Gracing the navy blue front was a cartoon of a bearded, leering motorcycle rider with popping eyeballs and drool coming from his mouth. Beneath the biker was Teddy's name in Day-Glo orange letters and
the inscription "Born to Raise Hell." Teddy hugged the sweat shirt to his chest. For a fraction of a moment he let himself believe that Dallie had sent him all this, but then he understood that these weren't the kinds of things you sent to a kid you thought was a wimp, and since he knew how Dallie felt about him, he also knew the gifts had to have come from Skeet. He squeezed the sweat shirt tighter and told himself he was lucky to have a friend like Skeet Cooper, somebody who could see past his glasses and stuff all the way to the real kid.
Theodore Day-Bom to Raise Hell! He loved the sound of those words, the feel of them, the grit and
spit of them, the whole idea that an undersize kid like himself, who was a jerk at sports and might even get kicked out of gifted class, was Born to Raise Hell!
While Teddy was admiring his sweat shirt, Francesca was winding up the taping of her show. As the red light went off on the camera, Nathan Hurd came over to congratulate her. Her producer was balding and chubby, physically unimpressive but mentally a dynamo. In some ways he reminded her of Clare Padgett, who was currently driving the news department at a Houston television station to contemplate suicide. Both were maddening perfectionists, and both of them knew exactly what worked for her.
"I love it when they walk off the show like that," Nathan said, his double chin quivering with pleasure. "We'll run the program as is-the ratings will go right through the ceiling."
She had just finished doing a program on electronic evangelism in which the guest of honor, the Reverend Johnny T. Platt, had walked off in a huff after she'd charmed him into revealing more than he wished to about several failed marriages and his Neanderthal attitude toward women.
"Thank goodness I only had a few minutes left to fill or we would have had to retape," she said as she undipped her microphone from the paisley scarf draped around the neck of her dress.
Nathan fell into step beside her and they walked from the studio together. Now that the taping was finished and Francesca didn't have to focus all of her concentration on what she was doing, the familiar heaviness settled over her. Six weeks had passed since she'd returned from Wynette. She hadn't seen Dallie since he stormed out of his house. So much for all her worries about how she was going to accommodate having him back in Teddy's life. She felt as confused as one of her teenage runaways.
Why had something that was so wrong for her felt so very right? And then she realized that Nathan was talking to her.
"… so the press release went out today about the Statue of Liberty ceremony. We'll schedule a show
on immigration for May-the rich and the poor, that sort of thing. What do you think?"
She nodded her agreement. She had passed her citizenship exam early in January, and not long afterward, she had received a letter from the White House inviting her to participate in a special ceremony to be held that May at the Statue of Liberty. A number of well-known public figures, all of whom had recently applied for American citizenship, would be sworn in together. In addition to Francesca, the group included several Hispanic athletes, a Korean fashion designer, a Russian ballet dancer, and two widely respected scientists. Inspired by the success of the 1986 rededication of the Statue of Liberty, the White House planned for the President to make a welcoming speech, generating a little patriotic fervor as well as strengthening his position with ethnic voters.
Nathan stopped walking as they reached his office. "I've got some great plans for next season, Francesca. More political stuff. You have the damnedest way of cutting through-"
"Nathan." She hesitated for a moment and then, knowing she'd already put it off too long, made up her mind. "We need to talk."
He gave her a wary look before he gestured her inside. She greeted his secretary and then walked into his private office. He closed the door and perched one chubby hip on the corner of his desk, straining the already overtaxed seams of his chinos.
Francesca took a deep breath and told him of the decision she'd reached after months of deliberation. "I know you're going to be less than delighted about this, Nathan, but when my contract with the network comes up for renewal in the spring, I've told my agent to renegotiate."
"Of course you'll renegotiate," Nathan said cautiously. "I'm sure the network will come up with a few extra dollars to sweeten the pot. Not too many, mind you."
Money wasn't the problem and she shook her head. "I'm not going to do a weekly show any longer, Nathan. I want to cut back to twelve specials a year-one show a month." A feeling of relief came over her as she finally spoke the words aloud.
Nathan shot up from the corner of the desk. "I don't believe you. The network will never go along
with it. You'll be committing professional suicide."
"I'm going to take that chance. I won't live like this anymore, Nathan. I'm tired of being tired all the time. I'm tired of watching other people raise my child."
Nathan, who saw his own daughters only on weekends and left the business of child rearing to his wife, didn't seem to have the vaguest idea what she was talking about. "Women look at you as a role model," he said, apparently deciding to attack her political conscience. "Some of them will say you sold out."
"Maybe… I'm not sure." She pushed aside a stack of magazines and sat down on his couch. "I think women are realizing that they want to be more than burned-out carbon copies of men. For nine years I've done everything the male way. I've turned the raising of my child over to other people, I've scheduled myself so tightly that when I wake up in a hotel room I have to pull a piece of stationery out of the drawer to remember what city I'm in, I go to bed with a knot in my stomach thinking about everything I have to do the next day. I'm tired of it, Nathan. I love my job, but I'm tired of loving it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I love Teddy, and I've only got nine years left before he'll be off to college. I want to be with him more. This is the only life I've been given, and to tell you the truth, I haven't been all that happy with the way I'm living it."
He frowned. "Assuming the network goes along with this, which I seriously doubt, you'll lose a lot of money."
"Right," Francesca scoffed. "I'll have to cut my yearly clothing budget down from twenty thousand dollars to ten thousand. I can just see a million burned-out working mothers losing sleep over that while they try to figure out how to buy their kids new shoes for school." How much money did a woman need? she wondered. How much power? Was she the only woman in the world who was tired of buying into all those male yardsticks of success?
"What do you really want, Francesca?" Nathan asked, switching his tactics from confrontation to pacification. "Maybe we can work out some sort of compromise."
"I want time," Francesca replied wearily. "I want to be able to read a book just because I want to read it, not because the author is going to be on my show the next day. I want to be able to go through an entire week without anyone sticking a single hot roller in my hair. I want to chaperon one of Teddy's class trips, for God's sake." And then she gave voice to an idea that had been gradually growing inside her. "I want
to take some of the energy that's gone into my job and give serious thought to doing something significant for all those fourteen-year-old girls who are selling their bodies on the streets of this country because they don't have anyplace to go."
"We'll do more shows on runaways," he said quickly. "I'll work something out so you can take a little more vacation time. I know we've been working you hard, but-"