The Unexpected Everything

“I’m not surprised,” he said.

“Me either.” I was still trying to get my head around it. My dad had given the speech he’d planned to give all along, the one that Peter had no knowledge of—the speech that said he would finish out his term but would not run for another one. That he wanted to spend more time with his family.

“So what now?” I asked.

My dad took a deep breath and gave me a smile. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m going to finish out my term and then . . . I guess I’ll figure it out.”

“So I bet Peter’s freaking out right about now,” I said, not quite able to stop myself from smiling.

My dad nodded. “Probably,” he said, then shrugged. “He’ll get over it. And if he doesn’t, it’s not really my issue any longer.”

“Congressman?” Walt called from the front of the bus. “I’m going to need an address. Unless you just want me to go back to the pickup spot?”

“Coming,” my dad said, ruffling my hair like he used to do when I was little, then making his way to the front of the bus.

I crossed back to join Palmer at the table. She was looking like I felt—a little stunned by everything that was happening. “Busy day,” she said, shaking her head, and I smiled as I sat in the seat across from her.

I nodded. “It has been.”

“And we’re still going to New Jersey,” Palmer said, fixing me with a look that let me know she wasn’t going to let me out of this. “We’ll just get my car and I’ll drive us.”

I nodded, pulling out my phone and looking at the time. I’d found the address of the bookstore on Clark’s website, and mapped it from Stanwich—it was still another hour to get there. It would be cutting it close, but we could almost make it. I wasn’t letting myself think about what would happen once I got there. For the moment it was enough to know that we were going. “Okay,” I said, nodding a few more times than I needed to. “Okay.”

“So I was thinking about Bri and Toby,” Palmer said, and I looked up at her, putting my phone away, glad to have some distraction from what we were heading toward. “I think we need to get them to sit down together and talk this out.”

“I agree,” I said, “but I don’t see that happening, do you?” Palmer sighed and bit her lip. “I mean, even if we get them both to the diner, or wherever, when Toby sees Bri, she’s just going to leave.”

“Or you,” Palmer pointed out. “They’re both still pretty mad at you.”

“Right,” I said. We sat in silence for a moment, the weight of the situation—the hopelessness of it—seeming to press down on me like a physical force.

“We need to get them together,” Palmer said slowly, “somewhere they can’t leave.”

I nodded, thinking that sounded good if we could work it out. I suddenly remembered Rio Bravo and all the secrets and resentments that had come bubbling to the surface when the men were stuck in the jail together. We needed that, but hopefully with less singing. “That would be good,” I said, “but . . .” I looked over at Palmer to see that she was looking at the bus with newfound interest. “What?” I asked.

Palmer smiled at me. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

? ? ?

I had not expected, when I’d woken up that morning, that by the afternoon I would be in this situation. In all the vague ways I’d imagined my day going—maybe getting a coffee and picking up some dog-walking shifts—this had not been one of the options. Riding in a bus with my dad’s face on it, barreling across New Jersey, en route to tell Clark I was in love with him, while trying to get Toby and Bri to talk to each other, had been nowhere in my list of possibilities. And yet here we were. We weren’t in the Mustang, but I had a feeling my mom would have approved.

“Say something,” I said to Bri, who sat across the bus table from me, her arms folded, looking hard out at the window like she couldn’t hear me.

“I’ll say something,” Toby snapped, from her seat across the aisle. “This is kidnapping. You can’t just force people to be on a bus together.”

“Nobody forced you onto the bus,” Palmer pointed out from where she was standing in the aisle between Toby and Bri’s rows. “You came on voluntarily.”

Both of them scoffed in unison, and Palmer and I exchanged a look. When we’d asked my dad if this would be possible—leaving out, for the moment, that Bri and Toby were currently not speaking to each other—we’d made it seem like we all just wanted to ride down to Clark’s bookstore event together and that Bri and Toby were excited by the idea of being on a campaign bus.

My dad had bought this and checked with Walt, who just shrugged and said he’d been paid for the whole day, so as long as we didn’t go over the mileage, we were okay, and that it didn’t make any difference to him where we went. Once we’d gotten the go-ahead, Palmer and I had strategized. When we’d decided on the plan—we’d pick up Bri and Toby as we went through Stanwich en route to New Jersey, and they’d just have to work it out as we all rode down to the bookstore together—we’d realized we had to actually get them both on the bus, together, in order for this to work.