“I don’t pretend to know what went on between you two,” said her father. “Don’t guess it’s any of my business. But remember what I told you a long time ago, before you even decided to get into politics?”
“‘The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it,’” she quoted. “Thoreau.”
“How much life did you exchange for all this?”
Gretchen glanced out and saw empty cups and radioactive cheese and brassieres. Certainly nothing worth exchanging for Chase. Hell, she was hard-pressed to figure out what she got out of something that once seemed so important. A pocket full of business cards? A popularity she already enjoyed with the townspeople? She wondered if the same would be true down the road, when she became attorney general. Would her life, the things she exchanged to get there, be nothing but forgotten cups in an abandoned field?
Her father continued. “Seems you spend most of your days trying to convince people you have a life that exudes character and sets an example and upholds promises and chases all the right things and captures perfection.”
“What’s wrong with all that?”
“You spend so much time convincing, you forget to actually live,” he said. “Ah. It’s politics. A chess match, like I always told you. The advantage’ll change a dozen times during the game. You didn’t do anything wrong, far as I can see.”
“I kept the knowledge in my hip pocket. An alternate, if things didn’t go my way.”
“Always were prepared.”
“If being attorney general means I hurt people I care about along the way, I shouldn’t want it so much.”
“No, I don’t reckon you should.”
She smiled, for the second time that day, as Gretchen. “Are you going to agree with everything I say?”
“Only the things that make sense.”
From a distance, they watched Jett Duncan’s roadies pack up the stage and load trailers.
“I miss Mom,” she said.
As soon as the words left her mouth, a chill swept over her, leaving goosebumps in its wake, scalp to toes. An April night in Texas, nothing more.
Her father reached over and took her hand.
“Me, too, Pumpkin.”
That night, Gretchen didn’t have the energy to do more than watch The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, one of her father’s favorite Clint Eastwood westerns, alongside him and be the slobber stand for Lincoln, who took up more than his share of the couch and snored inside some doggy dreamland every time a pistol fired. Long about news time, Darcy knocked on their door.
She didn’t wait for it to be answered. No one in Close Call did, really. Their lock had been broken for years.
“Turn on the news, turn on the news!” She charged in, not unlike an air raid siren, headed straight for the remote. Blondie and Tuco and Angel Eyes had just started their epic eight-minute stare-down anyway.
A reporter Gretchen recognized as someone a Houston affiliate had sent up to Close Call to cover the sesquicentennial filled the screen. Gretchen had granted her an interview near the statue at noon. The chyron read: Scandal Rocks Close Call. Beauty Queen Mayor Under Investigation.
Somehow, the beauty queen part pissed Gretchen off the most. It wasn’t a lie, exactly—one pageant to help pay for college—but it reduced her every success to a result of her appearance.
On the tail end of the spliced footage from the day’s events, Gretchen filled the screen, and said, “Close Call has a rich and varied history. There isn’t anything I won’t do.”
The reporter filled the screen again on a live feed, darkened street. Main Street in her to
wn.
Gretchen’s jaw dropped open. “…to ensure this remains a treasured town for families!” she screamed at the television. Her blood boiled; she paced the room in her fried-egg-looking fuzzy slippers. “They took that sound bite completely out of context. Cut it to fit their story.”
Lincoln whimpered from her shrill voice.
Typical media, though she hadn’t been on the ugly side of it before. The reporter signed off with the strong suggestion that Gretchen suppressed information regarding the property on Main because of her personal relations with the one person who stood to lose the most in a lengthy legal battle—rodeo star Chase Meier.
“There wasn’t time,” whispered Gretchen. “The event,” she added, lamely. Hot tears flooded her eyes.