‘Hey, there you are!’
Ted was drunk. His champagne glass was held at a sixty-degree angle.
‘We’re sort of talking here, Ted,’ I said.
‘Well, fucking excuse me. You’re such a fucking superior being you forget I write your check every month.’
‘Actually, Jess does, Ted,’ Joel said.
I could not have predicted his reaction. The arrogant, drunken, angry Ted Bradshaw said: ‘We’re supposed to be brothers. Why would you say something like that to me?’ He teetered as he said this and champagne ran from his tilted glass like a rich boy’s piss. I thought he was going to cry.
‘You say stuff like that all the time to me, Ted.’
But then Jess was in the doorway, saying, ‘C’mon Ted, the governor and his wife want to say goodbye to us.’
She wisely a) took his glass from his hand, b) pushed her arm through his and c) guided him into the still-going-strong party.
Joel offered a slight smile and shook his head. ‘What a couple.’
‘Thank God Katherine has always had you.’
‘She had me when I was sober, anyway.’ He was beating himself up. Then, ‘And speaking of sober, this is the kind of thing I never admitted to anybody even when I was drunk, but I’m going to tell you, Dev. And I’m going to trust that you’ll never tell anybody else.’
He hit somebody with his car when he was drunk. He had been embezzling campaign funds. He was gay. He’d taken a couple of drinks tonight despite telling me he was sober. What the hell was he going to tell me?
‘Katherine’s actually my daughter.’
I had to quickly survey all the words in the English language so I’d know what to say. I didn’t want to sound shocked because that might hurt his feelings. And I didn’t want to sound judgmental in any way because he’d been her real father all along.
‘I’m not quite sure why, but that doesn’t surprise me.’
‘Ted was having one of his flings and Jess was having particular problems with this one so she showed up at my apartment in Georgetown. She was very drunk. And I was pretty drunk myself. It was one of those periods when I was trying to convince myself that I could handle having a few drinks. Anyway, we made love several times that night. Maybe there was a little bit of revenge in it for her but I think that at the time we were both just desperately needy people.
‘And two months later she called and said she was pregnant and that it couldn’t be Ted’s because he hadn’t touched her in a while.’
‘Ted never suspected?’
‘No. He gets sort of crazy when he’s having his relationships. As far as I know, he’s never suspected. He just assumed that he and Jess slept together during his fling and Katherine was the result.’
‘You ever going to tell her?’
‘I’m not sure she could handle it.’
‘Maybe what you’re saying is that you’re not sure your brother could handle it.’
Then she was in the doorway — the fragile beauty and the elegant wan presence of her, his daughter, Katherine.
‘The band’s going to play a slow song, Uncle Joel. You still owe me a dance.’
‘You didn’t think I was going to forget, did you?’
‘No, but I know how much fun it is to talk to Dev. You never want to leave.’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘I’m sending you a check for that one, Katherine.’
She laughed and held out her slender arm. ‘C’mon now, Uncle Joel. Before the song ends.’
‘I’m a lucky man,’ Joel said as he went to her.
‘And she,’ I said, ‘is a lucky woman.’
Forty-Four
We won the election by six points.
During the course of the real victory party two weeks later I found out that Katherine was going to work as Joel’s assistant, that Abby was on the verge of being engaged, that Mike Edelstein’s sudden biopsy for possible prostate cancer revealed that he was fine and that neither Jess nor Ted seemed dismayed in the slightest when I told them I was resigning.
Wade got one of Showalter’s dirty cops to admit that Showalter and his buddy Dorsey saw an easy opportunity to take down Jess so they planted the rifle in Cory’s trunk. As for Cory, he told me he needed to take a break from politics. I gave him a thousand dollars of Jess’s campaign money to enjoy his break.
‘Truth be told, Dev,’ Ted said as we sat in his den, him playing the hard-nosed politician he was in his dreams, ‘I’ve been talking to a couple of firms and they think Jess needs a redo on some things.’
‘But if we get any calls for recommendations, Dev, there’ll be nothing but praise for you,’ Jess said.
‘Hell, not just praise, Dev. Super praise.’
‘Wow. Just plain old praise is hard enough to come by. But super praise—’
‘That’s Dev for you, honey. You try to pay him a compliment and he comes back with a cynical remark. We’re gonna miss that, Dev.’
‘We’re going to miss it a lot,’ Jess said.
She’d made herself a stranger to me in the past few days. She was a clone that had programmed me out of her memory.
Ted stood up. ‘Well, I’d say it was time for more champagne.’
But it wasn’t, of course. Not with them anyway. Not with them.
I got to the hospital in time to spend a full hour with Karen.
She told me that the new Chief Wade had visited her and she’d explained how Showalter had chased her up into the hills and then piled into her car so she’d be driven into the ravine.
Then we talked about what she was going to do in the future. I told her Chicago was a good place to be, especially since this campaign manager she’d said a few nice things about happened to live there, too.
Then I showed her iPhone photos of some of the Chicago apartments I’d been looking at. I needed more space because you just couldn’t tell when somebody might want to move in with you.
She smiled that smile of hers and said no, you really never could predict when somebody just might move in with you.
I thought that it was awful nice of her to understand.