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that. His commitment to the cause he espoused was very obvious the night he gave his speech in Madison, and he seemed quite willing to put his body where his mouth was for a long while.
    “Are you?” he sounded doubtful.
    “Yes,” she told him, and was prodded by the feeling that she said it as much because she was sure he needed to hear it as because it was, in fact, true. He sounded bone-weary, and she remembered how exhausted he had looked the night before. It was past ten here, which meant it was only eight on the West Coast, but already he sounded equally tired tonight. “Don’t you have to give a speech this evening?”
    “No. I’ve given four today already. That’s enough of inflicting myself on the public for one day. But,” he added, “I must admit, the crowds are good. And if they come to hear me because of Steve Scott and all that rot, at least they seem to leave thinking a bit about the future of the world.”
    Liv shifted in the chair and thought how amazing it was to be sitting in her kitchen with a pile of jeans to be mended and the evening paper scattered on the table in front of her, and to be talking to America’s great heart-throb. Somehow he didn’t fit the image, and not because he was less but because he was more. A real, living, breathing man, not some publicist’s dummy. She felt herself warming all over as she listened to him talk on, telling her about the places he’d been today, the people he’d seen—the hordes of young women and the hamhanded public officials who’d dogged his steps—with a surprisingly self-deprecating sense of humor that poked as much fun at his own image as at people who let themselves be swayed by it. She grinned when he paused and told him, “It’s just that you’re so wonderful.”
    “I know. I could tell how impressed you were yesterday.”
    “That didn’t really have anything to do with you,” she told him now, realizing for the fir s t time herself that it really didn’t. It wasn’t Joe, the person, she was annoyed at, it was the symbol of male freedom that he represented to Tom and men like him.
    “Explain,” he insisted.
    But she couldn’t. Not to him, not yet. He made her feel strange, alive, real—and the feelings scared her. She had to think about them, digest them, come to terms with them. Rationalize them, she mocked herself. “I don’t think I want to right now,” she said because, somehow, she felt that tonight he had given her a taste of who he was as a person, not a sex symbol, and she owed him the same honesty. “But I am so rr y I took it out on you. This call must be costing you a fortune.”
    “Don’t you think I can afford it?”
    “Probably.” He probably could own the phone company if he wanted to, “But I have this whole stack of mending to do and I haven’t — ” She was babbling now, nervous.
    “Okay,” he sighed. “I get the picture. Say hi to the kids for me.” And he was gone. Liv held the buzzing phone to her ear for a full minute before she replaced it on the hook, and when she did so she felt unaccountably lonely. No, not unaccountably. The reason was obvious—and ridiculous—she was missing Joe.
    She drifted through the whole next day, responding absently to Marv’s requests and Frances’s observations, nearly forgetting to attend Noel’s baseball game, and marking all of Stephen’s multiplication homework wrong because she thought it was addition.
    “Mom!” he howled with an eight-year-old’s righteous indignation. “You were just s’posed to look and see how well I knew ’em, not mark all over ’em with your dumb red pencil!”
    “Oh?” It barely penetrated the fog that was her brain. It was like being an adolescent all over again—the constant mooning and aching, the I-wonder-what-he’s-doing-now syndrome that affected her every waking second. Lord, I should be locked up, she thought, shaking her head and trying to act like the sane, sensible mother of five that she had been up