It was late afternoon. He decided to go for a walk before finding the Subaru and driving home. His first thought was to head over to the Hay-Adams and sit at the bar, but then he couldn’t take that anymore, either, so he wandered around to the south of the Capitol building. In spite of the various security installations, the evening was pleasant; the grass had that late-fall brilliance that contrasted with the fading of the trees. He passed the botanic garden and then walked west past the various buildings of the Smithsonian. This was a walk he sometimes made, and he also sometimes went into one museum or another. Now he saw a group of kids standing in a row in front of the Ad Astra spear at the entrance of the Air and Space Museum, being photographed by their teacher. Was his old military school the only school in America that didn’t dare take the kids to Washington for a field trip? He paused to look at the kids. The Air and Space Museum was one of Leo’s favorite outings.
The woman wasn’t like anyone around D.C. or anyone in Brooklyn. She was wearing loose black pants and a black sweater. Her hair was long, and looked like she cut it herself, grabbing it in her fist and clipping the ends with shears. In spite of the dark colors, she was big—five ten for sure, and large in the bust and the derriere—okay, Richie thought, watching her pass him, the ass. She had a real ass, and shoulders. She turned to look at the Hirshhorn, and he simultaneously thought that she was pretty and that she had no makeup on, which was why she didn’t strike you. He looked again, then dropped his gaze. But he sped up. How did you pick up someone not in a bar? Riley and Nadie were not there to advise him.
She kept walking—past the main building of the Smithsonian, toward the Washington Monument, which got taller and taller. Richie glanced surreptitiously down at his chest and swept what might have been a few crumbs off the gray cashmere blend of his overcoat. It was too warm for gloves and a hat, but he looked respectable, congressional. She was a good walker, long-strided and self-confident. He caught up to her at 14th Street and stood beside her as they waited to cross. Their shadows stretched before them. He glanced at her sideways, and smiled. She said, “Are you following me?”
Richie nodded.
She said, “Why?” But she didn’t seem nervous in any way.
He said, “I want your vote,” then held out his hand. “Richard Langdon, congressman, New York ninth district.”
Without missing a beat, she held out her hand. She said, “Jessica Montana.”
Richie said, “You’re kidding, right?”
And now she did smile—the smile made her. She said, “No, I’m not. But it’s been an inspiring name.”
“Because?”
“My great love is women’s semi-pro boxing. Do you know anything about that?”
“Nothing,” said Richie. “I am in politics. Do you know anything about that?”
“Nothing,” said Jessica.
“Then,” said Richie, “let me take you to dinner. We are made for each other.”
“I’m always hungry,” said Jessica.
2005
EMILY HAD BEEN a little surprised to be asked to be a bridesmaid for Chance and Delilah’s wedding (Delilah Rankin, lawyer, two years older than Chance, Emily’s own age, supposedly the daughter of a big Texas family), but when Tina pointed out to her that twelve bridesmaids was standard for a hundred-thousand-dollar wedding, Emily saw that she was being dressed and cast in a supporting role. Her only job was to smile and not catch the bouquet. Her aunt Loretta had prevailed on her maternal counterpart to have the wedding at Pebble Beach rather than in Dallas, which was fine with Emily, since she could go there with her mom, stay two nights, go home to Palo Alto (thank God, she thought, Jonah was too old to be cast as ring bearer). And so she stayed in the background most of the time, eating treats, reporting her observations to Tina by cell phone. One thing she hadn’t told anyone, though (and everyone was in a flurry, because they were dressing the bride and the service was due to start in half an hour), was that, if they hadn’t roped Delilah into her bridal corset, at least some people would have noticed the bulge, though maybe not Chance. Maybe Chance would be amazed to commence parenthood about a month after his twenty-third birthday.
She’d seen dresses that she knew were chosen by the bride to make sure that the bridesmaids looked appalling, but this dress even Tina approved—it was silvery, with an irregular hem and a slanted collar. The shoes were silver, too, and so were the decorations. At least nine out of the twelve bridesmaids looked pretty good in the dress. What Delie saw in Chance, Emily could not imagine, unless it was pure sex. Since moving to Idaho, Emily had slept with plenty of cowboys, and eventually they all came to look alike—limber and dry, their cheekbones getting sharper and sharper, their eyes getting twinklier and twinklier. They all had stories about being rousted out of bed at four in the morning to go retrieve the calves in the freezing rain. Her favorite was one a very nice guy had told her: He was following a cow and her calf up the side of a mountain, he was bored, he tickled his horse with the tip of his quirt, the horse startled and jumped off the cliff. Fortunately, Ryman was quick—he went left when the horse went right and landed on his feet, looking down at the horse, who landed on a ledge. The horse assessed his situation, then scrambled up the mountainside on his own, a good thing. But Ryman was exactly why Emily would never marry someone like Chance.
Finally, the girls got Delie into her dress. Her mom handed her her bouquet; the wedding planner set her veil on her head and floated the netting over her face. Delie did look happy. It seemed as though she saw Chance as a real catch.
The wedding planner opened the door to the corridor. When they lined up, Emily found herself beside one of Delie’s Texas cousins, who was fat and did not look like a cowboy. Tia was a maid of honor, and Binky was fourth in line, craning her neck to see everything while talking and talking, the way she always did.
Most of the family had flown in on a jet her uncle Michael had rented. They were sprinkled here and there like clover blossoms in a green field. You could recognize them even if you didn’t know them, because they didn’t have the hair—the men weren’t wearing pompadours and the women weren’t puffed up. Even Aunt Loretta was neatly trimmed. Mrs. Perroni was wearing a dress from the eighties—encrusted with beads—and Grandma Andy was wearing a dress from the Kennedy era. Emily had plenty of time to notice all of this as she walked down the aisle they had made in the ballroom (the Rankins were not Catholic, so there could not be a Catholic wedding). Emily and her partner reached the satin-draped platform and parted. When she took her place, Emily realized that the bridesmaids were arranged in order of height. All of this was interesting; Tina told her over and over that she would be much happier if she observed rather than judged, but they both knew how hard old habits were to break. And so, during the reception, she observed her uncle Michael and Chance. They did a lot of the same things: they danced with Delie, they danced with Aunt Loretta, they danced with Mrs. Rankin. They looked rather alike—more alike now, Emily thought, than Michael and Richie. She leaned over to Tia and said, “Don’t you think your dad and Chance dance alike?”
Tia tossed her head, watched, then said, “Chancie dances like he’s doing it with you. Dad dances like he’s doing it to you.”
Emily laughed out loud.
But, still, your eye was drawn to the older man, not the younger, wasn’t it? She could see around the room: Her mom was looking at Uncle Michael. Two of Delie’s aunts were looking at him, too. One of the bartenders was watching him. Emily shivered, just slightly, but she didn’t know why. At the next table, she saw Tina scribbling on a napkin—a cloth napkin. She made up her mind that that objet d’art would not be left behind. The music stopped, then started again. Her uncle Michael went over and asked Grandma Andy to dance. Everyone fell silent, even the singer, but the music swelled, and her grandmother—what was she, eighty-five?—curved the line of her body, stepped out, and let her son spin her across the floor.
—
FELICITY WAS SITTING on her old purple rug
. The sleeping porch looked out over the fields to the north. It was a sunny Sunday morning. Her dad and mom had gone to services, but she had said she had a sore throat so she wouldn’t have to go. Some Sundays, she just could not take Pastor Diehl. His lips were too big or something. He looked like a cartoon to her, though her mom thought he was nice enough. There was also that thing about how he got out on the basketball court with the kids. His feet were really big. He looked disgusting. Her room had a door to the sleeping porch, and so did Perky’s, and she was listening to Perky and Guthrie talk about something. They thought their conversation was private. They didn’t realize that Felicity had opened their door just enough to hear.
Guthrie was on leave. His first deployment had ended, and now he was waiting for the second one. According to her dad, Great-Uncle Frank had been in Europe for a whole war, but that wasn’t the way it was anymore. Perky said, “That was the biggest battle.”
Guthrie said, “You know what it was like? It was like attacking St. Louis. It’s right on the river. It’s about the same size, and St. Louis has a lot of churches. Well, Fallujah has a lot of mosques. And they were all full of weapons. Not much happened there during the invasion itself, so the insurgents had plenty of time to get ready.”
Felicity’s mom had told her that Guthrie would be different when he got home. No really bad things had happened to him, like getting shot or driving over a bomb (an “improvised explosive device”—Felicity mouthed the words), but every war was full of things that you didn’t want to see unless you had to, and Guthrie had seen plenty of them. He came home more serious, more jumpy. But he did want to go back.
“I mean, we kicked them out once, but that didn’t work. There was this old Baathist resort nearby. Kind of like that casino outside of St. Louis, in St. Charles. So they weren’t going to let it go easy.”
“What was the scariest thing?”
Felicity saw that she was fiddling with her hair, winding it around her finger over and over. She unwound it, put her hand in her lap. Guthrie didn’t say anything for a moment. The dark-red oak floorboards of the porch were cool and smooth, and one of the windows rattled in the breeze. She imagined either Guthrie or Perky noticing the crack in the doorway and discovering her, but just then Guthrie said: “I don’t know. It’s scariest before you go in. It’s scary to imagine the IEDs and the booby traps and the insurgents around every corner. Then you do go in, and something happens, and you’re so jacked up you don’t take it in at the time. You just keep going. I mean, this guy in my unit who was behind me got hit by a rocket. Just blew him up. We saw it, but no one said anything. There was nothing to say.”
Felicity rested her palm on her forehead. She was suddenly feeling a little dizzy. She knew that there were women soldiers in Iraq, who wore camo and everything.
Guthrie said, “It’s fucking hot. You’re covered from top to toe and wearing boots and carrying, carrying like a hundred pounds of shit. If you’re in a tank, it’s boiling. A guy passes out, you just shake him and hydrate him, and he’s got to get it together.” Then he said, “I mean, there were almost twenty thousand troops. That seems like a lot, and it was way more than when they went in there the first time, a year ago, and fucking lost. But they learned their lesson. Forty thousand would have been better, in a way. Or bombing the place flat with NE—you know, novel explosives. Those are scary. The marines did some of that. That’s what the IDF would do.”
Felicity knew that the IDF was the Israelis. They had talked about it in school.
“What about the white phosphorus?”
“Who said anything about that?”
“I read about it.”
“I’m not saying you can’t use it. You got to use what you got to use.”
Now there was a long pause, so long that Felicity had to extend her legs, very slowly, and she made a noise, because the rug shifted. Outside, in the top of the apple tree, two squirrels started running along a big branch, as if they were playing tag. Finally, Guthrie said, “Well, we saw some stuff. I’m not saying that our guys aimed it at anyone. Stuff goes up, stuff comes down. You flush them out and then shoot them. Maybe that’s putting them out of their misery.”
Perky said, “Yeah.” Dully, agreeing.
Then Guthrie said, “The skin just gets burned off where the crap lands, then it keeps burning into the flesh as long as there is any of it. I mean, you fucking took chemistry.”
Felicity stared at her pale, cold knees and shins, imagining this.
Suddenly the door opened, and Guthrie stepped onto the porch. She thought he was going to yell at her, but he didn’t even notice her. He went over to one of the windows, opened it, lit a cigarette. Felicity pulled her knees up again and sat quietly. He was wearing briefs and a T-shirt, even though it was cold. She hadn’t seen him in briefs for a long time—in their house, everyone was very modest. His legs were hairy, all the way down to his ankles. His tattoo was a little covered up, but she knew he would shave his head again when he was ready to be sent back. He was all muscle; that was another way he had changed. He stared out the window long enough to smoke the whole cigarette, then stab the butt into an ashtray that she hadn’t seen on the windowsill. He turned around and saw her. “Hey, kiddo. What are you doing?”
She was brave. She said, “Eavesdropping.”
He smiled his usual old smile and said, “Well, I guess someone has to.” He came over and held out his hand to her. She took his and stood up. He said, “I hear you learned how to make popovers.”
“Grandma taught me.”
“Well, let’s have some.”
She said, “Have you killed anyone?”
He said, “No one I know.”
“Do you care if I ask?”
“No. Because I think about it.”
She got a little closer to him, and put her hand in his. He squeezed it. When they made the popovers, he separated the eggs.
—
IT TURNED OUT that Jessica Montana was really Jessica MacKenna, or would have been if her ancestors had not moved from County Cork to Butte, Montana, in the early twentieth century. This was what Henry found interesting about her. Otherwise, she seemed like a good match for Richie. Riley, however, found the name change highly suspicious. Jessica was sitting at the table, with her back to the kitchen door, saying to Henry that she herself had never been back to Inishannon, or anywhere in Ireland, though her sister, Aileen Montana, had rented a car and driven from Dublin to Galway to Limerick to Cork to Waterford and back to Dublin. Henry was saying, “I would love to do that,” but even so he heard Riley snort. Richie turned his head in Riley’s direction, but Jessica paid her no mind. Jessica seemed like the type who went blithely forward, eternally surprised but not daunted by impediments. There were Calhouns from Ireland, and plenty of Rileys, but when Henry prodded her, Riley said that her Riley grandmother was English and her Calhouns were Scottish. She said nothing about her Menominee side.
Henry knew he tended to go on at boring length about all sorts of origins, and it had taken Richie months to agree to this little supper, so he made himself shut up. Alexis, who was almost three, about as big as a minute, and had Riley’s dark, penetrating eyes, said, “Do you like tofu?” in a serious voice, and looked at Jessica. Riley had been trying to get Alexis to eat tofu for a couple of weeks now, with no success. Alexis was a good talker and a good passive resister. One of her ploys was to solicit opinions on those things that her mother was trying to foist upon her.
Jessica said, “Not really. Grilled, maybe.” She answered as if she were talking to an adult.
Riley came in, set the eggplant Parmesan on the table, and said, “So—you’re a meat eater? How many times a week?”
“Every day, I suppose,” said Jessica. “I don’t really think about it. I have a big appetite.”
She looked as though she did, thought Henry.
“We’ve been vegetarian for a long time. Alexis has never had meat.”
Except for those bits of hot dog He
nry had given her.
“But she doesn’t like tofu, I’m sorry to say.”
“Yuck,” said Alexis, but with an alluring smile on her face.
“My grandfather was a butcher,” said Jessica. “You can’t imagine the offal that my father and his brothers ate. Kidneys were just the beginning.” She helped herself to the eggplant, ate with pleasure. It took Riley about a minute to say, “What’s the difference, really?”
Jessica let this go by.
After Richie and Jessica left and Alexis was put to bed, Henry helped with the dishes.
Riley said, “This can’t last. She is the most oblivious woman I’ve ever met.”
“Maybe she’s just easygoing. I mean, what is she, forty? Never been married.”
“Yes, she just does what she wants. Boxing. Bacon. She drives a diesel pickup. She voted for Dubya once, then Kerrey once. I’m not saying she’s unprincipled, but—”
“Yes, dear, that’s precisely what you are saying.”
“She likes Michael.”
“I like Michael.”
“You have to like him! He’s your nephew. I mean, she likes him voluntarily.”
That seemed to be the crux of it. Henry wiped the last plate carefully and placed it in the cabinet. He said, “I know you have reasons to disapprove of Michael, but he’s got a sense of humor. He’s observant. He’s well read. He does his thing, and he lets others do their thing.”
“Fucking free market,” said Riley. “I would love to have a look at his portfolio. I’m sure every investment is in something that gets government subsidies, all the time that he is saying the free market must decide what works and doesn’t.”