Chapter Twenty-Three #2
“I’m not going to pretend the whole account’s settled,” I said, quiet, because it wasn’t, and because I’d promised myself months ago that I wouldn’t let a good day talk me into believing a debt was paid before it actually was.
“There’s going to be a hard week in March I haven’t had yet.
There’s going to be a headline that stings worse than tonight felt good.
I need you to know I’m not agreeing to forget any of it just because today went the way I hoped it would. ”
“I’m not asking you to forget it. I don’t think I’m allowed to ask that, and I don’t think I want to, because forgetting it is exactly how we got here the first time.
” He turned my hand over under his, slow, an ordinary gesture that undid something in me more than anything said on a podium that morning had.
“I’m asking if there’s room, in whatever this turns into, for me to keep trying.
Slower than a headline. Slower than a speech.
Just — every ordinary day, the way you actually build anything that’s supposed to last.”
“There’s room,” I said, and meant it as much as I’d ever meant anything.
“I want to be honest that I don’t know exactly how much yet.
I know it’s more than there was a month ago.
I know it’s more than there was this morning, before you said all of it out loud in front of the whole state instead of just to me. ”
He didn’t say anything else. He came around the counter instead, unhurried, and I let him, and when he kissed me it was nothing like a campaign gesture, nothing built for anyone watching, just two people standing in a kitchen that had held a rupture and a reckoning and now, apparently, could hold this too — plain, unbuilt, no rule of three anywhere inside it.
Sadie came down late the next morning, hair still doing whatever it had decided to do overnight, and found the two of us at the table with the coverage spread out between us the way I used to spread out drafts, six different front pages, six different photographs of the same raised hand.
“Is this weird for you?” she asked, dropping into her own chair, eyeing the stack with the flat, assessing look I still couldn’t place the origin of. “Seeing yourself on that many front pages at once?”
“A little. I spent thirty years putting other people’s names above the fold and staying out of the photograph myself. I’m still learning what to do with my own face looking back at me from a newsstand.”
“For what it’s worth, the photo everyone’s using is a good one.
You look like you meant it.” She reached across and turned one of the pages to face her properly, studying the frozen image of the two raised hands with the same scrutiny she’d once turned on a debate ballot.
“Also, three separate people already texted me that clip of me telling that anchor lady you wrote the whole thing. Deja says I’m ‘unbothered core’ now, whatever that means.
I’ve decided to take it as a compliment. ”
“It was a compliment. You earned it the hard way, same as the rest of us this year.”
Pierce refilled her orange juice without being asked, an ordinary domestic gesture that would have meant nothing from most fathers and meant something specific from this one, and Sadie noticed it too, the quick flick of her eyes toward him and then toward me, checking, the way she’d checked all fall, whether this was a version of her father worth trusting or just a good performance of one.
Whatever she found, she let it go without comment, and reached for the paper instead, turning past the front page to the section where the actual box scores and community notices lived, the unglamorous back half of the paper that had once been my whole beat, thirty years and a lifetime ago.
“There’s a thing in here about the debate team’s regional bid,” she said, tapping the page. “Theo wrote it. It’s actually good. He got my name spelled right and everything, which apparently is a whole competency some reporters don’t have.”
“Theo’s careful. He’ll go far if he stays careful.”
“That’s basically the family motto at this point, isn’t it.
Be careful, be specific, make them check your work twice and find it holds up both times.
” She said it lightly, teasing, but I heard, underneath the teasing, a girl quietly deciding what kind of person she wanted to become, using the only material she had close enough to study.
“That’s not a bad motto to inherit,” Pierce said.
“I didn’t say I minded inheriting it.” She went back to the box scores, and neither of us pushed the moment any further than she’d offered it, because some of the best repairs in this family, I was learning, were the ones you let a fifteen-year-old set down herself instead of picking up and turning into a whole speech.
Walt called at eleven, his usual Sunday time, and Pierce answered before I could reach for the phone myself, which I noted, and which he noticed me noting, and neither of us commented on.
“Yes sir,” I heard him say, an old, half-forgotten formality surfacing from some earlier version of himself, “I know I should have called you myself last night instead of letting Lorna do it. I’m working on that too.
” Whatever Walt said back made Pierce laugh, real and startled, and he held the phone out to me a minute later looking like a man who’d just been forgiven by someone he wasn’t sure had the standing left to forgive him, and was grateful for the standing anyway.