“Okay, I’ve got work to do. Read your book,” Matt said.
Matt also knew that the dog-loving Grayson had a new one named Tot. But of all the dogs, Grayson loved Tater the best, because his father had given the dog to him. And while the kid spoke of the man in reverent terms, Matt couldn’t help wonder what sort of dad could leave a kid as cool as Gray hanging, but apparently he did. Matt liked to keep an open mind, but based on the evidence thus far, Grayson’s dad was sounding like a humongous prick.
When Matt wasn’t watching SpongeBob with Grayson, he was working very diligently on getting a meeting with the Hispanics for Good Government, or HGG, which was a grassroots organization that had grown into a voting force to be reckoned with. According to the poll stats Doug and Jeff held, the Hispanic vote was one area where Tom was lacking votes. And while HGG did not like to be lobbied, Doug and Jeff were adamant that Matt finagle a meeting with them for Tom. His opponent had managed it, and they feared that if Tom didn’t get in front of organization, they might endorse his opponent. That would be a critical loss, a potential showstopper.
What really chapped Malt’s ass was that Tom didn’t seem to care. He was forever off at obscure constituent meetings or working on campaign issues that no one else was privy to. He was not what one might call a hands-on candidate. The only thing Tom did show interest in—intent interest—was campaign contributions. He subscribed to the theory that the biggest purse won the pot, and toward that end, he hounded anyone who might contribute a little something. And it seemed to Matt, being just one innocent bystander, that he was using Rebecca to get those contributions, carting her around and letting her charm the pants off some of the big spenders.
Rebecca.
What could he say? He was truly crazy about her, like he’d never been crazy before—which was pretty sad seeing as how she treated him like chocolate one day, brussels sprouts the next. Short-term, long-term, any way he sliced it, he did not see how she could do anything but end up deranging his life in one enormous way or another. Like her referrals to his law practice. The shoe inserts had been just the beginning (the seniors had quite a network), and now Ben was absolutely beside himself, and had reiterated, emphatically, by slapping his hand on top of Matt’s desk a half-dozen times, that he DID NOT WANT TO BE KNOWN AS THE PATENT KING FOR A BUNCH OF OLD GUYS WITH HALF-BAKED INVENTIONS.
And what about Rebecca’s funky contributions to the campaign? The big giant gala aside, she had lots of really cute, no-place-in-a-political-campaign ideas. Like the email newsletter Gilbert had set up, which she thought would be a lot better received if it was more folksy instead of a just a bunch of blah-blah boring campaign news (her words, not his). So she and Pat started attaching recipes to the weekly newsletter, made it sound like they were coming from Tom’s wife, Glenda (who, insofar as Matt knew, didn’t even boil water). In spite of his arguments that a man running for the lieutenant governor’s office really shouldn’t be disseminating recipes, they went out, every week.
Then, Rebecca took Tom along to Eeyore’s birthday party. Now, anyone from Austin knew that the annual Eeyore’s birthday party was the opportunity for a bunch of aging hippies to hang out in strange costumes. Rebecca, who had only recently moved to Austin, mistakenly thought it was a good opportunity for Gunter to shoot Tom with lots of frolicking children. Gunter got Tom with frolicking children, all right, but most of them were in their forties. Worse, the local paper shot him in a staggeringly huge top hat, standing arm in arm with a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Of course Matt had tried to educate Rebecca about how that was going to play. “They’ll take those pictures of him and make him look like an idiot.”
“Who will?” she had asked, genuinely surprised.
“The Republicans. Heard of them?”
“Only in passing,” she said with a cheerful smile, and continued stuffing envelopes (hand-addressed, of course) with the latest campaign literature. “Besides, you’re so particular about everything; it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s just another of your weird idiosyncrasies.”
“My idiosyncrasies?” Matt echoed in disbelief, but Rebecca ignored him. So he put his hand on top of the stack of envelopes, leaned across the table so that she had to look at him—which she did, with those dancing blue eyes that always managed to get him right in the gut. “They’re not idiosyncrasies, Rebecca. I’m just practical, and you have to admit I have a little more experience with this sort of thing than you do.”
“Oh really?” she asked, happily wrenching the envelopes free of his palm “And how many campaigns have you worked on?”
“That’s a mere technicality—”
“How many did you say?”
“None,” he said through gritted teeth.