“We use what we get,” Keith said, extending his hand.
“I guess Santa came early for you this year,” Jack said. He turned and walked back into his studio, leaving Keith’s hand outstretched and unshaken.
News about the enticing rumour passed along by Jack Quinlan’s mystery caller moved fast. By the time we got on the plane, Keith had made some calls of his own, and the pulse beating in his temple suggested his excitement. The reports were good. Ginny’s seat was back in the undecided column, and that meant there was the possibility of forming a government.
Ginny and Keith huddled together, conferring in whispers on the flight back to Regina. I sat next to a woman whose son had been in grade school with Angus, and we caught up on each other’s news. Time passed quickly, and I was surprised when the plane touched down.
Keith and Ginny dropped me off at my house. Ginny was spending the afternoon canvassing, and I wanted to clean up and have a sandwich and a nap before I joined her. I checked the mail and found the usual mix of bills and ads. There was also an unaddressed padded envelope containing a DVD. That, too, was no surprise. NationTV had been taping since the candidate left the courthouse triumphant, and I knew they would have great footage of Ginny Agonistes, the combatant who wouldn’t quit.
I walked into the house, left a message on Zack’s machine telling him I’d survived two flights, and went out to the yard to throw a ball around for the dogs until I’d come down from all the tensions of the morning. It didn’t take long before the dogs collapsed in the sunshine, and I went inside to make myself a sandwich and watch the DVD.
I was so mentally prepared for shots of Ginny on the steps of the courthouse that it took me a moment to understand what I was watching. The quality of the picture was sharp, but the camera’s eye was static, so the effect was like watching a scene through a security camera. A woman, very slender with dark hair cut in a sleek bob, was sitting cross-legged on a bed, stroking a cat. I recognized her immediately. It was Cristal Avilia. She was wearing a T-shirt, and her legs were bare. She stood, walked out of camera range, and when she returned, she wasn’t alone. Zack was with her. He was wearing a robe.
He handed her an envelope. She placed it, unopened, on an armoire and moved in front of him; then she took her fingers and began stroking herself. She began to moan and took her fingers and held them up to his lips. “Taste it,” she said.
He took her fingers in his mouth. “That always works,” he said. He began to stroke her, and she thrust herself at his hand, whimpering.
As Zack told me the night he explained his relationship with Cristal, from that point on, it was all business. He wheeled his chair next to the bed, pivoted his body onto the sheets, and they had sex. I couldn’t move. I watched until it was over, and Cristal slid out of bed. She was naked, she walked off camera, in a few minutes she came back, still naked, with washcloths and a towel. Zack cleaned himself, and she left the room as he dressed and moved back into his chair. When he was ready to leave, he wheeled towards the door without saying goodbye.
“You never look at me, you know.” There was bitterness in Cristal’s voice; there was also longing.
“We both know why I’m here,” he said. When he was gone, she threw the towel he’d been using against the door. “Bastard,” she said. Then the screen went black.
I hit eject. What was on the disc was not a surprise. Zack had told me that he’d bought sex from Cristal Avilia. But knowing it and watching it were two different matters. I put the disc into the pocket of the folder that contained my notes about “Women in Politics.” I called Ginny’s cell and told her I couldn’t make the canvass this afternoon, but I’d meet her at Luther for the basketball game after supper.
Then I made myself a sandwich that I didn’t remember eating, went outside, and started breaking up the soil in the patch beside the house where we’d decided to plant tomatoes. The bed hadn’t been worked before, and as I dug, the sun pressed down on my back like a hand. By the time I’d prepared the soil and given it a soak, I was sweaty, stiff, and thirsty, but I felt better. When I went back inside to shower, the phone was ringing. It was Zack.
“Jesus, I was starting to worry,” he said. “Your cell must be turned off, and I’ve called home about a dozen times. Everything okay?”
“I was out digging that bed where we’re going to put the tomatoes,” I said.
“You sure you’re okay? You don’t sound like yourself?”
“I don’t feel like myself,” I said. “Somebody left a DVD in our mailbox. It was of you with Cristal Avilia.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. “And you watched it.”
“Yes. Not the smartest move I ever made.”
“I’m coming home,” he said.
“You don’t have to.”
“I know, but I want to.”
I went to the little greenhouse Zack had had built for my birthday and began carrying out the tomato plants we’d been growing. They were thriving. I heard his car come up, but I didn’t go out to greet him. In a few minutes, he came up behind me and touched my arm. “So where do we start with this?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He reached out to me, but I moved away. He wheeled his chair close to the plants. “How do you know when they’re ready for the big move outdoors?” he said.
“You kind of ease them into it,” I said. “I’ll take them back inside tonight. When they’re ready and we can trust the weather, I’ll plant them. I used to help my father do this when I was a kid.”
“You never told me that. In fact, you’ve never told me much about your father at all.”
“I didn’t see him much,” I said. “He was a doctor, and doctors are busy people. But he liked to grow cherry tomatoes from seed. And he let me help him.”
“So that’s why you wanted to do this.”
“I guess. My father didn’t spend much time at home, but during tomato season, he’d always leave a little dish of these on the kitchen counter, and they’d be there when I woke up. It always made me feel good imagining him out there in the dark picking the tomatoes, thinking about me.”
Zack took my hand. “Jo, what can I do to fix this?”
“Make it go away,” I said.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Then I guess we just have to keep on keeping on,” I said.
CHAPTER 6
That afternoon, Zack and I followed the adage that the best thing to do when confronted with a problem is to sleep on it. We took a nap, and when I awoke with his body warm against mine, and the branches of the honeysuckle outside our window tracing shadows on the bedroom ceiling, I knew we had to do whatever it took to hold on to our life together. As if he’d read my mind, Zack reached for my hand. “We can’t blow this,” he said.
I laced my fingers through his. “We did take those vows.”
“It’s your call about where we go from here,” Zack said.
“Let’s just get on with it,” I said. And so we did. We dressed and went into the kitchen. Zack made tea; I took a pan of lasagna from the freezer and put it in the oven for dinner, then like other busy couples, we sat down at the table and checked our messages.
Mine were predictable: a call from Mieka reminding me that the next day was the first anniversary of UpSlideDown and that I’d promised to have lunch there with her and the girls. The rest of my messages were from Ginny’s campaign: two from Keith asking advice about media buys; one from Milo O’Brien, whose staccato intensity as he summoned me to a breakfast rally the next day at the Pile O’ Bones Club made his invitation sound like a threat; and one from Ginny telling me she was going to the Luther game early to watch the twins warm up and she’d save seats for us.
I wrote down what I needed to remember and poured the tea. When I handed Zack his cup, he was still checking messages, and I was smug. “Beat you,” I said. “My life is more manageable than yours.”
He exhaled wearily. “You don’t know the half of it, Ms. Shreve. I have a message from the pal who referred me
