It was a different time. More innocent, I guess. Nights when Todd was up on the Slope she'd sit at the kitchen table as I made coffee, planning her latest vendetta and trying to learn how the local government worked. What fell within the mayor's province and what was out of bounds. She was something in those days, a young firebrand testing the limits of her power. Being Mayor of Wasilla isn't as easy as they make it sound. Before she'd only had to read sports scores off a teleprompter. Now she had to write a budget of $6 million.
"I asked Mary Ellen about removing those books from the lie-berry," she said one night, her usually chipper voice on edge.
"What'd she say?" I asked.
"She just scoffed and walked away," my love replied, her mouth turned down, her lips pursed tight.
"Sounds like insubordination," I said, and then I spooned a dash of sugar in her cup because I knew that's how she liked it.
"Oh! That means I can fire her, right?" she asked, suddenly excited. She could be so charming! I kissed her forehead. Then the top of her head, and then I buried my face in her beehive and we stumbled into the bedroom, because that's how it was then, everything so easy and free. What can I say? Dawn found the dinner plates unwashed in the sink, our clothes scattered on the bedroom floor. They were days of easy credit, sleepless nights, Todd's voice on the phone as I held my breath, Track and Bristol asking again the next morning who I was.
She said I was her cousin, in from Fairbanks for a week or two.
"Last month you said he was your brother," Bristol said.
"Aren't you kids late for school?" she asked, her jaw clenching that way it sometimes did, her voice dropping into the low register of a predator's growl.
God I loved her. She looked great in Victoria's Secret and boy could she turn on the charm. If there was something she wanted, all she had to do was wink. Her wink was a preternatural force. Like a werewolf's cry, a vampire's bite. It would become famous, win Bill Kristol's heart, and cause him to send a hundred slobbering e-mails to James Dobson, the sum of which had their intended effect. (Kristol may not be a great writer, but he is at least persistent). I guess it was at the convention. Dobson had promised McCain a revolt if he chose Lieberman, and they were only going round and round when Dobson showed McCain a photo of her giving the camera that wink. It stopped the would-be president in his tracks. The rest, as they say, is history.
But that wink. Once that wink was mine.
When the news broke I was as shocked as anyone. Yes, it had been a few years, but to hear it out of the blue like that. I was taken aback. She told the world that she had married Todd and he was still her guy, and I was the only one who knew the bodies buried between those lines. It was like that wink, a message sent in code across the years. But it was also a dagger to the heart, that stopped me cold. I don't have to have my heart attack now. I already know what one feels like.
Lately I've had this dream. It's winter in D.C. and I'm taking the White House tour. Suddenly, inexplicably, the other tourists fall away--they go off to check out the West Wing or something--and I wander through a narrow hallway that isn't roped off and find myself alone. And there she is, sitting at a little rolltop desk, wetting the tip of a fountain pen with her tongue. She looks up and says "Hey Tiger!" and it's like I'm back in Wasilla, tearing off her blood red Nancy Reagan dress, and her voice is vicious, the way it always was, and she's telling me again of everything she so badly wants, that she'll do anything to have.
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