summit this morning—a lifetime ago. When I’m in the residence, I dress casually, much the way Dena’s dressed, albeit in more modest shirts.
“It’s de la Renta,” I say.
She nods approvingly. “I was gonna guess him or Carolina Herrera.” She gestures out the window at the agent on the porch. “Do those guys listen when you pee?”
I laugh. “They don’t go into the bathroom with me, no. They wait outside. A few of them are female—no one who’s traveling with us today but some of the others—so if there’s a situation where it might be awkward to have a man present, a woman can step in.”
Dena shakes her head. “Better you than me.”
“It’s a strange life.” I pause. “Dena, Pete’s here, isn’t he?”
“And I thought I was the main attraction.”
“No, you are, but if it’s possible, I’d like to talk to both of you at the same time.”
She turns her head toward the hall and calls out, “Babe, she wants to see you, too!” Looking back at me, she says, “He thinks you don’t like him. I told him you wouldn’t make a personal trip here just to scold us, the first lady has bigger fish to fry, but you know Pete.”
Not really, of course—I don’t know Pete Imhof anymore, if I ever did.
Again, more impatiently, she yells, “Babe!”
After another minute, he materializes: He, too, wears jeans, and a gray Badgers T-shirt and brown leather flip- flops. (The dark hair on his toes! With a jolt, I remember it from when I was seventeen. How strange that I once, briefly, was well acquainted with Pete Imhof’s body.) When I last saw him, after that infuriating pyramid scheme, he had gained a good deal of weight, and he has gained a good deal since then. He’s not enormous, but he’s more than big, and both his hair and beard are silver. He’s actually a handsome man in an earthily sexual sort of way. I stand, and we exchange a clumsy handshake; I don’t mean to be cruel when I say that the clumsiness is his, that his discomfort is clear. God knows I have many shortcomings, but at this point, managing a handshake isn’t one of them. “You sure surprised Dena today,” he says as he steps backward so he’s next to her chair. He perches in a not particularly comfortable-looking way on an arm of it while I sit back down on the couch.
“Babe, get a chair from the kitchen,” Dena says, and he does, setting it close to hers.
“I hope I didn’t pull the two of you away from other obligations,” I say when Pete has sat. I know, through Belinda telling Jessica, what their jobs are—Pete is a night security guard at White River Dairy, and Dena is a part- time massage therapist at a chiropractor’s office.
Wryly, Dena says, “We managed to make time for you.”
“I bet you both are wondering why I dropped in out of the blue.”
Neither of them replies, and then Dena says, “Yeah, you could say that.”
“Well, first, I wanted to see you—I wanted to know what had become of you, Dena. But also, a news story is about to break that’s indirectly related to you, Pete. I’m not sure whether it will be a television program or a newspaper that will report it first, but in the next day or so, it’ll become public that I—that in 1963, I had an abortion. And I’m telling you because, although the media won’t have any idea of this part, Pete, it was you I’d gotten pregnant by. I don’t know if Dena ever mentioned—”
“He knows.” Dena says this matter-of-factly, and when I glance at Pete, he does not contradict her; he watches me with little emotion. (Would Andrew have become so heavyset as he aged? I doubt it, because they had different builds.)
“If I had it to do over again, obviously, it would have been more respectful to have told you at the time,” I say.
“Who’s spilling the beans?” Dena says. “Someone you know?”
“It’s—” There are several ways to describe Gladys Wycomb, but I decide to leave my grandmother out of it. “It’s the doctor who performed the procedure,” I say. “She’s very old now, and she’s doing it to protest—I don’t know if you two have been following the Supreme Court nomination of Ingrid Sanchez, but that’s what the doctor is protesting.” I look at Pete. “I hope this isn’t a news story that will have legs, but it’s possible some reporters will get it into their mind to try to figure out who I was involved with at the time, and I don’t think they’ll be able to except through one of us. But I wanted to warn you. I’d prefer that you don’t talk to reporters if you hear from them, but it’s your decision, and if you’d like, someone in my office can connect you with a media coach.” Lest this sound condescending, I add, “Although I’ve had loads of coaching, and I still haven’t learned all the tricks.”
Dena and Pete exchange a look, and Dena says, “Yep, we hear from your friends at the tabloids on a regular basis. Well, not just the tabloids—babe, where was that guy calling from a few weeks ago, was it Croatia? It was a country I wouldn’t be able to find on the map, I’ll tell you that much.”
This should not surprise me—exposes and tell-alls about Charlie’s administration or his family or his early years are published on a weekly basis, both articles and books, in tabloids and reputable magazines alike, and during the 2000 campaign, when the first reporter discovered the accident that killed Andrew Imhof, that was big news that I addressed by giving an interview to a
And I realize in this moment that neither Dena nor Pete has ever spoken about me to the media. For so long, I was so sure Dena would that it felt like she already had. Even earlier today, she was the first person I thought of when Hank came to tell me the abortion story was going to break, but she’d had nothing to do with it. That Dena and Pete have stayed quiet even though they’ve been together all these years, even though they’ve each had separate reasons for wishing me ill, and even though surely they could have reinforced each other’s antipathy, justifying their right to get back at me—I haven’t been sufficiently grateful, it occurs to me, I have never properly appreciated a thing that hasn’t happened. I haven’t thought of them as having opportunities they declined when clearly that’s been the case, clearly the opportunities have been plentiful.
