Fuck. I wanted to hug the stuffing out of her. What a fucking horrible time she was having—and I kept criticizing her baking. It was objectively terrible but she needed to catch a break somewhere. I could've faked it for someone suffering through this much personal garbage.
"Do you want to bounce back?"
Her head snapped up, her eyes hot. "Of course I do."
"If you say so." I gestured to the trees ahead as we walked. "How did you get this job in the first place?"
"I started working for Timbrooks in high school. My senior year U.S. government class required everyone to volunteer with a campaign, and since my family is flat-earth, dinosaurs-are-a-myth conservative, I chose the most progressive candidate in all the races."
"Nice." I chuckled. "Spite is an undervalued motivation."
"I worked on his first U.S. Senate bid that year and managed the local campaign office after graduation."
"Of course you did. Of course you went from intern to manager in—what was it? A month? Two?"
"Eight months," she replied, giving me her first true laugh of the afternoon. "But that only happened because he was a long-shot, no-name candidate and there was no support from the party."
"But he won."
"He did." I could hear the satisfaction in those two words. I could lick that pride right off her. "I worked for the senator through college. Mostly get-out-the-vote initiatives, voter registration drives, setting up small, community-based fundraisers, and organizing phone bank centers. Basic stuff like that."
"You ran a grassroots senate campaign while you were in college. That's a big deal. I lasted one summer as a bartender. That's what I did in college."
"It kept my family mad, so yeah, I kept doing it."
"As good a reason as any," I murmured.
"When I was finishing my last year at University of Georgia, the senator lost a bunch of his top staffers to other opportunities. It happens like that when an elected official comes in with a fresh new class of staffers. They lose a good chunk of them after three or four years because few people can handle the pace for much longer than a sprint." She pulled the sleeves of her shirt down over her fingers, closed her hands around the fabric. It was adorable. "I was hired as the deputy state director, which basically meant I kept the wheels turning in Timbrooks's office back home in Georgia. Scheduling appearances and coordinating locations, fundraisers and phone banks."
"Same things you did in college," I said.
"Yeah but you don't complain about it when you're working for an upstart underdog. You do whatever it takes to get the job done."
"When did you become the fixer of the problems?"
"When I started fixing the problems," she replied with that no bullshit, I can kill you with my words tone. "When the chief of staff in D.C. botched the handling of an event and I cleaned up the mess before it became a public-facing mess. I moved to D.C. that year and took over as deputy chief of staff. I've been fixing and cleaning for Timbrooks—and anyone he loans me out to—ever since. The titles have changed but it's all the same. Make the problems go away. Even better if they're gone before anyone notices them. Invent ways to avoid problems—or pass them off to someone else. Do whatever it takes."
I stopped in front of the maple I'd come here to see. Studying the stressed-out tree was a good diversion from the stressed-out woman beside me and the cold hollowness of her words. It was that fake smile all over again. Did she even know she did it?
Perhaps the tree wasn't a distraction at all, seeing as I could only focus on Jasper and the discontent radiating out from her. "And how long have you hated your job?"
10
Jasper
"I do not hate my job!"
"You're positive? Because this whole time you've been talking, you made it sound like a day at the gallows."
That was inaccurate. It simply was not accurate.
"I always thought I'd get Timbrooks into the gig—whether that was a cabinet post or maybe a vice presidential pick—and then I'd peel off for something else. Something higher profile, you know, something that felt less like duct tape and bubblegum to keep the train rolling along."
"But that didn't happen. The gig didn't come along," Linden said.
I shook my head. "I figured it would after this election." Then, "I do not hate my job," I repeated.
"Uh-huh," Linden muttered as he plucked a small, leatherbound notebook from his back pocket.
He flipped through the pages while I stared at him, waiting for more than "Uh-huh."
When it didn't come, I presented my case. "I had a sweet setup with the Timbrooks campaign. I had the last word on—on everything. The senator offloaded the majority of his priorities and projects to me. How many people can say they have the ear of a sitting senator?"
"Not many," he mused, still busy with that notebook.
"Exactly. How many people know what really goes down behind closed doors at the Capitol?"
"Just a select few."
"I was the person they called to make things happen."
"I bet you were damn good at it too." He shoved a pencil behind his ear and gazed up at the tree. "Being good at something doesn't make it good for you."
"And what do you know about what's good for me?" I exploded.
"Only what you've told me, Jas." He glanced at me then, his cool stare skating over every furious inch of me. "Are you upset about this because I'm wrong and that wounds your pride worse than getting fired on TV—don't get me started on that, by the way—or are you upset because it's possible I'm right?"
I stared down at my shoes. I didn't want to talk about myself anymore. The whole mess of it was depressing. Fired, divorced, displaced, and without the use of a toaster oven. I could handle those things on their own but the snowball of it made me want to crawl into a corner. A small, narrow place to slide down the wall and press my forehead to my knees where I could disappear for a moment. Where I could be very, very quiet and hear myself think without all the noise of my family, my work, this world for one minute. Sometimes it seemed like I could hear those thoughts far off in the distance but they never made sense. They couldn't make sense, not when they only came to me as pings in my heart, twists in my belly that seemed to say, It's not supposed to be like this.
I'd always drowned them in antacids and went on with my day.
But now, with Linden watching me and only the sound of the woods around us, I couldn't drown any of it.
"Let me just say this." He stepped closer, swung his arm around my shoulder. "People who love their jobs don't sabotage themselves in such irreversibly brutal ways."
"But the mic wasn't supposed to be—"
"Is that really the nail you want to hang this on?" He dragged a hand down my back and brought me in for a loose hug. "You don't have to answer that but what they did to you was bullshit. There's a right way to let people go, especially people who've been around from the start, and that wasn't it. I'm sorry you went through that."