CHAPTER 2
LINDA
The thing about being studied is that it feels, at first, like being liked.
Samantha Elkins attaches herself to my schedule the way a good staffer should, and for two weeks I let her, because the task force overlap is real and she makes herself useful in the small, unglamorous ways that matter.
She briefs me before the diplomatic spouses’ coffee without being asked.
She knows which foundation directors want small talk and which want numbers.
When my Tuesday gets double-booked between a literacy roundtable and a call with the Second Tour governors, she’s already drafted the triage options before Dana finishes apologizing.
“You’ve been here three months and you brief like you’ve been here three years,” I tell her in the car between events.
“I had a good map.” She’s in the jump seat with her tablet, ankles crossed, perfectly composed. “Your office runs on preparation. I read the after-action notes from the last two years. Your team documents everything.”
“We have to. I’m allowed to be spontaneous about lunch and not much else.”
She laughs, a real one, and writes something down. I never find out what.
The diplomatic spouses’ coffee goes well.
The ambassador from Kenya’s wife wants a literacy partnership.
The French ambassador’s wife wants to gossip about the trade talks, which I deflect.
Samantha sits along the wall with the staff, and I catch her taking notes during moments that had no policy content at all. During the gossip. During the laughter.
Afterward, in the hold room, she asks, “How do you decide when to be warm and when to be brief? The French ambassador’s wife got three minutes and the Kenyan ambassador’s wife got twenty, and it looked instinctive.”
“It is instinctive. Twenty-six years of practice.”
“But there’s a logic under it.” She’s not being pushy. She’s being thorough, which is worse, somehow, because you can’t object to thorough. “You gave the time to the woman who brought a project. The one who brought fishing got charm and a door closed politely.”
“That’s a fair read.”
“I want to learn it,” she says. “Not the briefing-book version. The actual judgment.”
Who says no to that? I told her she could shadow me through the next week. I remember being pleased. That’s the part I turn over later, in the dark. How pleasant it all was.
Dana’s less charmed, in her Dana way. “She asked me for your briefing binders going back to the transition,” she tells me over the schedule review.
“I said the office ones, sure, public record. She wanted the personal prep notes too. What you wore where, who you sat beside, which events you skipped and why.”
“Did you give them to her?”
“I gave her the office ones.” Dana closes the binder. “The rest I said she’d have to ask you for. She hasn’t asked.”
“Then it’s fine.”
The questions start small and stay inside the lines. How I prep before a big speech. Whether I read drafts or hear them aloud. How I choose causes, and how I choose which ones to drop. Then, on a Thursday, in the residence elevator, they drift.
“Does the President eat before difficult speeches or after?”
I glance at her. “During, usually. Off everyone’s plates. Why?”
“Speech prep for the task force deck. I wanted to get the room right in my head.” She smiles at the elevator doors. “You know when he needs food instead of coffee. I’ve watched you do it. You catch his eye at briefings and something gets ordered. How do you know?”
“He gets quiet. Declan loud is Declan fine. Declan quiet means somebody feed him before he fires someone.”
She laughs and types it into her notes.
“That’s going in the record?” I say.
“Only my record.” The elevator opens. “You’re the operating manual nobody wrote, Mrs. Hinton. I’d be a bad fellow if I didn’t study the text.”
Monday is the charity call, the annual one with the food-bank network, forty minutes of donor reassurance that I could do in my sleep. Samantha sits in on it from the corner chair.
Afterward, while I sign the follow-up letters, she says, “You gave them the hunger statistics from the briefing, but you told the story about the grandmother in Toledo from memory. That wasn’t in any notes.”
“She told it to me in a pantry line. Some things you carry.”
“That’s what I mean.” She leans against the desk edge, studying the signature I keep signing. “The briefings are the skeleton. You add the tissue. When the President does it, people call it genius. When you do it, people call it warmth.”
“Are you writing a thesis on me?”
“Maybe.” She smiles. “It would be a good thesis.”
I hand her a letter and change the subject, but the observation sits with me all afternoon, because she’s right, and being right about that particular thing requires watching a marriage from very close range.
Tuesday she brings the chili.
We’re in the East Wing conference room, nine of us around the table for the Second Tour working session, and Samantha arrives ten minutes in with a foil container from the mess and sets it, without ceremony, at the empty seat beside mine.
“For the President, if he stops by. McHenry’s office said he might.”
It’s the chili. The specific chili, from the Navy mess, the one Declan has loved since a campaign stop in a VFW hall in Pennsylvania when he was losing in the polls and the chili was the only good thing that day.
He asks for it after brutal meetings. Staff know about it.
It’s in the category of knowledge that circulates.
But it circulates in the West Wing, not mine.
“How did you know about the chili?” I ask. Conversation continues around us; I keep my voice level.
“You mentioned it.” She says it easily, no flicker. “The first week. We were talking about the Norfolk speech and you said something about the President and comfort food after hard days. It stuck with me.”
It’s possible. We did talk about Norfolk.
I don’t remember any chili, but my weeks are long and full of words, and I’ve learned I can’t cross-examine every kindness.
Declan doesn’t stop by, in the end. The chili goes back to the mess untouched.
Samantha takes the loss with a shrug, and the session goes well, and I file the whole thing under odd, explainable, let it go.
I should mention: her hair is different that day. Pulled back smooth, low at the neck. My style. My exact style, the one half the women in America copied from a magazine cover.
Thursday she’s quoting me back to myself.
The East Wing planning session is about the spring rollout, and I’m talking about framing, and I say, “We don’t sell this as charity. These are skilled workers with security clearances and relocation flexibility.”
Samantha, down the table, says without looking up: “‘Service doesn’t end when the uniform comes off. It changes hands.’”
Norfolk. My line, the one from her index card. She’s been using it in task force materials, she says, when Dana raises an eyebrow. Testing the resonance. The phrase polls well with undecided manufacturing voters.
“It’s a good line,” I say. “I stand by it. Careful, though. At this rate people are going to think you’re studying me for a role.”
The room laughs. Samantha smiles, unbothered, and says, “Maybe I am.”
A beat. The laugh dies.
“The role of public servant, I mean,” she adds, and the laugh reboots, and the meeting moves on to venue holds and catering minimums, and only I heard the first version land before the correction.
I watch her through the rest of the session. She doesn’t take another note. She just listens, head tilted, absorbing, and near the end she answers a logistics question in my phrasing again, my cadence, and three people around the table nod at her the way they’d nod at me.
She isn’t stealing anything you could name in a complaint. That’s the genius of it. Everything she takes was offered, public, or too small to defend.
Declan finds the whole thing charming, which I learn that night over dinner in the residence, both of us seated, a minor miracle of scheduling.
“She worships you,” he says. “McHenry says she keeps a file on your initiatives three inches thick. The task force people are annoyed she spends more time on your side than theirs.”
“She brought you chili.”
“The Navy mess chili?” He points his fork at me. “That’s good staff work.”
“It’s good something.” I push peas around. “She’s wearing her hair like me now. She’s using my Norfolk line in West Wing materials. Today she told a room full of people she’s studying me for a role, and then corrected it to ‘public servant’ half a beat late.”
He grins. “You’re jealous of a twenty-five-year-old fellow?”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Linda, this town runs on imitators. You should hear the junior speechwriters doing me. There’s a guy in Legislative Affairs who bought my watch.” He reaches over and takes my hand, thumb over my knuckles. “You’ve become the thing they copy. That’s not a threat.”
“I’m beginning to think she’s studying the vacancy.”
He laughs. Full, delighted, head back. He hears a joke, because I said it like one, because I don’t yet know how to say it any other way.
“What vacancy?” he says. “There’s no vacancy. You’re stuck with me for life. It’s in the vows.”
In Boston, in the laminate-table years, Declan had a partner who flattered him and copied him and wanted to be him, and I spotted it in one dinner and said so, and Declan believed me, and six months later the man tried to poach their biggest client and found the locks already changed.
I think about that dinner now. He used to trust my eyes.
“Sickness and health. I don’t recall a clause about fellows.”
“There was fine print. You signed it.” He kisses my hand and lets the subject go back to the budget markup.
Friday afternoon, late. I’m in my office signing letters, and Samantha comes in with the week-ahead binder Dana asked her to help assemble. She sets it down, turns to go, and stops in the doorway.
“A question. About him, not the office.”
I look up.
“When you two disagree.” She’s framed in the door, tablet against her chest, casual as anything. “The real kind. You’re both strong-minded, you work in the same building, the stakes are absurd. How do you fight with someone who outranks the entire planet? Who bends first? How does it end?”
It’s a good question. It’s also none of her business, and the interesting thing is that some part of her knows that, because she asks it in the doorway, with one foot already gone, deniability built into the architecture.
“We don’t keep score,” I say. “And he doesn’t outrank me. That’s the trick of it.”
“Right.” She nods slowly, filing it. “That’s what I’d have guessed. Thank you.”
She goes. I sit there with the pen in my hand and the letters unsigned.
Not my clothes, I think. Not my speeches. Not my causes.
My marriage.
She’s studying my marriage.
I pick up the phone and dial the residence, and ask the usher to make sure the Navy mess sends up chili for the President tonight, with my compliments. If someone in this building is going to know what my husband eats after hard days, it’s going to be me.