Mom flinches at the word felons but Clay continues, “Are you prepared to live with that? Everywhere Samantha goes, people will be speculating about her morals. Thinking she must not have all that many. That could be a dangerous thing for a young woman. There are men who won’t hesitate to take advantage of that.”
Jase looks down at his hands, which have balled into fists. But on his face there’s pain, and worse—confusion.
“I don’t care about that,” I say. “You’re being ridiculous. What are you even saying—that the whole world will assume I’m a tramp because Mom hit someone with her car? Give me a break. They must have handouts with better lines than that at Cheesy Villain School.”
Jase laughs and puts his arm around me.
Unexpectedly, Clay laughs too. Mom’s impassive.
“In that case, I guess offering you two hush money in unmarked bills isn’t going to fly, huh?” Clay stands up, ambles behind Mom and begins massaging her shoulders. “Fine, then, where do we stand? What’s your next move, Jase?”
“I’m going to tell my family. I’ll let my parents decide what they want to do, once they have all the information.”
“You don’t need to be so defensive. Hey, I’m from the South. I admire a man who stands up for his family. It’s commendable, really. So you’re going to tell your folks, and, if your folks want to call a press conference and announce what they know, you’re fine with that.”
“That’s right.” Jase’s arm tightens around my shoulder.
“And if the accusations don’t bear weight because there are no witnesses and people think your parents are just crackpots out to make a buck, that’s all good with you too?”
Uncertainty returns to Jase’s face. “But…?”
“There’s a witness, and it’s me,” I point out.
Clay tilts his head, looking at me, nods once. “Right. I forgot that you had no problem betraying your mom.”
“That line’s straight out of Cheesy Villain School too,” I tell him.
Mom buries her head in her hands, her shoulders shaking. “There’s no point,” she says. “The Garretts will hear and they’ll do what they’ll do and there’s nothing to be done about it.” She lifts her face, teary, to Clay. “Thank you for trying, though, honey.”
Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out a handkerchief and gently dabs her lashes dry. “Grace, sugar, there’s always a way to play it. Have a little faith. I’ve been in this game a while.”
Mom sniffs, her eyes cast down. Jase and I exchange disbelieving looks. Game?
Clay hooks his thumbs in his pockets, coming around in front of the desk again, starting to pace. “Okay, Grace. What if you call the press conference—with the Garretts. You speak first. Confess everything. This terrible thing happened. You were wracked by guilt, but because your daughter and the Garrett boy were personally involved”—he pauses to smile at us, as if bestowing his blessing—“you kept quiet. You didn’t want to taint your daughter’s first true love. Everyone will identify with that—we all had that—and if we didn’t, we sure wish we had. So you kept quiet for the sake of your daughter, but…” He paces a little more, brow puckered. “… you couldn’t honorably represent the people with something of this magnitude on your conscience. This way’s riskier, but I’ve seen it work. Everybody loves a repentant sinner. You’d have your family there—your daughters standing by their mom. The Garretts, salt-of-the-earth types, the young lovers—”
“Wait just a minute here,” Jase interrupts. “What Sam and I feel about each other isn’t some”—he pauses, searching for words—“marketing tool.”
Clay tosses him an amused smile. “With all due respect, son, everyone’s feelings are a marketing tool. That’s what marketing is all about—hitting people in the gut. Here we have the young lovers, the working family struck with an unexpected crisis—” He stops pacing, grins. “Gracie, I’ve got it. You could also use the moment to introduce some new legislation to help working families. Nothing too radical, just something to say Grace Reed has come through this experience with even more compassion for the people she serves. This all makes perfect sense to me now. We could get Mr. Garrett—the wounded blue-collar man—to say he wouldn’t want Senator Reed’s good work to be destroyed by this.”
I look at Jase. His lips are slightly parted and he’s staring at Clay in fascination. Sort of the way you’d look at a striking cobra.
“Then you could appeal to the people, ask them to call or write or send e-mails directly to your office if they still want you as their senator. We in the business call that the ‘Send in Your Box Tops’ speech. People get all het up and excited because they feel part of the process. Your office gets besieged—you lay low for a few days, then call another conference and humbly thank the citizens of Connecticut for their faith in you and pledge to be worthy of it. It’s a killer moment, and at least fifty percent of the time, it makes you a shoo-in at election time,” he concludes, grinning at Mom triumphantly.
She too is staring at him with her mouth open. “But…” she says.
Jase and I are silent.
“C’mon,” Clay urges. “It makes perfect sense. It’s the logical way to go.”
Jase gets to his feet. I am pleased to notice that he’s taller than Clay. “Everything you say makes sense, sir. I guess it’s logical. But with all due respect, you’re out of your f**king mind. Come on, Sam. Let’s go home.”
Chapter Fifty
The day has dimmed into twilight by the time we leave the house. Jase’s long legs eat up the driveway and I’m nearly jogging to keep up with him. We’ve almost reached the Garretts’ kitchen steps before I come to a standstill. “Wait.”
“Sorry. I was practically towing you along. I feel like I need a shower after all that. Holy hell, Sam. What was that?”
“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.” How could Clay have said all that, smooth as Kentucky bourbon, and Mom just sitting there as if she’d already drunk the bottle? I rub my forehead. “Sorry,” I mutter again.
“It’d be good if you’d stop apologizing right about now,” he tells me.
I take a deep breath, looking down at his shoes. “It’s about all I’ve got. To fix things.”
Jase has these huge feet. They dwarf mine. He’s wearing his usual sneakers, and I’m in flip-flops. We stand toe to toe for a minute, then he edges one big foot in between my smaller ones.
“You were great back there,” I say, hanging on to what’s true.
He jams his hands in his pockets. “Are you kidding? You were the one who called him on his bullshit every time I started to get hypnotized by his wrong-is-right, up-is-down arguments.”
“Only because I’d heard ’em all before. It took me weeks to see through the hypnotism.”
Jase shakes his head. “Suddenly the whole thing was a photo op. How’d he even do that? I get why Tim was so mental about that guy.”
We’re quiet, looking back at my house.
“My mother,” I start, then stop. Despite what Clay says, that I’m a casual turncoat daughter, this isn’t easy. How can Jase ever know, really understand, all those years when she did teach us well? Or the best she could.
But he waits, patient and thoughtful, until I can say more.
“She’s not a monster. I want you to know that. It doesn’t really matter because what she did was so wrong. But she’s not an evil person. Just”—my voice wobbles—“not all that strong.”
Jase reaches out, pulls the elastic band from my hair, letting it slip free over my shoulders. I’ve missed that gesture so much.
I didn’t look over at Mom when we walked out. No point to it. Even before, when I did look at her face, I had no idea what to read there. “I’m guessing Mom won’t want me showing up for dinner at the B and T tonight. Or when I’ll be welcome at home.”
“Well, you’re welcome in mine.” He draws me in close, hipbone to hipbone. “We can just listen to that suggestion of George’s. You can move into my room, sleep in my bed. I thought that was a brilliant idea the minute he came up with it.”
“George just mentioned the room, not the bed,” I say.
“He did tell you I never peed in my bed. That was incentive right there.”
“There are those of us who would take clean sheets as a given. We might need more incentive.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Jase says.
“Sailor Supergirl!” George shouts through the screen. “I’m going to have a baby brother! Or a sister, but I want a brother. We have a picture. Come see, come see, come see!”
I turn to Jase. “It’s confirmed, then?”
“Alice shook it out of Mom with her ninja nurse tactics. Kind of like Tim with you, I guess.”
George returns to the screen, squashing some printout against it. “See. This is my baby brother. He kinda looks like a storm cloud now, but he’s gonna change a lot because that’s what Mommy says babies do best of anything..”
Jase says, “Stand back, buddy,” nudging the door open wide enough for us to pass through.
I haven’t seen Joel for a while. Where he once projected all laidback cool, now he’s edgy, stalking around the kitchen. Alice churns out pancakes and the younger kids sit at the table, watching as if their older siblings are Nickelodeon.
We walk in just as Joel’s asking, “Why does Dad have that thing in his windpipe? He was breathing fine. Are we going backward?”
Alice edges a small, flat, very dark pancake off the pan. “The nurses explained all this.”
“Not in English. Please, Al, translate?”
“It’s because of the deep vein thrombosis—kind of a clot he got. They put him in those inflatable boots for that, because they didn’t want to give him anti-coag drugs—”
“English,” Joel reiterates.
“Stuff that makes his blood thinner. Because of the head injury. They put him in the boots, but someone ignored or didn’t notice the order that they were to go on and off every two hours.”
“Can we sue this someone?” Joel asks angrily. “He was talking, getting better, now he’s worse off than ever.”
Alice chips four more skinny charcoal briquette-looking pancakes off the pan, then adds some butter. “It’s good they caught it, Joey.” She looks up, seeming to notice for the first time that I’m standing beside Jase.
“What are you doing here?”
“She belongs here,” Jase says. “Drop it, Alice.”
Andy starts to cry. “He doesn’t look like Dad anymore.”
“He does so. Look like Dad,” George insists stoutly. He hands me the computer printout. “This is our baby.”