Read Online So Close by Emma McLaughlin - Free Book Online Page A

could hear her hope.
                  “Yup, just came by to make sure you weren’t kicking up your heels,” I did my best impression of her.  “I don’t want to hear nonsense about you playing hooky.  People talk you know, Grammy.” 
                  She let out a laugh and then swiped her fingers under her eyes.  She went to remove my empty glass, but instead put her palm to my shoulder.  I reached up and grabbed it, the strength of her grip always surprising me as she squeezed tightly before letting me go.
     
    Since I hadn’t even been able to scare up a job at the Tallyville dump, I’m not sure what made me think I was about to land one on a statewide campaign.  My municipal experience consisted of the Mayor wiping barbeque sauce from his cheek while audibly debating stuffing my tip in my bra.  But as Grammy had tacitly confirmed, Delilah’s growing belly threatened to collar my neck, so reality testing was off the menu.   
    Besides, I didn’t invent showing up at a political office with sugarplum visions of a making a just and ordered world.  As Tom Davis succinctly put it, kids aren’t being given shit.  So campaigns are run on the backs of the young and unsaddled, fueled on our fervent belief in a future more tolerable than today.  But it was more than that.  Until I saw Lindsay navigate whatever had transpired for her in that bathroom, and then the grassy circles of the Westerbrook’s party, I hadn’t yet come across a woman I wanted to be.  I definitely hadn’t met a couple I wanted to emulate. 
    I returned to the trailer that morning with fifty dollars pressed into my hand and a ham and cheese pressed into waxpaper.  The money filled my tank and the sandwich placated Billy, or so I needed to believe, and I pulled out of the trailer park to leave—as I should have that first time—in the driver’s seat. 
     
    For those who’ve never been to Palm Beach, steps from the ocean you find spectacular wealth.  Inland from that, decaying poverty.  And further in still gated communities of varying pretense linked by stretches of box-store dotted highways.  The hastily assembled Davis for Senate office was in a strip mall between a Laundromat and a Christian bookstore that was sporadically open.  I reached it in a teeming downpour, the grooming I’d done in the rearview washed away in the few puddle leaps required to make it inside. 
    Amidst the mess of cartons and half-assembled office furniture, everyone seemed to be attached to a phone and all of them talked at once.  I must have stood there soaking the linoleum a good ten minutes before it registered that I wasn’t on anyone’s radar.  And neither were the two women in rain slickers and the guy slouched on the wall with his arms crossed.  Their impatience instantly oriented me. 
    I squeezed out my hair, wiped my hands on my skirt and turned my hostess smile in their annoyed direction.  “How can I help you?”
                  Who knows how long they’d been ignored because I had to repeat myself and then they all jumped to talk at once.  The elder woman was there to complain about campaign signs wrecking her lawn.  The younger was supposed to pick up handouts for her church social that had already started.  And the guy had been waiting an hour to do an interview for his college newspaper.  I found the complainer the bathroom, got cups of water for all and, massaging them with apologies, surreptitiously interrupted staffers until I’d located assistance for each one.  Turns out the receptionist had cut out to grab a smoke at some point and, understandably overwhelmed, never returned.
                  And, just like that, I was the newest volunteer at Davis for Senate.
    I wasn’t the only one who’d heard him speak and felt like Tom was reading his or her mind, but the other zealots were law students whose employment opportunities were drying up faster than the ink on their