Mr. Dillon wasn’t friendly and didn’t try to be. He always seemed to be insulting Jimmy, and Ash told me that they’d had the same dynamic since Jimmy was a teenager and a little wild. “It’s like he still expects him to get expelled or have a party at the house when they’re out of town. He still treats him like an unruly sixteen-year-old.” He did seem to take a liking to Matt though, always asking him his thoughts about Jimmy’s opponents, listening to his answers carefully. Sometimes at dinner, Matt was the only person Mr. Dillon talked to.
—
On Thursday mornings, Ash took Viv to a music class, which was really just a group of babies sitting in a circle and clutching tambourines and shakers as the teacher and parents sang and clapped. Sometimes, Ash got one of the songs stuck in her head and would hum it constantly for days, then shake her head as if she could knock it loose.
When Ash asked if I’d like to come along to the class, I said yes mostly because I couldn’t think of a polite way to say no. I’d been there a couple of weeks and I still found myself trailing after her during the days. I just wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself — Matt and Jimmy were either in the office, traveling, or out at an event. And Ash was taking care of Viv or doing things around the house or working on Stella and Dot stuff. And then there was me. Sometimes I stuffed envelopes or prepared mailers for the campaign, and a couple of times I opened my computer and stared at a blank Word document, but I still hadn’t written anything. I had a feeling Ash invited me to the class because she felt slightly responsible for me.
The class was about a fifteen-minute drive from the house — still in Sugar Land, of course. One of Ash’s friends, Charlotte, was enrolled in the class with her daughter, which was why Ash signed up. “But I’m so happy I did,” she told me. “I can just tell that Viv loves it.”
Sugar Land was originally a sugar plantation, a fact that I found appropriate and creepy. There was a fake sweetness to the place — there were beautiful homes and cute little downtown areas, but it felt so manufactured. Everything was clearly plotted out, had been planned down to the last shrubbery. As Ash drove to the music class, I stared out the window, fascinated by all that we passed. The more time I spent in Sugar Land, the more I understood how strange DC must have seemed to Ash; how she must have felt like she was in another country.
There were ten other babies and toddlers in Viv’s class, and she was by far the best dressed. Ash always dressed Viv with a little more care when they were going out, and that day she was in a smocked dress with a monogram on her chest. (Viv was not a baby who wore stained onesies or mismatched socks.)
After thirty minutes of singing and clapping (which had originally sounded like a short time to me, but felt oh so long while I was experiencing it) a few of the moms went to a coffee shop around the corner. I sat and chatted with them as they ordered lattes and fed smooshed-up fingerfuls of muffins to their babies. The strollers were shoved in around the tables, and it was impossible to move without bumping something or someone. Charlotte’s daughter reached over and knocked a cup of water across the table, and when I jumped up to grab some napkins, I banged my knee against a stroller, causing the child inside to start screaming. By the time I returned to wipe up the spill, Viv was fussing and Ash was packing up. I handed the wad of napkins to Charlotte and then stood there, feeling like a mother’s helper who isn’t really old enough to be of any help at all.
—
At the end of January, Matt hired an intern named Katie, who’d just graduated from TCU that December and was the most serious twenty-two-year-old I’d ever known. She came to the house to meet Matt wearing a pantsuit, her long brown hair pulled back in a low ponytail. Katie was pretty, but wore minimal makeup and no jewelry, and had a very no-nonsense vibe about her. Whenever Katie was around, I could see Ash look at her out of the sides of her eyes, just itching to adorn her, to “fancy her up,” as she liked to say. Ash even gifted a necklace to Katie, a long gold chain with blue stones, one of her most popular pieces from the Stella and Dot collection. “I thought it would look great with your eyes,” Ash said, and Katie said thank you and put it right into her bag. We never saw it again.
“I graduated a semester early, not the other way around,” Katie told me when we first met, although I hadn’t asked. “I was just ready to be in the real world. But I loved school. Go, Frogs!” As she said this, she crooked two fingers at me, like she was making a peace sign but was too lazy to hold it straight. (I learned later this was a hand signal for the TCU Horned Frogs, but at the time had no idea what she was doing and just smiled.)
Katie’s family was friends with the Dillons, and she was interested in working in politics, planned to move to DC in the next year or so, and (most important) was happy to work for free, all of which made her a great fit.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to pay you as the campaign goes on,” Matt told her, but she just waved a hand in the air.
“That would be great, of course,” she said. “But I’m not concerned about it. I’m here to learn and I’m happy to help however I can.”
That was all Matt needed to hear to make Katie his favorite person in the world. He put her in charge of social media — she started handling the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, and also started writing most of the e-mails that were blasted to Jimmy’s supporters every few days. I was on this list, and woke up most mornings to a message in my in-box, with subject headings like “We need your help!” Or “Texas, it’s time!” At the bottom of each note was a plea for money and a link to the online fund-raising, asking the recipient to give anything he could, even if it was just five dollars. I started to feel fatigued at how often these e-mails arrived, and I can only imagine that everyone else receiving them did too. But the campaign had to keep asking for money, so they kept arriving. A couple of times I donated, if only because I felt like Katie deserved a response for all of her hard work.
When Katie started, Matt told her they’d get another desk in the den for her as soon as possible. “In the meantime,” he said, “you can set up in the dining room or use one of our desks if we aren’t here.”
“That works for me,” she said. I saw Ash wince as Katie set up her laptop on the dining room table, banging it down on the wood. Ash rushed over with a place mat to put underneath it. “Here,” she said, “this will make you more comfortable.”
The next day, a tiny desk and a folding chair arrived at the house and were shoved in the corner of the den. “That was fast,” I said to Ash, and she rolled her eyes. “I’m willing to sacrifice quite a lot of things for this campaign,” she said. “But I don’t see why my dining room table has to be one of them.”
I have to say, Jimmy’s Instagram got a lot better once Katie joined the campaign — she was always in front of him with her iPhone, capturing the moment that he shook someone’s hand or smiled during a speech. One night, when we were all sitting around after dinner, staring at our phones, I mentioned how good her pictures were. Matt agreed. “She’s got a talent for communications,” he said. “She’s always got the right image to go along with our message.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “Plus she’s great at picking the filters that make me look my best.”
—
Matt and Jimmy spent most weekdays at events around Houston — or at least within a couple of hours of the city — meeting with local groups, stopping by union lunches or DAR teas. On the weekends, they’d travel farther and Ash and I would usually go with them, the four of us (plus Viv) piling into a car and driving to rural areas in East Texas, hitting as many cities as we could in one trip, places I’d never heard of before: Longview, Lufkin, Tyler, and Henderson.