Matt chalked up her absurd infatuation with Russ Erwin to that gentle quirkiness about her he found so endearing, and listed it as one of the frighteningly few things in the con column, along with hogs the covers, which she audaciously denied.
But there was, admittedly, another part of him that was mildly alarmed she could be so easily taken in by a bunch of grass-eating, tree-clinging, salamander lovers. Rebecca was exactly the type those environmental goofballs preyed on—big-hearted, overly concerned about things like stray dogs and spindly tomato plants and trash on the roadside. He could just hear them now: Please, Rebecca, please help us save the universe! Corporate America is stealing our air! Your son and your dogs and your tomato plants will not have air to breathe and we will ALL choke to death!
Matt had been around this race long enough to know that if it wasn’t one gimmick, it was another, and this Russ Erwin, whoever he was, had landed on a pretty good one. Normally, he would have ignored it, but normally, he wasn’t working on the opponent’s campaign. And normally, neither was she. There was just a little too much conflict of interest there for the lawyer in him to ignore. And furthermore, he had a personal stake in the outcome of this race—a stake that, given his rift with Ben, was beginning to emerge as very important. If running for district attorney was really an option for him, he was going to have to see this bullshit through.
So when Rebecca called him up one day, asked if she could tag along that evening to one of the last candidate forums, he said yes, thinking it would be a good opportunity to point out a few things about Tom and Phil Harbaugh that might perhaps move her off the Russ Erwin dime.
She was at his loft at precisely six o’clock in the evening, aimed with a small notebook and a sheath of study papers. They took her new king cab pickup to fetch Pat and Angie. Both women looked at Rebecca as if she’d lost her mind.
“What did you buy this for?” Pat demanded, struggling to climb up to the backseat in the tight, but securely fastened, dull gray skirt she always wore.
“To haul dogs and other stuff. Do you like it?”
“It’s not really you,” Pat said flatly. “It’s more like . . . I don’t even know who it’s like.”
“I think it’s totally awesome,” said Angie, whose hair was neon blue today, almost an exact match to the new tattoo of a bluebird on her neck.
“Thanks!” Rebecca chirped. “Where’s Gilbert?”
“He went with Tom. They needed to go over his opening remarks one last time,” Angie said.
“Meaning, Gilbert is writing them as Tom decides them on the way over,” Pat translated, then made a sound of disgust. “Sometimes, I wonder who’s really running the show.”
“Why do you support him?” Rebecca asked, looking in her rearview mirror at the more-dour-than-usual Pat.
She shrugged, looked out the window. “Oh, he’s not that bad. And he’s definitely the lesser of two evils.”
“You mean three,” Rebecca corrected her.
“No, I didn’t mean three. I meant two. The Independent guy hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell.”
Fortunately, Matt, thought, Rebecca didn’t argue.
They reached the auditorium where the forum would be held and trooped in together, but the place was packed to the gills and they had to separate to find seats. Matt and Rebecca managed to snag two end seats on the aisle, one directly behind the other.
After a series of deadly boring speeches by local and state politicians (what was it about politicians that made them promise to keep remarks brief, then proceed to talk until they were blue in the face?), the candidates were finally introduced. The lieutenant governor candidates would go first, followed by the gubernatorial candidates.
The first one up was the incumbent Phil Harbaugh, who made a couple of very lame jokes that Matt didn’t even get before he launched into a little speech about the lack of revenues to keep state government running—without noting, Matt thought wryly, if all the state government apparatus needed to keep running—and talked about his plans to increase revenue that would NOT RESULT IN A TAX INCREASE TO THE AVERAGE, HARDWORKING TEXAN! His solution? Increase the gas and/or grocery tax, which, to Matt’s way of thinking, amounted to a tax increase to the average, hardworking Texan, no matter how you sliced it.