The Second Sister Read online

  “But . . . I don’t have any lobbying experience. Why would you want me?”

  “Because you’re passionate and organized and you know how to inspire passion in other people. You’d be great. And it’ll give you a chance to have a life. Lobbying pays a lot better than law making. You’ll be able to buy some decent clothes and even send them to the cleaners. I never want to see you in a wrinkled blue blazer again,” he said in a tone of mocking superiority, “not in my office. You’ll be able to buy a real house and real furniture. No more renting. You can put nail holes in the woodwork and paint the walls any color you want.

  “You’d have to travel, but not too much. You’ll have weekends off, nights too. Not all the time, but more often than you do now. And you’ll meet regular people—civilians, not politicos. Washington is full of eligible bachelors.”

  “Joe? Are you trying to set me up?” I couldn’t keep from grinning.

  “Well,” he said with a little shrug. “I know a couple of guys. One just divorced. One never married. You might like them. Look, you’re going to need to find work after the election, so why not work for me? We have doughnuts on Monday morning and an open bar on Friday night. What more could you want?”

  “Very tempting,” I said. “But if Ryland wins . . .”

  Joe’s smile disappeared. “Lucy, he’s not going to win. Quinnipiac has you down by five. You can’t close the gap in a week. Even if you could, why would you stay on? Ryland won’t give you a big job, Lucy. You know that. Otherwise, he’d never have let Miles push you out of the spotlight.”

  He leaned forward, his expression absolutely solemn. “I know you don’t like to talk about it, but just this once, let’s lay it all out there. You pulled off a miracle in Iowa and for a week you were a hero. You were interviewed on CNN. The Washington Post called you Ryland’s secret weapon, the architect of a brilliant but bare-bones campaign based on jobs, jobs, and more jobs that appealed to disaffected moderates who’d given up on voting and catapulted a candidate no one had ever heard of into a front-runner. For a week, you were a genius. Money poured in, big donors got on board, the party elite started paying attention, and the media was giving Tom the kind of coverage money can’t buy. For a week.”

  He paused, giving me a chance to fill in the blank.

  “And then came New Hampshire,” I said. “And we came in second to last.”

  Joe nodded slowly. “Uh-huh. And the people who sang your praises after Iowa started throwing rocks after New Hampshire. They said you were in over your head, too inexperienced to run a national campaign.”

  “And I was! I knew that!”

  I pushed away my plate, wishing I hadn’t eaten so fast. The food had given me indigestion. Or maybe it was the conversation.

  “The plan was to do just well enough in Iowa and New Hampshire so Tom would be seen as credible,” I said. “Then we could attract larger donors and afford real advertising and a manager with national experience. I’d always planned to step aside!”

  Joe gave me a “get real” sort of look. “It’s one thing to take a step to the side, Lucy. It’s another thing to get sent down. If you hadn’t done quite so well in Iowa, built up expectations, and done a little better in New Hampshire—”

  “We didn’t have an advertising budget! The donations came in too late!”

  Joe held up his hands. “Hey. You don’t need to defend yourself to me. I know what you were up against. But, fair or not, you were the one who was held responsible. Let me ask you something. Did Tom stand up for you?”

  Joe was staring right at me, his eyes practically boring through me. I stared right back. I wasn’t going to let him get to me.

  “Look. It wasn’t his idea. He was getting a lot of pressure from the big donors. We had to make changes or the money would have dried up.”

  “You didn’t answer the question,” Joe said, still staring. “Did Tom Ryland stand up for you? Did he tell them that New Hampshire wasn’t your fault?”

  I turned my head away. He already knew the answer.

  “Exactly,” Joe said. “It might not have been his idea, but he let them push you aside because by that time, he started to believe he really could win. And he wants that, very much.”

  “We both do,” I said. “There’s no point in running if you’re not in it to win.”

  “Lucy,” he said in a chiding tone, “you should have walked away after Iowa instead of sticking around and letting Miles shuffle you off to organize coffee klatches for women’s groups. I see you killing yourself . . . working ninety-hour weeks . . . Why? Some misplaced sense of loyalty? Are you trying to redeem yourself in the eyes of the world? In your own eyes? What’s in it for you? I don’t get it.”

  I grabbed the edge of the table, but really, I felt like smashing it with my fist.

  “First off, what’s wrong with loyalty? And second, is it possible that I stayed because I believe in what we’re trying to do? Okay, sure. Is there a part of me that decided to hang in there to prove everybody wrong? Probably. I’m only human. But a Ryland administration will put people and jobs first, politics second, and fix what’s been broken in the country since I was a kid. And when that happens, I want to be part of it!”

  Joe just looked at me. I think he was trying to give me time to cool down.

  “Well,” he finally said, “you almost pulled it off, Lucy. Without you, Ryland would never have gotten this far, would never even have been in the race. You should be proud of that. But it’s not going to happen. Even if it did—”

  “Joe,” I interrupted, “you don’t need to say it. I won’t get a big job in a Ryland administration. I already know that. But I’ve spent almost my whole career with Tom. If he goes to Washington, I go with him. Regardless of the title.”

  Joe moved the napkin from his lap to the table. “Ryland doesn’t deserve you, Lucy. He really doesn’t.”

  “Well, neither do you. God help the man who did deserve me. He’d be in for a world of trouble. I’ve got to go.”

  I reached into my purse to find my wallet, but Joe waved me off.

  “I’ll expense it. With a little imagination, I can figure out how to charge two clients for the same breakfast. You know how crafty we lobbyists can be.” He smiled. “Don’t think I’m done with you. Let’s talk after Tuesday. If Ryland loses . . .”

  “If,” I said, refusing to be defeatist.

  “If he does,” Joe said, “then promise me you’ll think about my offer.”

  “Promise. Thanks for breakfast.” I kissed him on the cheek. Joe stood up, watching me leave.

  “Hey, Luce?” I turned around at the sound of his voice. “I forgot to tell you—that’s a nice scarf.”

  “Yeah?” I fingered the blue and bottle-green fabric draped across my shoulders, pleased by his words. Positive comments from Joe regarding my wardrobe were rare. “Thanks. I found it in a thrift shop in Brooklyn.”

  “Uh-huh. And the shoes,” he said. “Did you get those in a thrift shop too?”

  I frowned. “No. Why do you ask?”

  Joe grinned and looked at my feet.

  “Because you’re wearing two different ones.”

  Chapter 4

  The week leading up to the election was exhilarating and terrifying by turns. Office morale soared and plummeted with the arrival of every new poll. We were closing the gap—but slowly.

  Campaign veterans wanted to be optimistic, but couldn’t quite bring themselves to it. They’d been to the rodeo before.

  Another week and we’d have this thing in the bag. But by Tuesday? I don’t know . . .

  The campaign virgins, recent college grads hoping their unpaid internships would lead to jobs with the administration, perhaps as secretary of state, or maybe the guy who carried her briefcase, anything with a paycheck, were exuberant.

  Dude! I borrowed money from my mom for a deposit on an apartment in Foggy Bottom. But I need two roommates. You in?

  Campaigning is a young person’s sport, so by rights
I should have been in the camp of the cautious. But I continued to believe that our position was brighter than the polls painted it.

  Miles, the campaign manager, disagreed.

  “It’s over, Lucy. We’re short two million votes. If we only had another week . . .” He grimaced. “But we don’t. Time to polish up the résumé. I’m talking to people at CNN. It’s gotta be easier to talk about campaigns than run them, right? I’m getting too old for this crap.”

  He’d already given up. It was a fight to get him to agree to go ahead with the rally on the Northwestern campus—he said it was a waste of money—but I refused to leave his office until he gave in, so eventually he did, just to get rid of me.

  I would have liked to fly out to Illinois for the rally, but I couldn’t spare the time away from the office. Illinois could be the straw that broke the back of the Gardner campaign camel, but we had to stay strong in the other states too. We couldn’t afford to let anything slide.

  Normally I find those final days leading up to an election energizing. But this time, I just didn’t feel the usual rush of adrenaline. Maybe I was getting too old for this too.

  I kept thinking about my conversation with Joe. Obviously, he thought Tom didn’t place the value on me that I placed on him. I really didn’t think that was fair. When Tom brought Miles in to run the campaign, he was only doing what he had to do.

  Okay, yes. It might have soothed my ego if he’d fought a little harder for me, made Miles give me something more substantial, but that wasn’t the real issue, not for me. What really bugged me was that Tom wasn’t listening to me anymore.

  Miles came on board just three days after the debacle in New Hampshire. After that, I almost never saw Tom. Unless it was a conference call, we rarely even talked on the phone. And when Miles and I had a disagreement about strategy or policy, Tom would just sit there, watching Miles and me go at each other, never taking sides, but never coming to my defense either.

  The equal-pay thing was a perfect example. Miles wanted him to back off. I disagreed, vehemently. But in the end, Tom did what Miles told him to do.

  Look, I understand that a ship can have only one captain, but that doesn’t mean the owner of the ship shouldn’t at least consider other points of view. Tom was wrong to flip on equal pay, and not just because it cost us support with women. It was just a mistake to back off on something he’d gone on the record as supporting for his entire career. It made him look indecisive. And if the whole thrust of your campaign is making sure that people have good-paying jobs, then it only makes sense that those policies apply equally to everybody. That’s just common sense.

  If he asked my advice, I’d tell him to flip right back as soon as the election was over. Maybe even put a reference to equal pay in his inaugural address. He wouldn’t be the first president to change his mind once the votes were counted.

  But he hadn’t asked for my advice. Not for months.

  Every waking moment of that week was spent calling field operatives and offices, state and county chairs, making sure that every detail of our get-out-the-vote strategy was perfectly understood and executed. I worked unceasingly, going to my apartment just long enough to change into my cleanest dirty clothes or catch a couple of hours of sleep before being woken right in the middle of a REM cycle by yet another phone call from Alice, who was still going on about Christmas.

  Exhausted doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt by Monday.

  I didn’t bother going back to the apartment that night. Instead, around two-thirty in the morning, I went into my office, closed the door, dimmed the lights, kicked off my shoes, and, after a moment of hesitation, decided that, just this once, I’d leave my cell phone off.

  Lying down on the couch, I fell instantly asleep and didn’t wake until Jenna, my assistant, knocked on the door and said the polls were about to open in the East. Also that the lobby had called to say two Secret Service agents were on their way up, which meant the governor would be right behind them, arriving at any minute.

  “What!” I bolted upright and started frantically raking my fingers through my hair. “Why’d you let me sleep so long?”

  “Because you needed it. You look like complete crap, Lucy. So does your office.” She shook her head and looked around at the piles of papers, files, boxes, half-empty cups of cold coffee, and other debris. “How can you work in this mess?”

  “You know, if I needed a mother . . . I know where everything is in here; I have a system.” Unable to see without my glasses, I slid my bare feet over the office carpeting, searching. “Where are my shoes?”

  Jenna shot me a look, then stooped down and retrieved two scuffed pumps from under the sofa.

  “Here,” she said, holding out my missing footwear. “Hang on a second. Don’t put them on yet.” She reached into the left shoe, pulled out a pair of eyeglasses, and handed them to me.

  I frowned. “I put them in there so I’d be able to find them later.”

  “I know. You have a system.”

  “That’s right.”

  I stood up, slipped my feet into my shoes and my arms into the sleeves of my jacket, and smoothed my hands over my hair and lapels.

  “Do I look okay?” I asked hopefully.

  Jenna looked me up and down. “Maybe after some coffee.”

  I followed her a few steps into the outer office, which, in spite of the early hour, was already starting to buzz with activity. Jenna started down the hall toward the kitchen, but came face-to-face with two very tall, very fit, very serious-looking men dressed in dark suits. Without speaking, one of them started opening closet doors and peering around corners. The other walked up to her and asked, “Is Miss Toomey alone in her office?”

  Secret Service agents make Jenna nervous. She says that the way they look at her, faces like flint, makes her feel like they suspect her of something.

  She called out over her shoulder, “Luce!”

  “He’s here?” I asked. “Why? He’s supposed to be at the TV station.”

  Hearing my voice, the agent looked across the room to me and repeated the question, “Miss Toomey, is there anyone else in your office?”

  I shook my head. The agent lifted his sleeve to his mouth, mumbling the all clear into a tiny microphone hooked to the cuff of his starched white shirt before he and his partner moved into position on either side of the hallway, standing as still and stalwart as two stone lions. A moment later, a door opened and Governor Thomas W. Ryland came striding down the hallway.

  “Happy Election Day!” he boomed.

  Bleary-eyed staffers, their faces suddenly bright, looked up from what they were doing, got to their feet, and started to clap. The governor flashed his famous smile and waved, hand high over his head, calling out to them over the applause, thanking them in advance for all their hard work.

  “It’s going to be a great day! Historic! We couldn’t have done it without you. Now, let’s everybody go back to it, eh? See you tonight at the victory party!”

  His pronouncement brought another brief wave of applause, but it died off quickly as everyone returned to work. Tom walked up to Jenna and shook her hand. She’d been working for me for more than a year, and she still blushed every time he spoke to her, but hey, she was only twenty-four. He had that effect on people. I got it.

  He dropped her hand and turned toward me. “Morning, Luce! Beautiful day. Who are you voting for?”

  “Still trying to make up my mind,” I said, and crossed my arms over my chest.

  I’m too old to be charmed.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him. “You’re supposed to be recording interviews for the East Coast morning shows.”

  I really hadn’t expected to see him until tonight. There were about two hundred other places he needed to be that day.

  “We finished up a little early,” he said brightly. “So, thought I’d just drop by and rally the troops before we drive back to the hotel to pick up Leah and go vote. After that, I’ve got a photo op, then a
breakfast speech to the teachers’ unions, then back to the station to record more interviews for the West Coast morning shows, followed by another speech, three more photo ops, and two rallies before we go to the hotel to watch the returns. See? You can quit scowling at me anytime, Lucy. I know where I’m supposed to be as well as you do. And even if I didn’t, is that any way to talk to your future commander in chief?”

  “You’re not commander in chief yet.”

  I stood aside to let him pass and then looked at Jenna. “Coffee ready?”

  She nodded. “I’ll bring it in.”

  “Hold my calls for a few minutes, will you?”

  I followed him inside and closed the door behind me. As soon as I did, the governor slumped into a chair, the hail-fellow-well-met persona of a moment before melting away like a morning mist. Suddenly, I understood why he was there.

  It was Election Day. Tom Ryland had come looking for me, as he had on so many other Election Days, nervous, anxious, afraid of wanting this win too much, afraid he’d already lost, in need of reassurance. He’d come, not to rally the troops, but so the troops—so I—could rally him.

  For a moment, I had to fight back the urge to get up from my chair and kiss the top of his head.

  Instead, I opened my top left desk drawer, which held six identical boxes of Girl Scout cookies, took a cookie for myself, then held the open box out to him.

  “Want one?”

  Still slumped in his chair, he lifted his hand, waving off the offer. “How are you able to eat so many of those things and not gain weight?”

  “I’ve got the metabolism of a rabid wolverine,” I mumbled through a mouthful of coconut, chocolate, and caramel. “When I was little, my mom was worried I was too skinny, so she started feeding me Girl Scout cookies. It worked. I gained seven pounds and developed a lifelong addiction to Samoas.”

  He leaned forward and picked the box up off my desk, frowning as he read the package. “Samoas? Then why does it say Caramel deLite on the box?”