Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Richard pulled his jacket taut and sat on its tail, then adjusted his bright-yellow tie. He checked himself in the monitor on the floor stage left.

“Try to look like a serious fucking guy with some serious shit to say. Look just over the lens to the left. There. Give me five seconds of that. You don’t want to look like Congressman Mouthbreather over there.” Wally nodded at a guy in a cheap gray suit perusing the buffet.

“Ready?” Wally said, and before Richard could reply, the red light came on. Richard cocked his head just slightly, a mannerism he had learned from videotape of his previous appearances; his media coach—the same person who had trained the would-be senator from Alabama on how to appear folksy yet serious—said it made Richard look studious, as if he were considering the evolution of his position at every moment.

When the red operating light on the camera disappeared, the light from its secondary spotlight dissolved into a blue-black glow, and Richard blinked his eyes clear. Cameraman Wally departed the darkened set, sipping a tall, ice-filled glass of orange juice that Richard figured was spiked with a good dose of vodka.

“What do we do now?” Richard asked of Wally’s departing back.

Wally stopped. “The only thing we ever do. We wait.”

SHERRI ASHBURTON began calculating just how much her mother-in-law’s latest misadventure—Geneva’s fall, her hospitalization, a last-minute plane ticket for Ash, his cab in from the Dallas airport—would cost. Ash hadn’t even left yet, and already they were out $900 for a plane ticket and a few nights’ worth of $60 motel rooms and restaurant food. She’d keep a running total in her head for the entirety of his trip, and she resented it. Being an adult, Sherri had once believed, would free her from having to worry about things like whether or not her bank card would go through. She felt guilty too.

Whether Ash flew in tonight or tomorrow or next Tuesday, Geneva’s hip was still going to be broken, and she’d still need surgery, rehab. The hospital wasn’t going to make her wait until Ash showed up to sign whatever paper they needed him to sign; the only reason Sherri had relented, the only reason she had chosen not to put her foot down about the money—despite the fact that she would have to cover his shift at the Canyon Room this afternoon and despite the fact that he was scheduled to sit for the bar exam in just three weeks—was that the doctor described Ash using one of the saddest phrases she’d ever heard: only known living relative.

She settled for helping him pack. She stopped him at the edge of the bed and made him remove his T-shirt, stuffed it under the pillow so that she could sleep with his scent. All Sherri Ashburton would do in his absence was watch television and eat cans of organic vegetable soup and wear his shirt while relishing the extra room in their full-size bed.

Ash hadn’t spoken to her about his mother, not since the discussion about the plane ticket, about whether or not his presence would make any difference. “It’s therapeutic,” he argued, and Sherri suspected that he meant his absence would be therapeutic for both of them too.

Because Sherri was thinking about money as they drove in silence to the airport—whether or not she could survive for three or four days on the forty-seven dollars in tips that she’d squirreled away—she knew that she would not park the car (three dollars for the first thirty minutes) and walk Ash into the terminal. He’d be frugal once he got to Dallas; he’d even sleep in his mother’s empty house if he could; the dust and the stale smell and the general creepiness never seemed to faze him. Geneva had been in the nursing facility for a while; how long, Sherri couldn’t precisely remember. Seven months? This trip could work in their favor, even. She could encourage Ash to be assertive for once, to take control of his mother’s finances on a day-to-day basis instead of letting things crop up the way her property tax bill had snuck up on them last spring.

Sherri made an almost involuntary noise she knew he would take as harrumph. “You need to talk to your mother. Between the taxes and utilities, she’s paying maybe seven hundred dollars a month for nothing. For an empty house. Just pissing that money away.”

“Please, not this. Not now. I grew up in that house.”

“That house is empty now,” she said, and immediately wished she hadn’t. His face registered a pained look that told her to back off. “Think of what a difference seven hundred dollars would make in our lives every month. Can we at least make a point of actually talking about it sometime, before it costs us more?”

Sherri popped the hatchback, and Ash extracted his duffel bag, a separate backpack with books on constitutional law and a mangled copy of Black’s Law Dictionary. “When I get back. Right now, I figure I’ll have three hours on the plane each way. Three hours, uninterrupted, just to study,” he said, thumping at his books through the heavy canvas of his bag; he dropped the duffel at the curb and leaned in the driver’s-side window for a final kiss. She pictured him rummaging in his mother’s house for a pen to make notes, huddled over his books, sitting under the baked-enamel light on what had once been his father’s desk. He would always be the smart boy from trigonometry class that she’d fallen in love with, the one who used to camp beneath her window, a subdivision Romeo throwing rocks and pennies. She nearly swooned as he ran his thumb along her jawline with the lightest pressure he could manage, his touch moving along with her memory. She loved that boy. Always had. He kissed her again, and said, “Thursday. I’ll see you Thursday.”

AT THE newsstand, Mary Beth stopped for a bottle of water and a new tin of peppermints. Farther down the C concourse, a woman sold coffee to a man in a turtleneck sweater and watermelon-colored nylon running shorts. Mary Beth made a quick stop at the restroom, and when she returned, saw the same man leaning against the wall, taking a call on the white courtesy phone. There wasn’t even an agent at her gate, just a dozen other travelers, all wearing the mask of boredom they hoped might keep friendly conversation to a minimum.

Mary Beth took a seat and watched the television news, a reporter in a tweed cap and trench coat making his way through midtown Manhattan. He stopped in front of the retail display windows that lined Fifty-Seventh Street to confront passersby about their resolutions.

The top-of-the-hour broadcast recapped the lead stories from the past year—an assassination in the Middle East, a mining collapse in western Pennsylvania, the bombing of an Orthodox cathedral in Moscow by Chechen separatists, August’s transoceanic flight of a billionaire in a shiny silver balloon, the summertime disappearances of a handful of young blond girls. Next, set to the background music of Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year,” came the usual year-end homage to dead celebrities, a slideshow of the last luminaries of a departed age, the tributes rendered in black and white—the stop-motion of an athlete dying young, the overdosed guitarist haloed and backlit in performance, a soundless clip of a pratfalling sitcom star, people both familiar and anonymous, even in death. A hockey player from a team Mary Beth had never heard of, the Green Hornets or Yellow Jackets or something, lay in a profound coma after being struck in the temple by an errant slapshot. In Washington, the president’s daughter was recovering from mononucleosis, and the president himself waddled on crutches after tearing his Achilles tendon during some undescribed Camp David recreation. Goodland, Kansas, dug out after seventeen consecutive days of snow; the local McDonald’s claimed to be sold out of everything but Filet-o-Fish sandwiches and orange soda.