“Listen, it’s ten o’clock,” Cleo said now to her son, that blip on the ultrasound fifteen years ago. “I’m not going to litigate why I’m a single parent with you right now. I’m just encouraging you to not be a jerk to these girls.”
Lucas flexed his jaw. Cleo tried to envision his father doing the same, if he’d look like him while doing so, if they shared these mannerisms. In truth, she couldn’t really remember all that much about him, and that both embarrassed and relieved her. There wasn’t much to tell Lucas because, well, there wasn’t much to tell.
“Fine,” Lucas said. “Duly noted.”
“Thank you. That’s all I’m saying. I’m out here on the front lines fighting for legislation that makes women true equals, and if I end up raising an asshole . . .”
“I got it.”
“Right, of course. You’ll do the right thing.” Cleo relaxed. She thought she might brew some coffee and get back to the list once he went to bed. “Oh, but did you come in here to tell me something?”
“First of all, can I stay home from school tomorrow? I have a headache.”
“No.” Cleo sighed. She didn’t know why this had become a thing lately, Lucas squirming out of school. She’d asked Emily if there were any bullying rumors or drama, but she’d heard of nothing and said, “Benjamin does the same thing. I think it’s teenage boys. They want to hibernate.” So Cleo, who had let him skip the first two times he’d groused about a nondescript ailment, had started putting her foot down. “Take a Tylenol,” she said. “You’re fine. But what did you want to tell me?”
“Fine,” he huffed, then softened. He chewed his lip. (Did his dad also do this? Cleo had never chewed her lip a day in her life. Or at least certainly not since she held an elected position. Lip chewing implied equivocation, and elected women were not allowed to look equivocal.) “Well, I just hung up with Esme.”
Cleo sighed.
“Do you want to hear this or not?” Lucas barked. “I’m, like, trying to be helpful. A good son.”
“I’m sorry, yes, continue.”
“Well, her mom. She’s, like, still pretty pissed.”
“Yes, that makes sense.” Cleo nodded. MaryAnne could harbor a grudge with the best of them.
“And I guess she’s running a full-page ad tomorrow in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.”
“A what?” Cleo yelped. “An ad about what?”
“About you,” Lucas said. “Or against you.”
“Jesus Christ!” Cleo screamed.
“I don’t know,” Lucas said and even seemed a little bit sorry for her. “But it seems to me that this is war.”
NINE
The ad went more viral than even the YouTube video. Frankly, a lot of people thought that it made MaryAnne look a little bit unhinged, which left Cleo conflicted. On the one hand, Cleo appreciated that the tide of public opinion was tilting toward her, but on the other hand, she didn’t appreciate the notion of a woman being deemed “psycho,” as she was frequently seeing online, because once you called one woman crazy, you opened the door to call all of them crazy. And more often than not, women were not only saner than men but actually less hysterical. Cleo and her colleagues had trained themselves to hold their voices firm, their posture unwavering whenever any of their hearings were televised or whenever a reporter tracked them down in the halls within the Senate building. They couldn’t afford to look emotional, couldn’t risk even being called emotional. As if emotion were something that made them less capable at their jobs. Often it made them better.
One of Cleo’s colleagues, Helene Boxer, learned this lesson the hard way. During a particularly contentious Supreme Court justice hearing, Helene had the audacity to rise from her seat and point her finger at the nominee when she caught him in a lie about his voting record, and not only was she raked over the media coals for ten days straight, she lost her upcoming reelection. Her challenger Photoshopped the video of her at the hearing such that she resembled a witch on a broom and ran ads with the image the last two weeks of the campaign. He won by seven percentage points.
So Cleo was understandably torn at the blowback against MaryAnne Newman.
Gaby, however, was not.
“I am going to fuck that bitch up,” she said. She’d sent out one of their staffers, Timothy, to the newsstand that stocked the papers from all fifty states, as well as countries across the world, and she was staring down at the open paper on Cleo’s desk. “Like, seriously. I could kill her. Kill her.”
“You can’t kill her,” Cleo said.
“True, I’m a black woman in America. I could be arrested just for saying that.” Gaby paused, only half joking. “We’ll enlist Timothy. He’s white, Harvard-educated, and twenty-eight. He’ll be out of jail in three months, if he’s convicted at all.”
Cleo pulled a sheet of paper from her bag. She couldn’t sleep last night, not after Lucas announced the declaration of war and certainly not after more obfuscation about his dad. Cleo knew the mess was her own making—perhaps not all the MaryAnne stuff, because MaryAnne was happily digging her own hole deeper, but the father stuff, well, sure. So she had plunked down at her desk, and she had taken another hard look at those 233 regrets, and she had written down ten before she could talk herself out of it.
“Here,” she said and shoved the paper at Gaby. “Ten. As demanded.”
“As requested,” Gaby corrected.
“Same thing coming from you.”
“True,” Gaby demurred, glancing over her options. “Hmm, OK, OK, no, OK, oh yes, that one for sure.” She looked up, met Cleo’s eyes. “There are some things we can work with here. You really want to dance?”
“No,” Cleo snapped. “I don’t really want to dance. But you made me write down ten regrets, and I thought that pursuing something creative in the public eye was better than tracking down Lucas’s father in the public eye, so does that satisfy you?”
Gaby’s eyebrows skyrocketed as Cleo’s intercom buzzed.
“Senator McDougal?” Arianna still always sounded like she was apologizing. Cleo grabbed a pen, wrote down, Speak with Arianna about her tone!, and underlined it twice to remind herself. Arianna wasn’t going to get far in politics, in any career, if she couldn’t quell that upward tick, that question mark. Women who were constantly apologizing were at a disadvantage in any negotiation and, of course, taken less seriously, because who wants advice or counsel from someone who is sorry before they’ve even convinced you of anything?
“Yes, Arianna.”
“Veronica Kaye is here? Um. Now. She’s outside?”
Gaby’s face went slack, and the blood drained from Cleo’s.
“Shit!” Gaby said.
“Shit,” Cleo said too.
“I wanted to have time to tell her our plan,” Gaby was whispering again, a sure sign of her highly unusual and extremely rare panic. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Our plan?”
“The regrets plan! That’s what she wanted from us; that’s what got her here.”