But with them gone, I stayed downstairs to watch TV as Ash put Viv to bed, and it felt so freeing — like the first time my parents left me alone when they went out. I poured us each a glass of wine, and when Ash came down, she said, “Oh, that is just what I need.”
Neither of us was all that hungry, so Ash just set out cheese and crackers to snack on. Ash chewed on a piece of cheese thoughtfully and then said, “I wonder what the boys are up to.”
We hadn’t heard from them since they arrived. Matt had just sent one text that said, Made it to Odessa. I’d written back to ask how the drive went, but he hadn’t responded. I checked my phone once more, just to be sure, like I could’ve missed something when my phone had been no more than six inches away from me all day.
“They probably just got dinner and went to bed,” I said.
“Do you think they’re getting along?” Ash asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe being alone will be good for them. Maybe they’ll be able to talk some things out.” I doubted this was true, but we were both skirting around what was so obvious — that Matt thought Jimmy was being a prima donna and Jimmy thought Matt was jealous.
“Maybe,” Ash said, although I could tell she didn’t believe it any more than I did.
“It’s making Matt so irritable though,” I said. “The campaign, I mean. Like he’s just mad all the time. Even at me.”
This was the most I’d disclosed about what was going on between me and Matt. It was embarrassing, but I figured she was seeing it all anyway and was the only one who could really understand the complications of our situation.
“That must be hard,” she said, giving me an exaggerated look of sympathy. She’d snapped back to her Texas Ash voice, the one she used when she talked to the Dozens.
“Yeah, I’m sure it’s just stress,” I said, hoping we could drop it.
“I’m sure it is,” she said, and again her voice had a syrupy sweet tone to it that made me want to slap her. Why was she acting like this? Like everything in her life was so perfect? I’d wanted to tell her so much, how weird things were with Matt, how we barely talked anymore, how we hadn’t had sex in weeks, how I’d been shut down so many times when I tried to initiate it that I felt humiliated.
But now I couldn’t confide in her. Six months ago, I could have told her everything. But in that moment, I didn’t trust her. She’d probably run to the Dozens and tell them all about her poor friend Beth, who was having marital problems. I didn’t say anything else, and then she reached over and touched my arm and said in a voice so dramatic it was almost funny, “Don’t worry, I know you two will work it out.”
—
Matt and Jimmy returned late the next night, and I was already in bed but still awake and reading when Matt came in, tossed his bag in the corner of the room, and closed the door behind him.
“That was the most annoying twenty-four hours of my life,” he said. He wasn’t bothering to whisper.
“Why?” I asked, putting my book down.
“The round table was fine. Jimmy did well, although he spent the first twenty minutes shooting the shit with everyone instead of talking about safety concerns. He kept straying from the talking points, but eventually he got there. But then we got to the dinner tonight and we’d been in the car for hours at that point and I’m trying to give him some feedback, some constructive criticism, and he acts like I’m out of line. Like I’m insulting him just for fun.”
“So what happened?” I asked. I wasn’t happy that they’d fought during the trip, but for once it felt like Matt was confiding in me, like he was finally seeing that we were on the same team. I didn’t want to encourage what was happening between him and Jimmy, but I did want him to keep talking to me.
“Nothing happened, really. We got to the dinner and he got pretty drunk right away, which meant that I was going to have to drive the whole way back, which is fine, I guess, but whatever. And then he started talking to this woman, just one on one in a weird way, like no one else was there. Every time I tried to introduce him to someone new, he basically ignored me. Not to mention that he didn’t care how it looked that he was hitting on this woman in front of the whole room.”
“He was hitting on her?” I asked.
“I mean, yeah. I don’t know. You know him.”
“Who was she?”
“One of the donors. She sought him out, but he didn’t back away. I think he was trying to piss me off.”
“Was it bad?”
“It wasn’t great,” Matt said. But then he seemed to snap out of it and changed his tone. “It wasn’t a big deal, really.”
“It sounds weird,” I said, hoping he’d say more.
Matt climbed into bed, leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “It was just a long night. I’m so tired.”
It was funny, for all of the things that Matt would say behind Jimmy’s back, he never discussed the way Jimmy acted around attractive women, how it sometimes seemed just shy of inappropriate. Matt had always dismissed all the rumors about Jimmy as just that — rumors. But lately, I wondered if he knew something more, if he was just protecting Jimmy the way you protect your candidate.
“What was the woman’s name?” I asked, but next to me, Matt was already asleep.
—
When I think back to our time in Texas, it doesn’t seem possible that we actually lived in the Dillons’ basement for nearly a year, that we ate almost every meal with them like we were part of some strange commune. There were days that seemed so long, so open — I didn’t have a job or a baby, we were staying in someone else’s home, and while I was helping with the campaign, it didn’t even come close to taking all of my free time. Some afternoons, I did nothing but read, finishing whole books in a day. But somehow, it didn’t feel like the time passed slowly, just the opposite really — it seemed like we were moving into the basement one day and out the next.
During those months, it felt like I was floating, in suspended time. When my birthday came that year, I felt truly shocked to have turned a year older. Everyone around me had a real purpose — sometimes more than one — and while I could mock Ash’s jewelry business (when I was feeling hateful), there was no denying that she was successful, that she enjoyed it. And so most of the time when I watched her pack up her samples and get ready to go to a party, it was jealousy that I felt.
There was a lot of fighting that happened in that house, a lot of anxious and tense moments, and days when it felt like we were just marking time until the next argument. But still, when I think about that year, what I remember most is one night that the four of us sat outside on the back patio, first eating dinner and then staying there to split a bottle of wine. Our plates were still on the table, but none of us were in any hurry to clean up. Viv was asleep upstairs and I remember being nervous that our laughter was going to wake her up.
Things hadn’t yet turned sour between Matt and Jimmy, and we were all talking about an event we’d been to that day, where an older man had cornered Jimmy to talk about railroads for almost an hour, while Jimmy tried to explain (unsuccessfully) that the Railroad Commission didn’t have anything to do with actual railroads. Matt kept impersonating Jimmy during this conversation, and we couldn’t stop laughing.
“I think he was a retired Amtrak driver,” Jimmy said. “No joke. He was very concerned about our rail system.”
“Let’s have one more,” Matt said, picking up the empty bottle of wine. “You know, in honor of the railroad.”
“We should clean this up,” Ash said, but she didn’t move.