Chapter 20

After the fundraiser was over, the lights turned off, the stage partially dismantled, Ryan all but ran from Harrison. From that arm around her waist, the heat of his body at her side, the way he sometimes watched her as if she were a riddle he was trying to figure out. Which was hilarious. She wasn’t the one with different personas.

She was just Ryan Kaminski trying to make this shit work.

Her purse and comfortable shoes were in the suite they’d been using as a staging area and she headed up there, her feet and head aching. All she wanted was to go home, pull the covers over her head, and sleep for a week.

That wasn’t entirely true; she wanted to go home, pull the covers over her head, and talk to her sister. The Nora from years ago, who had good advice and loved her.

I miss my sister.

She stopped for a second, her hand braced on the burgundy wallpaper in the hallway. There was a raised pattern on it, interlocking squares, and she traced it with her fingers until she could move again. Until she could breathe past the rock on her chest.

Nora, she thought, I wish …

She forced herself to keep moving forward, her heart a shriveled raisin in her chest, ruined by wishes.

She walked in just as Ashley and Brody were walking out, and everyone stopped on either side of the threshold.

Brody, even more handsome, more austere up close, slipped his arm around Ashley’s waist, a silent show of support. Ashley leaned back just slightly against him and the two of them wore their happiness, their affection for each other, like his-and-hers matching sweaters.

It would be nauseating if she weren’t so damn jealous.

“Hi,” Ryan said, holding out her hand to shake Ashley’s, like a job applicant. Part of her yearned for the job, of sister or friend, or something to this woman that Harrison so clearly loved. And the other part was exhausted by all the yearning. Furious over its sudden appearance.

Stop wanting shit, Ryan.

“I’m—”

“The wife no one told me about.” Ashley slung her purse over her head so it hung across her chest and then pulled her long brown curly hair out from under the strap. Brody smoothed it down her back.

“I … no one told you? Harrison …”

“They don’t tell me anything.” Ashley shook Ryan’s hand, giving her a long, appraising up-and-down. “This is Brody. My …” She glanced at him. “What do I call you?”

“Let’s stick with Brody,” he said with a twinkle in his dark eyes.

“So, not lover?” Ashley teased. Ryan glanced down at her feet, aching inside of her shoes.

“So what’s the story with you and Harrison?” Ashley asked. “Mom told me about the contract.”

“That would be the gist of the story.”

“Do you love him?”

She gaped, no answer available.

“Do you like him at least?” Ashley amended.

She understood what Ashley was doing and why she was doing it. It was the exact same thing she would have done for Nora, or Wes back in the day.

Ashley had her brother’s back. And as awkward and strained as it was between them, she was glad someone was looking out for Harrison.

“I like him. Admire him. But it’s complicated.”

“I understand complicated,” Ashley laughed. “And I gotta say, you two put on a good show up there. I believed it.”

“That’s my job.” To her horror, her voice cracked.

“Are you okay?” Ashley stepped forward and put a hand on Ryan’s arm, and she found herself wanting to grab that hand and spill the whole story. So at ends, so lost in this thing between her and Harrison and so lonely at the same time, she was unsure of what she would say if she did open her mouth.

So she smiled instead, something she’d gotten very good at.

“Don’t you two have somewhere else you need to be?” she asked.

Brody and Ashley shared a quick glance full of silent conversation.

“Go. Please,” Ryan said before one of them lied and said it was all right. “My problems are hardly worth anyone changing their plans for.”

“You sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Ashley dug into her bag for a second. “Crap, I was going to get your cell phone number, but I must have left my phone in the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”

She took off, leaving Ryan standing there with Brody, whose silence was so pronounced it was a physical thing. She shot him a wan smile.

“You ready for this?” he asked.

“For what?”

“The Montgomery circus.”

“I’m one of the stars, I think,” she said. “The bearded lady or something.”

“It’s different on the inside,” he said. “When they love you—”

“Harrison’s not like Ashley,” she said quickly before he could say another word.

“No one is like Ashley. But Harrison isn’t as cold as he seems to be.”

I know, she thought. I know, and it would just be so much easier if he were.

“And maybe you’re not as hard?” He cocked his head, watching her.

She laughed. “We don’t … It’s not …” It’s not what you guys have, that’s what she’d been about to say but that sounded ridiculous, so she just shook her head. “I’ll be fine.”

“I was telling myself that, too,” Brody said with a half-smile that was devastating. Good God, the man was handsome. “And you know, fine is plenty until you get a taste of happy. Once you’re happy, it’s all over for you.”

“Okay, okay, I found it.” Ashley came back into the room with her phone. “Give me your number before I run out of battery.”

They exchanged numbers and then Ashley pulled Ryan into a hard, fierce hug and Ryan stood there, wrapped in a sister’s arms again, not her own, but that didn’t seem to matter. It felt good.

And she crept dangerously closer toward happy.

Ryan woke up Thursday night, something she’d been doing more and more of. Heartburn, having to pee, a sudden desperate craving for Oreos dipped in peanut butter—all those things were ruining her sleep on any given night.

She shuffled from her bedroom down the dark hall to the living room, where the television was still on, the volume very low.

He sat in a corner of the couch, his tie pulled loose, the buttons of his shirt open. His eyes riveted to the screen. The light from the television and the latest of Glendale’s last series of smear ads were flickering over Harrison’s face.

The campaign had hit a rough patch. Maynard was not letting up. The op-ed pieces were getting more pointed. He’d been all over talk radio talking about how the Montgomery family had failed the people of Georgia, and that Harrison was no different than his father, and he wanted to see the reign of Montgomerys in Georgia politics stopped.

And Glendale was coming after him with everything they had. Radio ads, billboards along I-75; you couldn’t watch the local news or listen to the radio without three or four ads for Glendale, and at least half of them smeared Harrison.

They did more press. And still more. But the scales were tipping out of their favor.

“Turn it off, Harrison,” she said softly and he jumped, startled. The stony lines of his face curved into a weary smile.

“Did I wake you up?” he hit a remote with his thumb, and the screen went black, the condo plunged into thick darkness.

“No,” she said, turning on the lamp as she walked past it to the kitchen. “I’m just hungry.”

“I had Dave pick up some more graham crackers.”

Oh, she didn’t know what to do with those little things he noticed. Those small domestic kindnesses. “Thank you,” she said, and grabbed the box from the cupboard and poured herself some milk.

Going back to her room had been her plan, but she couldn’t leave Harrison out here, torturing himself with his opponent’s smear ads.

“Why are you watching that garbage?” she asked, dunking her graham cracker in milk.

He shrugged and rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t have an answer that sounds sane.”

“Isn’t the debate tomorrow?”

“Yep.”

“You’re neck-and-neck in the polls, Harrison. And without that guy’s budget, you just have to trust that the message and the work that everyone’s doing will get to the right audience.”

“Is that what I have to do?” he asked, shooting a weary smile over his shoulder.

She handed him a graham cracker, which he took. And then she held out her mug of milk for him to dip the cracker into.

“Is this a pregnant thing?” he looked dubiously at the milk.

“It’s a childhood thing. Try it.”

He did, and then lifted the dripping graham cracker to his mouth.

“Not bad,” he said after he ate it, and she handed him another.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“Why are you doing this? Running for office? Why now? I mean … is it all about trying to fix what your dad broke?”

“Is that such a bad reason?”

“Well, it’s kind of overkill, isn’t it? Dedicating your life to sweeping up after your dad?”

Harrison broke the graham cracker in his hands into smaller squares and then smaller ones. “I knew I would be going into politics. I wanted to go into politics, but I knew everything I did would be measured or colored by what my dad had done. And so from the very beginning I was thinking about that. About who I was in comparison to my dad.”

“Who are you when you’re on your own?” She swirled her cracker through the milk in a slow figure-eight pattern.

In the long years of exile from her family she’d figured out who she was outside of the confines of that neighborhood. Outside of that last name. And they had been hard years, but she realized, suddenly, that they’d been good years, too. She’d figured a lot of shit out.

He was silent for a long time and that wasn’t a good sign; he was quiet only when he was thinking.

Maybe the guy needed a little more exile to answer that question.

“I want to serve the public,” he said. “I want to help people who need it. I want to make people’s lives easier in fundamental ways. And I think government, in its purest form, can do that. I can do that.”

His earnestness, his absolute conviction in his ideals, made her chest tight, as if her heart were suddenly too big for her ribs.

“Your mom told me the first time we met that you cared.” She watched cracker crumbs bob and drown in her milk because she couldn’t quite look him in the eye. “That you cared more than anyone else in the family.”

“Ashley—”

“Ashley’s not even on the same curve,” Ryan said. “But all these smear ads, all these Maynard op-ed pieces, you can’t change them. Those things they say about your dad, they’re true, and trying to keep them covered up or ignore them, it only feeds that fire.”

“You saying I should 8-Mile it?” She glanced up in time to see a dimple, and then it was gone.

“I’m saying you need to get a little more Zen about it.”

“Zen?” He scoffed. “I don’t think that’s something I can do.”

“You should try,” she said, and handed him her last graham cracker before heading back to her bedroom.

“Ryan?”

Don’t turn. Just keep walking. Pretend you didn’t hear him.

But that would be ridiculous and cowardly, so she turned.

He was going to ask her to stay. She knew it. It was written on his face, in that lonely slump to his shoulders. He was going to ask her and she wanted to. So badly she wanted to sit down next to him on that couch and comfort him with her body. And be comforted by his.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she said, and then rushed into her room before she gave in to the mercurial demands of her foolish heart.

On a cool morning in October, Harrison and Ryan worked at the Atlanta Community Food Bank, boxing and sorting food for the Thanksgiving event that would be taking place in an hour.

The director of the food bank, a kind but stern woman named Abby, worked with them. Abby was talking about the food bank’s initiatives and kept using the words “food insecure.”

A term that made Ryan snort-laugh through her nose.

“What …?” Abby looked over at Harrison on the other side of the warehouse, as if he might explain why his wife was laughing at the thought of families going hungry. But he wouldn’t have the answers. For all his compassion, he didn’t have any idea what it meant to be hungry.

Sorry, food insecure.

“What is so funny?” Abby asked.

“I’m sorry.” Ryan shook her head. “It’s just the term. ‘Insecure.’ When you’re a kid and you’re hungry and you know there’s nothing at home for dinner and won’t be until the end of the month, ‘insecure’ isn’t exactly the right word.”

“What word would you use?” Abby asked.

“Scared. Food scared.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Harrison put down a box and turn to stare at her.

“Your family didn’t have enough food?” Abby asked.

“Some months my dad’s disability check didn’t cover everything, and meat was always the first to go. Then vegetables and fruit. Milk. Even the powdered stuff for emergencies. Then the macaroni and ketchup. If we were lucky, we’d only have to get by without dinner for a few nights.”

“What did your father do?”

“Drove buses for the city until he slipped on some ice and hurt his back, and then we lived on his disability. Which could get us through as long as no one needed new shoes, or the car kept running. And I guess I’ve never really thought about this, kids usually don’t, but I can’t imagine how my dad must have felt those nights.”

She pushed hair off her shoulders as she knelt to pick up another bag of rice. “It must have killed him knowing he couldn’t always give us a good meal … I can’t even imagine what he’d call it. But I doubt it’s ‘insecure.’ Food anger? Food rage?”

“Mrs. Montgomery—”

“Please, call me Ryan.” She still wasn’t used to “Mrs. Montgomery” and frankly didn’t think she ever would be, considering her mother-in-law.

“I think you’d be a great spokesperson for us.”

“For hunger, you mean?” She laughed, but no one else did. Harrison was staring at her over the boxes he’d stacked. Abby was doing the same.

She could feel the blood pounding in her cheeks, sweat dripping down her sides from her suddenly sticky armpits. Oh, this attention sucked.

“Yes, in a word,” Abby said.

“That’s … I’m …” She glanced at Harrison, hoping he would bail her out with some kind of story about how busy they would be in Washington, how badly he needed her on the campaign, but he just kept those level blue eyes on her. “I’m not really …”

“You’d be great at it,” he said. “Perfect, I think.”

Her ears buzzed and she laughed, a wheezy, empty thing.

“Look,” Abby said. “I know you’re busy, but perhaps after the election you can come in and talk to us.”

“That’s … We’ll be …” she stammered into silence.

“Just think about it. We’d love to have you,” the director said, and then quickly checked her watch. “Let’s open the doors!”

After the food was handed out and the photos were taken, Harrison was back in the limo with his wife.

When she thought he wasn’t looking, she’d unbuttoned the top button of her skirt and pulled the thin fabric of her yellow-and-green print shirt over her stomach. Her clothes were getting uncomfortable lately; she wouldn’t say it, but she did that sort of thing a lot.

And tried to hide it from him.

He wondered what she would do if she knew how badly he wanted to strip those clothes off her, reveal her in the sunlight so he could soak in the sight of her, learn the reality of her so his dreams, his imaginings, his pre-dawn fantasies of her would be made more real. More concrete.

So this whole damn relationship of theirs would be made more concrete.

This charade that they were living was wearing him down. The closer they got to the election, the more real the next step in his life, the more he wished they could have those moments back on the couch. The more he wanted to just stop … pretending.

At first the charade had been in public, the smiles and hand-holding. The kissing and whispers. The united shoulder-to-shoulder front they presented to everyone. But now … since that night in September, and maybe since before then, maybe gradually, minute by minute since they’d been together, the tide had turned and the time when they were alone felt like the large lie.

The chill with which they handled each other. The careful indifference, as if showing the other how they might care, or how they were invested in each other, might somehow tip this boat over.

And what then? he wondered. What would be the great disaster if he let his wife—his goddamned wife—know what he thought. How he felt. They’d said no lies between them, but all they did was pretend not to be so painfully aware of the other. Staring out windows, taking phone calls.

It was his childhood all over again. But worse, somehow. A thousand times worse. Because he knew what he was missing out on. What they were missing out on.

It seemed impossible that the woman who had stayed with him, held his hand, let him into her body, comforted him, counseled him, shared her graham crackers, now stood beside him a stranger, pretending at love.

“You should think about it,” he said to his wife. “Working with the food bank.”

She looked out the window, even harder if such a thing were possible.

“You’d be good.”

The sound she made was partially disbelief, but he couldn’t be sure because he couldn’t see her damn face.

Fuck this, he thought on a sudden wave of anger, and he rolled up the partition between the front and back seats. They did not need any witnesses for this half-formed idea of his.