Jennifer Close - The Hopefuls

The class was about a fifteen-minute drive from the house — still in Sugar Land, of course. One of Ash’s friends, Charlotte, was enrolled in the class with her daughter, which was why Ash signed up. “But I’m so happy I did,” she told me. “I can just tell that Viv loves it.”

Sugar Land was originally a sugar plantation, a fact that I found appropriate and creepy. There was a fake sweetness to the place — there were beautiful homes and cute little downtown areas, but it felt so manufactured. Everything was clearly plotted out, had been planned down to the last shrubbery. As Ash drove to the music class, I stared out the window, fascinated by all that we passed. The more time I spent in Sugar Land, the more I understood how strange DC must have seemed to Ash; how she must have felt like she was in another country.

There were ten other babies and toddlers in Viv’s class, and she was by far the best dressed. Ash always dressed Viv with a little more care when they were going out, and that day she was in a smocked dress with a monogram on her chest. (Viv was not a baby who wore stained onesies or mismatched socks.)

After thirty minutes of singing and clapping (which had originally sounded like a short time to me, but felt oh so long while I was experiencing it) a few of the moms went to a coffee shop around the corner. I sat and chatted with them as they ordered lattes and fed smooshed-up fingerfuls of muffins to their babies. The strollers were shoved in around the tables, and it was impossible to move without bumping something or someone. Charlotte’s daughter reached over and knocked a cup of water across the table, and when I jumped up to grab some napkins, I banged my knee against a stroller, causing the child inside to start screaming. By the time I returned to wipe up the spill, Viv was fussing and Ash was packing up. I handed the wad of napkins to Charlotte and then stood there, feeling like a mother’s helper who isn’t really old enough to be of any help at all.

—

At the end of January, Matt hired an intern named Katie, who’d just graduated from TCU that December and was the most serious twenty-two-year-old I’d ever known. She came to the house to meet Matt wearing a pantsuit, her long brown hair pulled back in a low ponytail. Katie was pretty, but wore minimal makeup and no jewelry, and had a very no-nonsense vibe about her. Whenever Katie was around, I could see Ash look at her out of the sides of her eyes, just itching to adorn her, to “fancy her up,” as she liked to say. Ash even gifted a necklace to Katie, a long gold chain with blue stones, one of her most popular pieces from the Stella and Dot collection. “I thought it would look great with your eyes,” Ash said, and Katie said thank you and put it right into her bag. We never saw it again.

“I graduated a semester early, not the other way around,” Katie told me when we first met, although I hadn’t asked. “I was just ready to be in the real world. But I loved school. Go, Frogs!” As she said this, she crooked two fingers at me, like she was making a peace sign but was too lazy to hold it straight. (I learned later this was a hand signal for the TCU Horned Frogs, but at the time had no idea what she was doing and just smiled.)

Katie’s family was friends with the Dillons, and she was interested in working in politics, planned to move to DC in the next year or so, and (most important) was happy to work for free, all of which made her a great fit.

“Hopefully we’ll be able to pay you as the campaign goes on,” Matt told her, but she just waved a hand in the air.

“That would be great, of course,” she said. “But I’m not concerned about it. I’m here to learn and I’m happy to help however I can.”

That was all Matt needed to hear to make Katie his favorite person in the world. He put her in charge of social media — she started handling the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, and also started writing most of the e-mails that were blasted to Jimmy’s supporters every few days. I was on this list, and woke up most mornings to a message in my in-box, with subject headings like “We need your help!” Or “Texas, it’s time!” At the bottom of each note was a plea for money and a link to the online fund-raising, asking the recipient to give anything he could, even if it was just five dollars. I started to feel fatigued at how often these e-mails arrived, and I can only imagine that everyone else receiving them did too. But the campaign had to keep asking for money, so they kept arriving. A couple of times I donated, if only because I felt like Katie deserved a response for all of her hard work.

When Katie started, Matt told her they’d get another desk in the den for her as soon as possible. “In the meantime,” he said, “you can set up in the dining room or use one of our desks if we aren’t here.”

“That works for me,” she said. I saw Ash wince as Katie set up her laptop on the dining room table, banging it down on the wood. Ash rushed over with a place mat to put underneath it. “Here,” she said, “this will make you more comfortable.”

The next day, a tiny desk and a folding chair arrived at the house and were shoved in the corner of the den. “That was fast,” I said to Ash, and she rolled her eyes. “I’m willing to sacrifice quite a lot of things for this campaign,” she said. “But I don’t see why my dining room table has to be one of them.”

I have to say, Jimmy’s Instagram got a lot better once Katie joined the campaign — she was always in front of him with her iPhone, capturing the moment that he shook someone’s hand or smiled during a speech. One night, when we were all sitting around after dinner, staring at our phones, I mentioned how good her pictures were. Matt agreed. “She’s got a talent for communications,” he said. “She’s always got the right image to go along with our message.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “Plus she’s great at picking the filters that make me look my best.”

—

Matt and Jimmy spent most weekdays at events around Houston — or at least within a couple of hours of the city — meeting with local groups, stopping by union lunches or DAR teas. On the weekends, they’d travel farther and Ash and I would usually go with them, the four of us (plus Viv) piling into a car and driving to rural areas in East Texas, hitting as many cities as we could in one trip, places I’d never heard of before: Longview, Lufkin, Tyler, and Henderson.

If we were coming back that night, or if it was an incredibly busy trip, Katie would sometimes come along, but mostly if we were staying overnight, she hung back so we didn’t have to pay for an extra room. (I’d never seen Matt so thrifty in his life, but he was constantly making sure we were doing things the cheapest way possible, stretching all of the campaign money as far as it would go.)

When Katie wasn’t there, I was in charge of the social media, taking as many pictures of Jimmy as I could, sending out tweets, posting on Instagram. The first time I’d done this, Katie had approached me when we returned and not so subtly suggested that I could do a little more. “Make sure to tag all of the places where he is,” she said. “We want to get as many eyes on these posts as possible. You can never take too many pictures.”

She spoke to me in a tone you’d use to explain hashtags to your grandmother — patiently and with just a touch of condescension and amusement, as if she couldn’t believe how little I knew.

Since that day, I’d taken my role as traveling social media person very seriously, once almost tripping Jimmy as I took pictures of him walking into a radio station in Waco.

—

Ash once told me that Mrs. Dillon loved to talk about when Jimmy was in preschool, how she knew even then there was something special about him. She said every day when she dropped him off, the kids would come running over to greet him. Once, he got there late and all the kids were already sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, and as Jimmy went over to join them, they all reached their arms up to him, to touch him as he walked by. “Like Jesus,” I said, and Ash nodded. “Exactly.”