“I see,” Doug said, after a long moment. “And what is her status at the present moment?”
It was easy to imagine Doug, standing still in the middle of abustling office, a big campaign poster behind him (civil war is coming), a half dozen interns crowded around him in a semicircle, all holding up sticky notes to convey their own deeply urgent messages. Mine, of course, was the most urgent of all the messages, and so his hand was probably lifted to them, a single finger of pause.
“I confronted her this morning,” I said. “It was—it didn’t go well.” A sob escaped me.
“What do you mean exactly?”
“She doesn’t want to run away with him. But there was … there was an altercation.”
“Ah!” he said brightly. “I see what you mean now. Thatisvery interesting. Let me just get somewhere more quiet—”
I sat there in the darkness of the pantry, listening as Doug walked impatiently through the office, sayingnot nowandgive me fiveto the faceless interns still chasing after him. And then there was the click shut of a door, and the white noise of the campaign office was gone, and Doug’s voice was close and shallow in my ear, each word hitting my eardrums with the exaggerated echo of water droplets in a cave. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
“It’s hard to describe.”
“Find a way to describe it.”
Through the darkness, I could just see the shadows of the containers on the wall opposite me, lined up in neat little rows. Like jury members. Watching closely.
I’m always being watched,I thought calmly.I will never get away.And the Lord—the pressure of His attention was so heavy on the crown of my head, it felt like the earth’s gravity had doubled in weight.
“I sort of … hit her,” I told the jars, and Him, and Doug. “Or threatened her. Physically. But it wasn’t—” I paused, held the phone away from my face, sobbing quietly into the fabric of my sweater. “I tried to—I didn’tmeanto—I put my hands on her, Doug. I put my hands on her neck.”
The phone was silent. The jar of brown sugar leaned over to the flour:You believe the nerve of this bitch?
The Lord was silent. So was my father-in-law.
“Doug: Are you listening? Are you still there?”
The flour shrugged.These women have so much free time, they lose their minds.
“I’m just thinking,” Doug snapped. “Let me think.”
We, the members of the pantry-jar jury, have come to a unanimous verdict …
I covered my eyes with a cool palm.
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
Finally Doug spoke. “Does she come from money?”
I considered what I knew. “She’s definitely not poor.”
“All right. We’ll give her a promotion and a bonus. A new contract.”
“I don’t think she’ll sign it.”
“Of course she will,” Doug said impatiently. “It usually takes a few of these instances before someone actually decides to leave.”
Of course Doug had dealt with this before.
“Listen,” he went on. “There’s a special election in California right now. A state senator died of cancer, and his wife is running uncontested to fill his seat. We can beat her, easy, but we need to be prepared for the consequences of success. Which brings me to a very important question: Do you think Caleb is ready to win?”
Of course I didn’t. Of course he wasn’t. But I would rather give my idiot husband clearance to our nation’s nuclear codes than find myself a single, homeless, divorced mother of five with a sixth on the way. My reputation destroyed. Barely a dollar to my name.
Well, maybe a few dollars. The last time I’d checked that private account, I had seventy thousand dollars. It was growing so slowly, I could leach only the smallest percentage each month, and I had thought—well, of course the account was for Caleb, I hadn’t ever planned on actually using it, and—
Anyways. There wasn’t enough.
