Her campaign team bursts into spontaneous applause.
“How you holding up, Dad?” Mel asks him as the press conference winds down.
“Hmm?” he says, looking at her vaguely. He’s in a suit as well, of course, and from the smell of him, reasonably sober. He takes a drink of the coffee provided while my mom does a few friendly interviews. “Oh, you know,” he says. “Another year, another campaign.” He pats his pockets, but doesn’t look like he expects to find anything there. “We’ll get by.”
My mom comes over in her power blue dress and her power pearl necklace. “Thank you,” she says, and it’s so genuine, we all feel a little embarrassed. “You did great.”
“You’re welcome,” Mel says, wary as ever. “Mama bear, huh?”
My mom gives a tight smile. “I’m really not going to let them get to you, Melinda. You have my word.”
“You can’t control that,” Mel says, “but thanks. It’s a small race, I don’t think they’ll bother.” My mother stiffens a little at “small race” and Mel immediately closes her eyes. “Not what I meant.”
“I know,” my mom says. “You two will be out of here before it really heats up.”
It’s the first time she’s acknowledged this. She sounds kind of sad.
“We’ll get by,” I hear myself saying. “We’ll get by.”
We’ve taken separate cars to get here; my mom coming up from the capital with her team, my dad under orders to clean up enough to get there for the evening. He can do it, if you push him, and my mom really, really knows how to push him. Who knows what their secret married life is like? I can’t even imagine it, don’t ever want to, and feel like I have less clue about it as time passes. But whatever, it seems to work for them.
Mel drives Dad and Meredith back home. I ride with my mom.
“The best thing is that it’s only six months to the election so it’s a short campaign,” my mom says, pushing on through the dark. “Normally for a seat this big, I’d have had to be running for at least the last year.” She glances over at me. “Which would have been worse.”
“You’d still have run, though.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I probably would have. And you and your sister judge me for that, I know.”
“We don’t judge you.”
To my surprise, she snorts. “Yes, you do. I judged my parents. That’s what young people do, isn’t it?”
Her parents live in North Dakota. I’ve met them about four times in seventeen years of life. I wonder if she just kept on judging them.
“I do all this for you guys, you know,” she says. “I know you think it’s just ambition and power-seeking, and well, for goodness’ sake, I’m a politician and I wouldn’t be a politician if those things weren’t there, too, but it’s not just that.”
I don’t know what to say. She never talks like this. Never hints that there’s anything behind her motivations other than pure, patriotic public service. “Are you feeling okay?” I ask.
“The thing is, I’m not even surprised you’d ask that. We’ve forgotten how to talk to each other, haven’t we? Funny how things evolve and evolve and then one day, you look up and they’re different.”
“You don’t believe in evolution.”
She laughs. Actually laughs. “Well, not politically, I don’t.” She looks over at me again. “I wonder what you think of me. Really. What kind of a person am I when seen by you?”
I keep quiet, hoping like hell this is a rhetorical question. It is.