Chapter 4 - The Retreat from Goochland
My father did not speak until we had cleared the second security gate.
He was driving his 2012 Ford F-250, a truck with two hundred and eighty thousand miles on the odometer, a cracked dashboard, and the lingering scent of damp clover, diesel exhaust, and winter peppermint. Jessica sat in the back seat, her long lavender dress hiked up over her knees, her laptop propped on her thighs as she monitored the digital aftermath with the cold efficiency of a mortar fire controller.
I sat in the passenger seat, my uniform jacket unbuttoned, my head resting against the vibration of the passenger door glass.
Outside the truck, the landscape of Goochland County was unrolling in a blur of gray fences, white horse barns, and rolling pastures of Kentucky bluegrass. It was beautiful land—land that had been tended by someone else’s labor for two and a half centuries so that women like Margaret Wilson could sit in morning rooms and discuss the vulgarity of people who earned their livings with their hands.
"You all right, Katie-bug?" my dad asked.
His voice was rough, like gravel shifting under a steel tire. He kept both hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, his eyes fixed on the two-lane asphalt of Route 6.
"I’m fine, Dad," I said.
"Dress cost a lot of money," he said simply.
"Nine thousand," I said.
He grunted. A muscle in his jaw twitched once. He reached into the pocket of his Sears jacket, pulled out an old silver Zippo that had been his father’s, and set it on the dashboard. He didn't smoke anymore, but he liked to feel the weight of the metal when his thoughts got heavy.
"Your mama spent three days making them rolls for the rehearsal dinner," he said. "Margaret didn't put 'em out. Left 'em in the pantry behind the cases of French water."
"I know, Dad."
"I saw 'em," he said. "When I went to get the cooler out this morning. Threw 'em in the trash behind the barn. Said they were 'too dense' for the aesthetic."
He didn't raise his voice. He didn't cuss. In forty years, I had never heard Thomas Harvey use a word stronger than damn, but there was a specific, ancient steel in the way he shifted the truck from third gear to fourth that told me more than a three-hour operational brief ever could.
"Jason was a coward, Katie," my dad said.
"Yes, sir."
"A man who lets his mother talk to his woman that way ain't a man," he said. "He’s just an expensive pet. You would've spent forty years sleeping in a house where the doors don't ever really open from the inside."
"I know, Dad."
"Good," he said, tapping the steering wheel once. "Then we don't need to waste no more diesel talking about him."
In the back seat, Jessica let out a sharp, low whistle.
"Captain," she said, tapping the screen of her ruggedized Panasonic Toughbook. "You need to see this."
I turned around in the bench seat. "What do we have, Jess?"
"The stream officially peaked at two hundred and fourteen thousand concurrent views before the server crashed under the traffic load," Jessica said, her eyes tracking scrolling lines of data. "WRIC-8 ran the full six-minute unedited clip at the top of their noon broadcast. Associated Press just picked up the wire story with the headline: 'Congressional Candidate’s Wife Caught on Video Incinerating Combat Veteran's Wedding Gown.'"
"What about Richard’s office?"
"Total radio silence," Jessica said, a grim smile playing at the corners of her dark lips. "Their website has been pulled down. The campaign headquarters in Glen Allen has the blinds drawn and the doors locked. And Jason..."
She paused, looking up from the screen.
"What about Jason?" I asked.
"His LinkedIn profile just vanished," Jessica said. "And the Wilson, Vance & Sterling website just updated their 'Our Team' roster. His biography has been moved to an archived directory. They’ve already removed his photo from the firm’s main landing page."
I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes.
I didn't feel triumphant. I didn't feel vindicated.
I felt like I had just cleared an eight-mile road march with a sixty-pound ruck through a swamp. Every joint in my body ached with a dull, throbbing weariness that went deeper than muscle or bone.
For two years, I had convinced myself that if I was just a little more patient, a little more refined, a little more accommodating, I could build a bridge between the world I came from and the world Jason inhabited. I had swallowed the insults about my father’s work clothes, the patronizing remarks about my education at a state military college, the endless, subtle reminders that I was an interloper who had been granted temporary admission to the grand salon on good behavior.
I had traded pieces of my dignity for the promise of a man’s love, only to discover that the man was nothing more than an empty suit standing in the shadow of a woman with a gold-plated lighter.
My phone, resting in the cup holder between the seats, began to vibrate.
The screen lit up with a contact name that had once made my heart skip a beat:
Jason.
I let it vibrate.
It stopped. Three seconds later, it began again.
Then the text notifications started rolling in like artillery rounds:
Jason: Katie, please. You have to call me.
Jason: My mother is having an actual medical emergency. The paramedics are at the house.
Jason: Dad’s campaign manager says we can still save this if you do a joint press conference with us this afternoon. We’ll say it was a misunderstanding. We’ll say the fire was an accident with a scented candle.
Jason: Katie, think about my career. Think about everything we planned.
Jason: Please pick up the phone.
I reached down, picked up the phone, and swiped my thumb across the glass.
I didn't call him.
I went into the contact settings, selected the option marked Delete All Messages, and then tapped the small, red rectangle that read:
Block This Contact.
Then I turned the device completely off, dropped it into the glove compartment next to my father’s tire pressure gauge and his spare box of fuses, and looked out the windshield toward the Blue Ridge Mountains rising purple and solid against the western sky.
"Dad?" I said.
"Yeah, Katie-bug?"
"Can we stop at the diner in Staunton? The one with the cherry pie?"
May you like
My father looked at me in the rearview mirror, his weather-beaten face breaking into the first real smile I had seen on him since six o'clock that morning.
"We can, Captain," he said, easing the truck into the left lane. "We surely can."
