Lori doesn’t show up at school Tuesday morning, at least she’s not in their usual meeting place at the bottom of the school’s front steps, just to the right a little, which is ordinarily Ellie’s signal to get out of the car, to know that it’s safe to cross the gauntlet that is the front walk of any American high school. This morning, she senses in an instant that yet another thing in her young life has changed, that another loss is looming. She lingers, reluctant to get out of the car.
Jay is running late.
He hates to push.
“I’ll be here, okay?” he says, reminding her that he has to get into the office early today. “I’m the one who’s picking you up today. I’ll be here, El.”
She turns to her dad and nods. A hand on the door’s handle, she says, “She never called me back. I don’t understand why she won’t call me back.”
“We’ll talk about it tonight, I promise.”
She nods again and exits the car with her backpack, her black Starter jacket puffed up around her ears. From the dry cleaner’s parking lot, Jay watches her cross Westheimer at the light, watches her pass through the crowd of teenagers, walking through the doors of Lamar High School on her own.
When he arrives at his office a half hour later, there’s a car parked in front.
Not the black Cadillac he might have expected, but a plain Town Car, midnight blue, with a thin silver stripe along the sides. It’s not one of Rolly’s either. Jay parks his Land Cruiser in the drive alongside the house, grabbing a briefcase off the passenger seat as he exits. He tucks it under his arm, a bruised and battered caramel-colored satchel he bought on a trip with Bernie to Veracruz right after the Cole verdict, their only real vacation in twenty years. He’d had to dig through his hall closet to find it. It’s empty, except for a few Bic pens and a half dozen legal pads. He’ll have to get used to the weight as it grows, swelling with briefs and file folders, witness interviews and the like, the raw materials for the building of any court case, like State of Texas v. Neal Patrick Hathorne, which, as of eleven o’clock last night, is Jay’s to win or lose. As he approaches his office’s front gate, the rear passenger-side window of the blue Lincoln slides down slowly, revealing Cynthia Maddox.
“Jay,” she says.
He stops cold.
God help him, he still feels a jolt at the sight of her.
Her hair is different, the first thing he notices. It falls in a soft shag around her face, the color less artificially blond than he remembers. And here, in middle age, the handful of extra pounds the society pages loved to gossip about when she was mayor have come to serve her well. Her face is dewy, plump, and wholly unlined, a few brushstrokes from the girl he met thirty years ago.
His first impulse is to run.
Instead he says her name, because it’s all he can think to do and because silence itself would be a lie. Whatever the fallout, their history has a sound, a ringing in his ear, the hum of a song’s final note. He still remembers the night they went to see Lightnin’ Hopkins at the Pin-Up Club in Third Ward, the night she first kissed him in the cab of her pickup truck. He remembers the grassy smell of her hair. He remembers everything, in fact, including the months she let him sit in a jail cell, never once explaining herself, or even coming to say hi.
“They’re not here,” he says, guessing she didn’t come all this way for him.
Hoping, actually.
He is careful not to look directly into her eyes.
“I’m not looking for Sam. I’d actually rather he not know I was here.” He hears the click of the door lock releasing. “Come on, take a ride with me.”
What is it, he thinks, with people trying to put him in cars?
“I’m busy,” he says, opening the front gate.
As he starts up the walk, she steps out of the car, calling after him, embarrassed, it seems, to be on her feet, asking him to turn around, to give her even the smallest unit of his time. “God damn it, Jay, don’t make me chase you.”
He’d like to see that, actually.
He’d walk in circles just to make her dizzy.
“There somewhere we can talk for a minute?” she says.
She’s wearing a pale gray pantsuit that nearly matches her eyes and, on her right wrist, a line of thin gold bangles, which she fingers nervously. Jay has never seen her so anxious, so undone by whatever emotion is stirring behind those blue-gray eyes. If he had to put a name to it, regret would come closest. She looks toward the door of the Victorian, but hesitates, as if she can’t bear to cross the threshold into his private space, an intimacy they both know she forfeited long ago. The house, the porch swing–they’re too much for her. She tells her driver to wait for her a block over on Travis. The driver, a white man in his fifties tanned the color of Jay’s briefcase, eyeballs Jay from behind the wheel.
“You sure?”
“I’m fine,” Cynthia tells him, watching and waiting as he puts the car in drive, pulling away from the curb. To Jay, she shrugs at the pomp and circumstance, how far she’s come from the girl in peasant skirts, the one forever carrying a stack of leaflets, trying to rap her way into SNCC, SDS, and Jay’s fledgling political groups, a journey he rode shotgun. She nods toward the Town Car, traveling up Brazos Street. “He used to be my bodyguard, in Washington. I ran into a lot of trouble after that Anita Hill thing, death threats,” she says, rolling her eyes, but looking away, kind of, so that he can see she doesn’t take it as lightly as she’s pretending to. “I hate it, frankly, hate the whole idea of being watched, fussed over. But the White House insisted. Don’t let anybody tell you folks on the left aren’t hardcore. They can pull some scary shit.”
“But you already knew that.”
Cynthia smiles. “Let’s walk,” she says.
“I have a meeting at nine.”