“Text Emily Godwin. She’ll cut up oranges,” Gaby said.
“I like Emily; don’t shit on her. She’s saved me a million times.”
Gaby nodded, a small concession that she was being petty. “You’re right. Sorry.” She plopped a sugar cube into her mug. Cleo’s house was Gaby’s house. “I’ve booked us on noon flights to Seattle.” She checked the time on the microwave. “So we need to leave here in about an hour. Give or take.”
“You’ve what?”
“I checked the weather, and it’s beautiful in Seattle this weekend, and we’re gonna knock on MaryAnne Newman’s door and rattle the shit out of her, and by the time we leave, this turd is going to turn into a diamond.” She blew on the top of her coffee, as if what she was announcing were perfectly innocuous, like, Let’s go to the grocery store this afternoon and pick up some Cheerios.
“I . . . I can’t just . . . I’m not going to Seattle today!” Cleo tugged her robe around her neck.
“Au contraire. You can and you are. This story spun even bigger overnight. While you were catching up on your beauty rest, CNN led with it last hour.”
“So it will go away! Like every other stupid story. I think Malcolm Johannsson is about to leave his wife for their nanny! That will bump it out of the cycle. He’s supposed to be a churchgoing, God-fearing devout Christian and is the minority whip! That should stay in the news for at least three days.”
Gaby shook her head. “Do you want to have a shot at the nomination?”
Cleo felt her jaw tighten. “Yes.”
“Then you do it my way. I ran some numbers last night, read some internal polling. People like you, Clee. But they also see you as . . . robotic.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you are a successful single mom, which they admire—”
“Uh, yeah, this shit is hard,” Cleo interrupted.
“Right.”
“Also, I’m not robotic,” Cleo said flatly, a little too robotically, she realized. “Also also, she tried to out Lucas’s dad!”
“True,” Gaby said. They met each other’s eyes. Gaby knew Cleo well enough to know that Cleo wasn’t truly offended by this, particularly because MaryAnne had gotten it wrong. If anything, it amused Cleo precisely for that reason: that it was a clumsy, amateur play, and that as long as Lucas wasn’t upset by it, Cleo wasn’t either. Welcome to Washington. Bring your steel balls.
“Look,” Gaby continued. “We just need to have more than one emotional card to play. Voters want to—need to—have more of a connection with you. This isn’t just New York. This is America.”
“Very glad we get to expose all of my regrets to America.”
“Not all,” Gaby said, swinging open the refrigerator and sighing when she found it mostly empty. “Just five.”
Cleo hadn’t returned to Seattle since her grandmother died her junior year at Northwestern. Her sister had long since fled to California—after dropping out of the University of Washington, she headed south to Los Angeles and had stayed, and what else was left there for Cleo? It wasn’t that she lamented her childhood; in fact, she remembered it warmly and was grateful her parents had expected excellence or at least taught her to pursue it, but she’d made the decision—she remembered consciously thinking this at her grandmother’s funeral, which she, barely an adult, had organized—that Seattle had offered her all that it could, and, like an orange picked down to the rind, she was ready to emotionally discard it. Over the years, she’d gotten the (very) occasional invitation to weddings and, of course, her ten- and fifteen-year high school reunions, but she had a toddler, then an elementary-age kid by then, and dragging him across the country to reunite with friends she hadn’t felt the urge to speak with in a decade didn’t exactly sound appealing. Also, none of them were friends by that point. Maybe a therapist would tell her there were other reasons, more complex reasons for turning her back on the place that she came from—that this was where she gained a lot but lost a lot too, and that this was where she learned that playing dirty came with costs (that didn’t seem to bother Cleo as much as it should), and that this was where she quite literally mourned the loss of her childhood and learned how much you could get by on your own—but the result was the same: Cleo had left and didn’t come back.
That the flight was turbulent was no surprise. As if a sign from the universe, if Cleo were to believe in signs, which she did not. Gaby had booked a ticket for Lucas as well (“it’s important that we still see you as maternal,” she’d said, to which Cleo replied, “I am maternal!” to which Gaby had just said, “Great, then this will be easy,”) and Lucas was more pouty than usual because he missed his soccer tournament, but he’d never been to Seattle, and even with all her misgivings, Cleo wanted him to see where she’d grown up. Also, if Lucas had really protested, he could have stayed with Emily Godwin—Cleo’s red line was using Lucas for political gain; she wouldn’t have brought him if he didn’t “kind of” want to come. She wanted to take him to the cemetery where they’d buried her parents. Point out the mayor’s office where she’d interned that summer before her final year of high school, maybe even swing by her old school on Monday before their flight out and introduce him to her debate teacher, who had prodded her into another round of revisions on her speeches and also invited her over for dinners once a month after her parents died. Ms. Paul must have been sixty by now, but Cleo bet that she was still as much of a hard-ass as ever, while still knowing when a kid who lost her parents needed a plate of homemade lasagna.
Lucas drank four Cokes on the plane, which both improved his mood and made him too hyper not to be annoying. Cleo had bought him Wi-Fi to keep him occupied, and he’d spent the majority of the six hours texting frantically with . . . Cleo didn’t know whom, but she was glad that he appeared to have more friends than his morose demeanor would indicate. His leg bounced as their town car cruised down I-5 toward their hotel, his neck swiveling every which way as he took in the landscape, each turn of the freeway a new memory for Cleo and a new sight for Lucas. The Space Needle, where they’d held their spring dance. The expanse of Lake Washington where she spent summers, before she became so laser focused on moving up, up, up, jumping off the docks of more affluent friends who lived on the water. The looming mountains, where her dad had taken her to learn how to ski.
Gaby had booked them at a downtown Sheraton, and their rooms were not ready upon their late-afternoon arrival.
“I have to share with you?” Lucas whined.
“I won’t peek at anything,” Cleo said. She made a cross-her-heart sign across her chest and immediately regretted it. Lucas thought emojis were lame; this was not going to endear her to him either. “No, really, Luke, I’ll give you as much privacy as you need.”
He sighed as Gaby pecked at her phone and said: “Uber’s on the way. Lucas, you’ll film it from your phone—you probably know your way around the tech better than I do.” Lucas shrugged, as if this were totally normal, and Gaby took it as a yes. Then she looked toward Cleo, as if she did not need to be in the know until now. (Cleo always needed to be in the know.) “If you want, because I sprang this on you, we can count this as one of your five.”