Whoa . . . Cal Blivins? The Cal Blivins who attended the University of Texas at the same time as Matt and Tom? The same worthless piece of shit who had screwed Matt’s girlfriend in the back of his pickup? Okay, so she wasn’t much of a girlfriend, and maybe Matt couldn’t remember her name anymore, but that was beside the point. Guys did not do that to guys. But Cal did. Cal was forever pushing to see what would stick. There wasn’t a sleazier man in the entire state, and the bastard would sell his mother to the devil if there was something in it for him
“You’re kidding,” Matt said flatly.
“We wouldn’t kid about something like that,” Doug assured him. “Blivins has so many hands in his pockets he’s already talking about cutting services. Tom said you sit on the board of the Children’s Aid Services, right? Well, Blivins thinks the private sector ought to pick that up. Worse, he’s making noises about the unthinkable—say hello to state income tax.”
Matt gasped in abject horror—the absence of a state income tax was the last sacred cow in Texas.
Nevertheless, he’d never once, thought of political office. Hell, he never thought of politics at all. Then again, he’d never thought of Cal Blivens at the capitol, either. Matt made the grave mistake of looking at Tom and felt his heart flutter. Nothing against Tom, but he was in politics because he couldn’t do anything else. Was he the Democrats’ great hope? Matt caught the waiter’s eye and held up a finger before asking, very cautiously, very tentatively, and oh so very stupidly, “So what exactly are we talking about here?”
Chapter Four
You can’t play the game if you are not in the game . . .
A BRAND-NEW DAY: STARTING UP AND STARTING OVER
In Rebecca’s eagerness to move to the lake house, she had not counted on sharing it with so many refugees.
The latest refugee to reach them was big and brown and covered with ticks. His leg had been broken and then had healed funny, which made him look like he was half drunk when he walked. Even more unfortunate for the mutt was that he was too ugly and too used up for anyone to want him. He was never going to look much better than he did at this moment, covered head to toe in soapy bubbles.
Rebecca had discovered him in the early dawn when she had gone outside to become one with nature (as advised in a new book Rachel had sent her, Changing Lives: A Return to the Basics Through the Power of Tai Chi). His head was deep inside her garbage can, the contents of which had been strewn about the gravel path leading up to the main road. But the poor dog hadn’t found much to sustain him, and when Rebecca called to him, he didn’t bolt, but banged around the garbage can in his eagerness to get out, wagging his tail like a dog who enthusiastically and firmly believed that where there was a woman, dog food couldn’t be too far away.
Now that his belly was full, Rebecca and Grayson were bathing him—or rather, the unnamed Big Dog was bathing Grayson, who was likewise covered in soapy bubbles. Rebecca hadn’t fared much better—her T-shirt now sported two distinct paw prints where the dog had jumped up to thank her for his Purina. He was such a gentle and loving giant, it was beyond Rebecca’s ability to comprehend how someone could drive down a near-deserted road, open the car door, push him out, and then drive off. Surely there was a special place in hell for those folks—and based on what she’d seen, it would have to be a very large place, because Big Dog was the fourth mutt to have found his way to her door, in addition to a pair of parakeets who had roosted for a week in the old cottonwood tree.
Of the three prior refugees, Rebecca and Grayson had agreed to keep Bean (so named from a broken tag where only Bean-something was legible), because the chunky yellow dog was mentally deranged. He walked into doors, couldn’t find his food bowl, and always seemed to be going in the opposite direction of the rest of the world. Rebecca and Grayson found homes for the other two by sitting out front of Sam’s Corner Grocery in nearby Ruby Falls one long Saturday afternoon.
Now it appeared that loony Bean would have company. Big Dog must have known Rebecca wouldn’t turn him away, that she of all humans would understand why he had come here. After all, it was the same reason she had come here—to escape the reality of being out there. And truthfully, she didn’t mind; the dogs gave her something to do to fill the endlessly empty moments that piled up around her.