“Your mom left?” I knew moms died. I had no idea they left.
“Yeah. She got a job in Ohio or something. Don’t forget to ask your dad about Thanksgiving, okay?”
He insisted on walking me back to my street, as far as the communal mailboxes. That was another Columbia concept—the mail didn’t come to your house, it was delivered to a locked compartment in a large box that served the entire cul-de-sac. This was supposed to foster community spirit. In my house, it meant that AJ or I had to get the mail because the last thing my father wanted at the end of a long day of serving the community was to talk to actual members of the community.
I watched Randy walk away. He walked like a grown-up, an old one, his narrow shoulders rounded, his feet shuffling like the characters in the animated Peanuts cartoons. He walked as if he hoped he never got to where he was going. Why had he brought that thing up about kissing? Was it because of what the other kids said, planting the idea in his head that we should be kissing? I wanted none of that. Now I was going to have to watch him all the time, make sure he didn’t try it on the sly. Kissing ruined everything.
FEBRUARY 11
Lu looks at her plate. She has seen this plate of food many times. It is the meal inevitably served at such luncheons, luncheons that make up too much of her life. There is a salad with iceberg lettuce, two slices of cucumber, edges crimped, carrot shavings, and one—always one—cherry tomato. The salad is always served with a choice of ranch or raspberry vinaigrette dressing, both of which she declines. Always. The salad will be followed by string beans and one’s choice of beef, salmon, or chicken. Lu has learned over the years that the salmon, counterintuitively, is always the safest choice. Dessert, which looks fantastic—a fudgy brownie with ice cream on top—is served at the exact moment she is called to the podium. She knows the harried waitstaff will have cleared her brownie before she returns.
Today’s luncheon is for a professional women’s group in Howard County and Lu is the keynote speaker. More insultingly, she is the fill-in speaker. They wanted the state’s attorney of Baltimore City. She is younger, an African American woman whose election last fall was considered big news, overshadowing Lu’s election as the first female state’s attorney in the history of Howard County. (Bal timore has not only had a female state’s attorney before, but she was African American, too, so the only notable thing about the new attorney’s election was that she defeated a well-financed incumbent. But Lu did that, too.) Now, listening to her introduction, she has a sinking feeling that it may not have been updated, that the woman at the lectern might be describing the originally scheduled speaker. No, wait, there it is, the telltale phrase—
“And, not incidentally, the daughter of one of the most beloved men in Howard County, the former state’s attorney Andrew J. Brant.”
Former state’s attorney. Why did he stop there? Strangely, Lu has never reopened that topic with her father, not since 1986 when he stepped down, amid speculation that he would run for Congress. Yet he never did. He said, at the time, that he felt he was out of step with the county and the country. Reagan was still president. Lu suspects her father’s real problem is that he preferred the Senate to the Congress; her father’s temperament was better suited to that more sedate, formal body. But Barbara Mikulski was elected to the Senate that year and it was believed it would be a long time before there would be a vacancy in the Maryland seats. The belief was true. Sarbanes, elected in ’76, didn’t leave until the 2007; Mikulski is still in office, although speculation is rife that she might announce this is her last term. Now Lu wonders if her father worried that moving up through the political ranks would cost him that adjective, beloved. Certainly, almost no politician is described that way anymore. Even the people who vote for you didn’t seem to like you that much.
In front of an audience such as this, she can go on autopilot. Lu never prepares her speeches ahead of time but works from a menu of discrete topics, which she can arrange in endless forms depending on her audience. This group wants heartwarming empowerment, so she talks about work-life balance, the challenges of being a woman in public office, especially a single parent. That went well, she thinks, as she tries to rush out without seeming to rush out. (Sure enough, her brownie was gone. So it goes.)
But as she moves through the kind, smiling, congratulatory women, a younger one blocks her way. Lu, still on autopilot, extends her hand, but the woman, whose suit looks like a cheap knockoff of the rag & bone suit that Lu is wearing, keeps her arms crossed on her chest, a bad sign unless she’s chilly—and it’s not cold in this room. Overheated if anything.