “now that there’s no crowd and no clock and nobody’s optics riding on the answer?”
“You can ask.”
“Are we all right? Not the marriage as a project. Not a five-year plan. Just — tonight. Are we all right tonight.” He said it plainly, no vocabulary borrowed from a campaign anywhere in it, a man asking a question with nothing to hide behind.
I thought about the honest answer the way I’d learned to think about every honest answer this fall, before I let myself reach for the kinder one instead.
“I don’t think ‘all right’ is a thing that happens in one night, after sixteen years and one very bad one.
I think it’s going to happen in a lot of ordinary nights like this one, most of which won’t have a speech in them, or a bill, or a camera anywhere near us.
I think tonight was the first night I actually believed those ordinary nights were coming.
That’s not nothing. It’s also not the whole answer yet. ”
“I can live with that answer. I think it’s the only honest one available tonight, and I’d rather have it than a kind one I couldn’t fully trust.”
“You’re learning.”
“I had a good teacher. Several, actually, this fall — you’ll have to share credit, which I understand is going to be a permanent condition of being married to a woman who’s spent a month building an actual coalition instead of just being angry alone in a kitchen.
” He said it with the ghost of the old humor, the kind that used to be easy between us before it curdled into something we deployed against each other instead, and I felt something in my chest loosen at hearing it come back clean.
“I have a question for you too,” I said.
“The reporting. Going forward. I don’t want a job in your administration, Pierce.
I want to be very clear about that, because I know how these things get offered without anyone quite meaning to offer them.
I want to keep writing for the Courier, under my own name, which means there are going to be stories about your government I’m going to write whether or not you like how they read. ”
“I’d be worried if you didn’t.” He said it without hesitation, which told me he’d already thought about it, probably on the drive, probably longer.
“I don’t want a wife who checks her coverage of me against how it’ll play at my own dinner table.
I want a wife whose byline I can trust precisely because she never once let me influence it, including tonight, including this whole story.
If you ever soften a piece about my administration because you’re afraid of what it costs us at home, that’s the day I’ll actually worry we’ve gone wrong again. ”
“That’s either the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me, or the strangest. I genuinely can’t decide which.”
“It’s allowed to be both. I’ve been told I contain multitudes.
” He almost smiled, borrowing Trent’s line again, this time on purpose, and reached across the counter, not fast, giving me every chance to step back if I wanted to, and set his hand over mine, flat on the cold tile, gentler than he’d touched me in longer than either of us wanted to name out loud.
I didn’t step back.