Here’s the thing I didn’t notice until it was gone: Matt stopped finding me funny. I’d always been able to make him laugh. I was my goofiest around him, my weirdest self. I’d hold up a banana and make it dance and talk, or I’d smooth one of his unruly eyebrows and say, “This guy is just really excited today.” And he’d throw his head back and laugh—really laugh from deep down in his stomach. Sometimes he’d shake his head at me and tell me I was weird, but it didn’t matter, because I knew he thought I was hilarious. Even in his worst moods, I could get him to smile.
I don’t know when it stopped, but I do remember once that summer in Texas, when he was sitting on the couch with his laptop in front of him, probably reading about a new oil well or cyberstalking Candace Elroy’s campaign team. I’d just gone for a run, and still had my headphones on, listening to music. He didn’t say hi when I walked in, didn’t even lift his head. There was some obnoxious Taylor Swift song playing, so I unplugged the headphones and turned the music up, started dancing in a crazy way, slapping the air in front of me like it was the ass of an imaginary person, waiting for him to look up and laugh. I knew he could see me out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t acknowledge me so I just kept dancing. Finally, he looked at me straight on and asked without smiling, “What are you doing?” and I stopped mid-slap and said, “Nothing.”
Chapter 19
The last push of the campaign felt more like a death march. We were still traveling all the time and hoping for the best (whatever that meant), but the bad news kept rolling in. The Farm Bureau decided not to endorse either candidate, to stay out of the race altogether, which was a huge blow for Jimmy—he’d been courting them for months and their support would’ve prompted a lot of people to vote for him. The media interest slowed all through September and then basically stopped. No one cares about a David and Goliath story unless David has a shot in hell of winning. And then in early October, The Dallas Morning News (who’d endorsed Jimmy in the primary), endorsed Candace Elroy. This wasn’t a surprise, but it felt like the nail in the coffin. After Matt read the piece, he slammed his fist down on the table and said, “Fuck!” making all of us around him jump. The op-ed said that Jimmy was eager and that they admired his intentions, but that Elroy had more experience and a measured approach to fracking regulations. “A measured approach,” Jimmy said. “Which means not changing anything.”
“Exactly,” Matt said. And then we all just sat there, not talking, because what could we say to make it better? Each day, it felt like a little more air was let out of the campaign. It was October and there was still a month left, thirty days until it could be put to rest. By the time it was over, we’d have nothing left.
Later that day, Matt said to me, “Well, that’s that.” He sounded so defeated, like he wanted to pack it in, call it quits and head back to DC immediately. But you can’t just abandon a campaign because you think you’re going to lose—there were still so many events to attend, so many trips to take. “You really think it’s over?” I asked, and he sounded so certain as he said, “It would take a miracle for him to win.”
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After Luling, Matt had stopped asking me to help as much with the campaign. I still did some stuff, of course, because it was impossible to live in the same house as campaign headquarters and be completely uninvolved. But where he used to ask me to pick something up at an office supply store or coordinate volunteers, he now asked Katie. I don’t know if this was his way of punishing me or if he figured I didn’t want anything to do with it, or if he was just trying to avoid fighting. I was still going on all of the trips, but when we were at the house I felt like I’d been cut out of the loop.
Ash had stepped back from the campaign too—just a little bit, but I noticed. She booked more parties than she had all year, and was gone a few evenings a week. She didn’t attend any of the in-town events, and she started dropping Viv off at her parents’ house almost every morning. Ash would return with Viv in the early evening, giving the impression that she’d been working, but never saying where she was. I couldn’t imagine her sitting in a Starbucks on her laptop all day, and sometimes I think she just stayed at her parents’ place or maybe just drove around. Honestly, I think she just wanted to be out of the house, and really, who could blame her?
The upshot of all these changes was that we no longer ate breakfast together, and when we were together for dinner, we usually had takeout in front of the TV. We still saw each other plenty, with all the trips we were taking, but things were different. It was clear that if given the choice, we had no desire to be anywhere near each other.
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