‘No. He’s real old.’
Rachel scowled at Angel.
‘You keep saying things like that and you won’t live to be his age.’
‘I don’t want to live to be his age,’ said Angel. ‘He’s, like, Methuselah in pastels. Who dresses like that anyway?’
Rachel, to her credit, seemed determined to fight Jeff’s corner.
‘He’s playing golf later,’ she said.
‘Golf?’ said Louis. It might have been possible to inject more contempt into four letters and one syllable, but I couldn’t see how.
‘Yeah, golf,’ said Rachel. ‘Regular people play it. It’s a sport.’
‘Golf’s a sport?’
He looked at Angel. Angel shrugged. ‘Maybe we didn’t get the memo.’
‘You guys are jerks, you know that?’ said Rachel. ‘Where’s my daughter? I need to get her away from here before she contracts jerkdom.’
‘Too late,’ said Louis. ‘She got her father’s genes.’
‘You guys are jerks, you know,’ I told him, as I followed Rachel.
‘The cool kids are being mean to us,’ Louis said to Angel.
‘It’s homophobia,’ said Angel. ‘We ought to complain, or write a show tune about it.’
I left them to it.
‘Hey,’ called Angel to my back, ‘does that mean we can’t go to the prom?’
In the hallway, Rachel was helping Sam with her bag.
‘What happened to your nice new sweater?’ asked Rachel, noting that Sam was wearing the old one with holes that I kept in the house for her to use when we worked in the garden.
‘It got eggded,’ said Sam.
‘That figures,’ said Rachel. ‘Did mean Uncle Louis and Uncle Angel throw them at you and call you names?’ She glowered at me.
‘I didn’t put them up to it,’ I said. ‘They can be mean without my help.’
‘Uncle Angel said a bad word,’ said Sam. ‘The one beginning with “f”.’
There was a cry of shock from my office. ‘You promised she wouldn’t tell!’
‘That doesn’t surprise me in the least,’ said Rachel. She raised her voice and directed it to the office. ‘But I’m very disappointed in Uncle Angel.’
‘Sorry.’
Rachel checked that Sam had both socks on, that her underwear was the right way round, and she had her toothbrush and her dolls.
‘Okay, say goodbye to your daddy, and then go to the car,’ she told Sam.
Sam hugged me, and I held her tight. ‘Bye, Daddy.’
‘Bye, honey. I’ll see you soon, okay? I love you.’
‘I love you too.’
She pulled away, and I felt my heart break a little. ‘Bye, Uncle Angel who said a bad word,’ she called.
‘Bye,’ said an embarrassed voice.
‘Bye, Uncle Louis who promised to shoot that man.’
There was a long, awkward pause before Louis said ‘Bye,’ and Sam trotted out the door.
Rachel gave me the hard eye. ‘What?’
‘It was a misunderstanding,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t really have shot him.’
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Can I ask why they’re here?’
‘Just a thing,’ I said.
‘You’re not going to tell me?’
‘Like I said,’ and it was my turn to give her the hard eye, ‘it’s just a thing.’
Her temper was rising now: Angel and Louis’s ribbing of her, Sam’s sweater, Angel’s swearing, and whatever the hell she thought Louis had said, all of it combined to work on her like heat on a pressure cooker. Then again, she hadn’t looked too happy when she’d arrived. An evening spent listening to Jeff tell a crowd of wealthy folk that the banking collapse was all the fault of poor people for wanting a roof over their heads probably hadn’t helped. Her cheeks were flushed. She looked beautiful, but telling her that wouldn’t have helped the situation.
‘I hope you get shot in the fucking ass!’ she said. She opened the office door wide – ‘That goes for all of you!’ – then slammed the door shut behind her.
‘Come out and say hi to Jeff,’ she ordered. ‘Be polite and act like a normal guy.’
I followed her outside. Sam was already sitting in the child seat in the back of the car. She waved at me. I waved back.
‘Hey, big guy,’ said Jeff. He smiled whitely.
Big guy. What an asshole.
‘Hey . . . Jeff,’ I said.
We shook hands. He did that thing he always did where he held on to my right hand for too long with his right hand while gripping my upper arm with his left hand, and examined my face the way a surgeon will check out a patient who is seriously ill and doesn’t appear to be getting any better, and is thus an affront to his caregiver.
‘How you doing, fella?’ he asked.
Fella: it just got better and better. Rachel grinned maliciously. It was revenge for earlier.
‘I’m good, Jeff. And you?’
‘Fantastic,’ he replied. ‘Just fine.’
‘Speech went well last night?’
‘It went down a storm. There were people asking me to run for office.’
‘Wow. Somewhere in Africa would be good. I hear Sudan needs ironing out, or maybe Somalia.’
He looked puzzled, and the smile faltered for a moment, then recovered.
‘No, here,’ he said.
‘Right. Of course.’
‘There was a reporter who came along from the Maine Sunday Telegram. They’re going to report the details of my speech on the weekend.’
‘That’s great,’ I said. If they did, the Telegram wouldn’t be getting my dollar seventy-five that Sunday. ‘Any other reporters there?’
‘Some guy from the Phoenix, but he was just hanging around to cause trouble.’
‘Asking awkward questions? Not accepting the party line?’
‘Ordinary people just don’t understand deregulation,’ said Jeff. ‘They think it involves a state of lawlessness, but it simply means allowing market forces to determine outcomes. Once government begins to interfere, those outcomes start to become unpredictable, and that’s when the trouble starts. Even light-touch regulation interferes with the natural running of the system. We just want to make sure that it runs right so everyone can benefit.’
‘So you’re the good guys?’
‘We’re the wealth generators.’
‘You’re certainly generating something, Jeff.’
Rachel intervened. ‘It’s time to go, Jeff. I think you’ve been baited long enough.’ She hugged me and kissed my cheek. ‘You’ll come see Sam in a week or two?’
‘Yes. Thanks for letting her spend the night. I appreciate it.’
‘I didn’t mean that part about you getting shot,’ she said.
‘I know.’