She was wearing a white crew neck over khaki slacks. A little cooler here in the foothills. Needless to say, she looked stunning. We walked away from the van, and when the others were behind us, she turned to me. Her face flushed, rosy, biting her lip.
“Alex, listen to me, I lost my head the other night. I love Charles, I don’t know what happened, but it can’t ever happen again. I blame myself, the fire, the excitement, I don’t know, I was overcome, if you value my friendship you won’t mention it, please.”
I didn’t know what I was expecting her to say. But not this. Not the brush-off.
“Ok,” I said.
“Friends?” she asked, and offered me her hand.
“Friends,” I said, concealing my amazement at her behavior. It seemed so wrong, so immature, so silly. And yet maybe that’s what adults did. We walked in silence for a half minute and took out our maps.
“I think we’ll do better tonight. Tonight we have the Glengarry leads,” Amber said with a little smile….
She proved correct. A short night, but good work. Two hours, ten members each. A hundred and fifty bucks for me.
It was only on the way back to the van that we managed a real conversation. I tried to be lighthearted.
“You know what this neighborhood reminds me of?” I asked her.
“What?”
“It’s the sort of place a lot of Spielberg movies begin in, you know, picket fences and kids playing and stuff and then something ominous happens, aliens come, or a poltergeist, or government agents, something like that.”
“I don’t really go to the movies,” she said.
“No?”
“No.”
“Oh, that’s right. You said you like the theater,” I said.
She nodded and the conversation died. With annoyance, she brushed the hair away from her face. How dare one strand of hair be out of place again. She knocked her hair clip to the ground. I picked it up, gave it to her. Our fingers touched. She smiled at me. I swallowed.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Look, about the other night, I’m glad you didn’t say anything to the police,” I said.
“It’s ok, I understand. You’re from Ireland, you want to work, and you don’t have all the papers, nothing to be ashamed of,” she said, sympathetically.
“Not every American takes that attitude,” I said.
“Well, I do, I come from pretty straitened circumstances myself,” she said.
“Your parents weren’t well off? Thought you went to Harvard?”
“I worked hard,” she said firmly.
“Tell me about your background, if you don’t mind,” I said, and again she returned my smile.
“It’s very complicated,” she said carefully. She blinked a couple of times, angled her head away from me.
“I’d like to know,” I said.
“Well, my parents were divorced, you know,” she said.
“That can be very hard on a kid, did you have brothers or sisters?”
“No.”
“What did your parents do for a living?” I asked.
“Dad was a mechanic, he went to college part-time, and he became a union rep and did well. Mom worked in a place called Dairy Queen, which you probably haven’t heard of, I haven’t seen any in Denver.”
“So you were solid working class?” I asked with a smile, since some people can take offense at that kind of question.
“I suppose so, I don’t have a, uh…”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What?” I insisted.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I don’t have a relationship with my dad, we haven’t spoken in years.”
“How did that happen?”
“Well, he divorced my mom and he’s a real operator, he had good lawyers and she got screwed over and got nothing. That’s the first thing. And then when I was going to college, he’d promised he would pay but he stopped paying. He wouldn’t give me anything until I went to see him, to beg in person, but I didn’t want to do that because of what he did to Mom.”
“I’m sorry. He sounds like a bastard,” I said.
“Yeah. He was, still is, probably. I don’t want to talk about it. What did your parents do?”
“My parents were both teachers, math and English. Dad’s retired, Mum’s dead,” I said.
“Oh, I’m sorry, uh, what did your mom die of? I mean, if you don’t mind…”
“She had cervical cancer, it was misdiagnosed for a while and when it was diagnosed it was probably too late, they tried some alternative treatments, but those things don’t work,” I said simply.
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” she said. “How old were you when she died?”
“I was eighteen, it was my second year of university, it was really hard, my siblings were in England and my dad was doing all this political shit, Mum was practically on her own, it was awful, really. She was tough, though, she said we should all get on with our lives.”
“I’m so sorry,” Amber said, and stopped for a minute to give me a look of real sympathy. She touched my hand again. I squeezed hers.
“My poor mother might as well be dead,” she said, her face sad with the memory.
“What’s the matter?”
“She’s only sixty-eight, but she has early-onset Alzheimer’s, hardly recognizes me, it’s awful. Charles had her flown out here to Denver, to a wonderful place. Oh, my goodness. Actually, I don’t want to talk about that, either, it’s terrible.”
I nodded sympathetically. But sharing that had brought me closer to her.
“To be honest, I don’t really like it here in Denver that much,” she offered after a while. “It’s a poor excuse for a city.”
“If you don’t like it, why do you stay?” I asked.
“Oh, Charles has to be here, for political reasons, you wouldn’t really understand. All politics is local in this country. We have to be here.”
“And does Charles have political ambitions?”
“I suppose so, don’t we all?”
“Not me. You don’t really hear about many national figures coming out of Colorado, though.”
“No, no, you don’t, the last was Gary Hart and we all know what happened to him.”
“The girl on the boat, that scandal thing,” I said.
“Monkey Business,” she said.
I swore inwardly, for we were already back at the van. Everyone else there, Charles beaming, wearing Dockers, deck shoes and a button-down Oxford shirt. His hair gelled. He looked younger, like the millionaire commodore’s wanker son at a yacht club function. And of course he was a millionaire’s son and he was a wanker. I had to bite down a real hatred for the man. He bounded over, kissed Amber, shook my hand.
“Well, folks, hope you’re ready to party,” he said.
“What is it, Charles?” Amber asked excitedly.
“We just signed our ten thousandth member,” he said, and gave her another big kiss.
“That’s wonderful,” Amber said, her face lighting up with pleasure.
“It is, ten thousand members and the timing couldn’t be better. Momentum is what we need right now. And we have it. Ten thousand members, if we could use the mailing list and hit them up for a hundred bucks a pop, we could have a million dollars in our PAC before anyone else even begins to raise money….”