“Got it,” Jimmy said.
“This race isn’t something they’re paying too much attention to, so we want to give them a reason to get excited, to remember your name.”
“That I can do,” Jimmy said. He turned to me. “Beth, did you get to see the world-famous Jimmy Dillon campaign office yet?”
I couldn’t help but laugh when Jimmy talked about himself in the third person, no matter how often he did it. “I peeked in there yesterday,” I said.
“Well, that won’t do. Come on, I’ll show you where the magic happens.”
I wasn’t quite finished with my breakfast, but I stood up to follow them anyway. I carried my bowl over to the sink, but Ash intercepted and took it from me. “Don’t worry about this,” she said. “Go check out the office.”
—
Campaign headquarters was set up in the den on the first floor. “We never used this room anyway,” Ash had said when she showed it to me. She’d opened the door briefly and then closed it again so that I’d just caught a glimpse. I had a feeling she hated the clutter in the room—there were two desks in there, facing away from each other and pushed against opposite walls, and all around were signs and stacks of papers, boxes of posters and push cards, the tiny little pieces of cardboard with Jimmy’s picture, bio, and platform on them.
“See?” Jimmy said, handing one of the push cards to me. “They’re small enough so people can put them in their pockets. And you can only imagine how many people are dying to carry a picture of me around with them.”
Matt shook his head behind Jimmy, but he looked amused. There wasn’t all that much to see in the office, so after a few minutes I told them I’d let them get to work.
“Wait,” Jimmy said. He gave me a large pile of the push cards and winked. “So you can campaign for me.”
I took the cards from him. “Of course,” I said. “I’ll start knocking on doors now.” But the thing was, from then on I always had a bunch of his push cards with me. During the campaign we all carried them to hand out at events and lunches and sometimes to random people we met. Once, I gave one to a lady in the grocery store as we chatted in the checkout line. It became such a habit over those ten months that after the election was over, I sometimes found myself reaching for them when I met someone new.
Jimmy’s father had footed the bill for a photographer and a messaging and design consultant, which resulted in a two-day photo shoot where Jimmy was captured in ten different outfits and five different locations. Matt was there for the whole thing, and afterward he said to me, “I’m starting to think Jimmy secretly wants to be a model.”
The picture that they chose to use on all the promotional materials was a shot of Jimmy standing outside, somewhere in Texas, nothing but open land behind him. He was wearing dress pants and a button-down shirt that was rolled up to his elbows, and his hands were on his hips as he looked straight at the camera, smiling but looking confident. Underneath him was his campaign motto, “Let’s Get to Work,” which I thought sounded cheesy at first, but grew to like. During those months, I saw this image of Jimmy about four hundred times a day—there were posters and push cards littered all over the house—and after a while when I looked at him in real life, I could almost see the slogan underneath him, beckoning me to get to work.
It also became something Jimmy said often, mostly when Matt was trying to get him to focus. That day, when it became clear that Matt was getting impatient and wanted Jimmy to stop talking to me and start being productive, he stood up straight and said loudly, “Okay, let’s get to work!” saluting me as I walked out of the office.
—
As soon as Matt agreed to run Jimmy’s campaign, he thought of little else. He did research on past commissioners, read as much as he could about the oil and gas industry in Texas, like he was cramming for a final. Matt had told me once how much he loved school, how he missed it all the time. “How very Harvard of you,” I’d said, rolling my eyes just a little. Because he wasn’t talking about the parties or hanging out in the dining hall—no, he missed studying for tests, the satisfaction that came from gathering information and making it his own. And as I watched him run the campaign, this was clear.
Each night, he took stacks of paper to bed with him, highlighting and making notes in the margins. “I feel like there’s so much I need to catch up on,” he said. Often, I woke up in the morning to find Matt sleeping with papers on top of him, a highlighter still clenched in his hand. Our sheets were soon streaked with neon yellow marks, but he didn’t seem to notice.