She sits in the back, between her daughters, and she holds them close and kisses their heads: the soft child’s hair on one side, the harsh brittle bristles on the other.
Laurence brings all four of his favored news shows up in different corners of the screen and sits at the breakfast bar and eats his bacon and drinks the revolting milkshakes that Amit insists he has every morning. A blogger made a GIF from pictures of him that had been taken over the last thirteen months, showing his decreasing weight, a morphing slideshow sold as somewhere between comedy and tragedy; and that set the other blogs to speculating what it could mean. They touched on his personal traumas, of course, but also mentioned the S word: sick. They asked if there was maybe something wrong with Laurence that the public hadn’t been told about, and that made Amit flip out. He called in the middle of the night after reading something that speculated with actual medical terms and told them – told Deanna, in no uncertain words – that it was something they had to change. They must never, ever use the S word and they weren’t to let others use it either.
‘As soon as people start asking about the health of any normal candidate, their campaign is essentially screwed,’ he said. ‘Somebody can go from weight-loss to cancer in two or three posts and all of a sudden they’re out of the running. Laurence can take that even less than any of the others. Better a fat candidate than one who looks like he’s the S word, Dee.’
So she began to cook pasta for dinners. She made rich sauces, with real cream, and she started baking breads with cheese running through the dough. Amit bought them an old Paula Deen cookbook as a partial joke, along with a packet of real butter, and he told them to deep-fry everything. She sets the cooker to fry the bacon rather than griddling it, and she takes it out when it’s done and puts it into a thick-cut doorstep sandwich with full-sugar ketchup. It’s not helping. His belts are new, and his trousers. He has to tuck his shirts in more; in the worst cases, Deanna pins them at the back to make them taut again across his new frame. When he undresses for bed, she sees his ribs, a ladder of loose skin. He’s seen a doctor, quietly, to appease her – in case there was something wrong, the S word again, uttered privately – but he’s medically fine. He’s just thin. He’s not eating enough, was the diagnosis. That and stress, but one is an easier fix than the other.
He’s been away working for a fortnight, and only came back last night. Today, he’s off again. This, he’s warned them, is pretty much how it’ll be for the next year of their lives. So breakfast with him feels rare, suddenly, as if it’s a special occasion. His face appears on Fox, top right corner of the screen, and he selects it and maximizes it. He jacks the volume up to hear a man talking to camera as if it’s his friend, casual and smooth. His name is Bull Brady, the front wave of a new type of shock-pundit for the political channels as they attempt to make something dry considerably more popular. They’re met a few times. He doesn’t like Laurence, is the recollection.
‘So, most predictions have Walker managing to climb another three points in his key demographics today,’ the host says, ‘which, of course, means very little at this stage. Three is nothing: three can be lost by spending time in the wrong place at the wrong time. So how does he hold? Get out.’ The host stands and does a little walk-on-the-spot move. ‘Get out, talk to people. He’s had too much time off, and he lives in Podunk, Nowheresville; he needs to work more if he wants back in. He’s got a big old chunk of the country, catching the more, shall we say, cosmopolitan parts of our great nation; but he hasn’t got a chance in the red states. Not even close. Now, Homme might. He can win some of them, that’s the word. So Walker plays well in New York. So he plays well in Boston.’ (The host does the accent of these cities. That’s his shtick.) ‘So he plays well with core democrats. Big deal! If he can’t play well with big oil, he could lose this before it’s already begun. If they want to go Democrat, they’ll go with Homme. Walker’s going to Texas to try and see what he can do, but I’ll be damned if he’s walking away from there with anything but a suntan.’ He puts on a cowboy hat and climbs a mechanical bull in the corner of the studio, and he moos. Laurence mutes and minimizes it as Deanna walks in.
‘Don’t listen to him,’ she says.
‘I know. But people watch him. They like him.’
‘People like spectacle.’
‘He says I’m not doing enough of that.’
‘Which is why you’re up three points.’
‘That’s nothing. Three points is nothing. He said it himself.’
‘Okay,’ she says. She puts his plate in the dishwasher. ‘Go and wake the girls and say goodbye, would you? They’ll miss you.’
‘They barely noticed that I was back.’
‘Because you were only here for one night. They miss you. I don’t know what else to say.’
‘Lane?’
‘Even Lane.’ She kisses him. It’s everything, these moments: they remember Sean with every single kiss and it doesn’t stop them doing it. He calls for the girls from the hallway. School has just gone back. Alyx comes out and smiles at him in the doorway of her room.
‘Hey, Pumpkin,’ he says. ‘I can take you, if you’re quick getting dressed.’
‘In the car?’
‘In the car.’ The car is a big black cross-country thing that his party has recently leased to drive him around, less conspicuous out here than the town cars, coming complete with low-paid driver and super-strict fuel budget. Laurence knows that budget doesn’t extend to taking Alyx to school, but he doesn’t care. ‘Lane?’ he calls, ‘you up?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘I’m off soon,’ he tells her. ‘Want to say goodbye?’
‘Bye,’ she shouts.
‘Look at the college applications,’ he says. She hasn’t decided about what she’s going to do next year yet and they’re not pushing her too hard, in case it scares her off. They mentioned college once and she countered with a desire for a year to find herself. He and Deanna both hope that she likes what she finds. He rolls his eyes at Alyx who has reappeared, clutching her clothes. She starts to pull them on in the hallway.
‘No shower?’ he asks.
‘Later,’ she says, and she runs downstairs, past him and to the kitchen. ‘Dad’s taking me,’ she tells Deanna. ‘Can I have my breakfast to go?’ She says it in a voice that she’s heard on a TV show. Deanna pulls bread from the grille of the toaster and the spread out of the cupboard, and she puts it down in front of Alyx with a thick, rounded knife.
‘You get the honor,’ she says to her daughter, and then she leaves for the hallway and finds Laurence there, at the foot of the stairs. He’s in the lemon tie, and she knows exactly when he was last wearing it. Exactly what day it was. She balks and stands back.
‘What’s up?’ he asks.
‘Nothing,’ she says. If he can’t remember it, she reasons, there’s no point in saying it. The suit still hangs in the wardrobe. He hasn’t worn it since Sean died. He’s blamed it on the weight loss, but she knows that’s not true. She’s told herself that it was because of the connotations. The breast of it still has smears from her eyes on it, the dark tear-runs of her mascara like a print of her face. Deanna didn’t see the point in cleaning it. She thought, instead, that they should just burn it, but they haven’t. She doesn’t know how they go about it without making it seem like ceremony, so it’s inside a vacuum bag at the far end of the closet, beyond the part that you can see when the doors are opened.