see her mom laugh and to please both of them. That laughter and approval and Cleo winning were all knotted together, especially after Georgie, her older sister, had been such a disappointment.
Gaby’s phone buzzed before they could get into it further, which Cleo found to be a bit of a relief. She and Gaby so rarely disagreed, and she didn’t want to butt heads with her closest advisor, not over MaryAnne Newman.
Gaby’s face grew still as her eyes raced over her screen.
“Hmm,” she said, and it was not a hmm of ponderance. More a hmm of displeasure.
Cleo’s stomach rumbled again, and she pressed her intercom, asking her executive assistant to bring her something, anything that they had on hand in the office. Someone had grabbed a tray of muffins a day or so ago, left over from a meeting. That could do.
“Hmm,” Gaby muttered again, and this time Cleo could not wait.
“What?”
Arianna, in a blazing fuchsia sweater and wide-legged black pants that reminded Cleo of the shape of the Liberty Bell, entered with the picked-over plate of muffins and a bag of Bugles. This was surely not the job she’d had in mind when she graduated from Columbia Law last May, but everyone needed to start somewhere. (Cleo often worked on legislation with Arianna’s father, an environmental lawyer, and when he called her to say his daughter was graduating from Cleo’s alma mater and could she find room on her staff, Cleo happily did.)
“This was all I could find. But I can run out?” All of Arianna’s sentences ended with a question mark, which Cleo made a mental note to dissuade her from. Women in politics didn’t have the luxury of ending their sentences on an upswing, as if they were asking permission, as if they couldn’t find the answers themselves, as if they were waiting for someone to guide them. Actually, Cleo thought, women everywhere couldn’t afford this.
“Don’t worry,” Cleo said to Arianna, reaching for a nonspecific flavor that she thought might be carrot but proved to be banana nut. “This is great.”
“I’m sorry,” Arianna said. She tugged at the hem of her sweater.
“Don’t apologize,” Cleo replied. “Don’t apologize for anything if you’re not responsible for the problem.”
“OK. I’ll try.”
“It takes a while,” Cleo added. “Eventually you’ll refuse to apologize even when you are responsible.” Cleo thought again of her parents in the kitchen, with her report cards hung on the refrigerator and a giant poster board from the science fair—an exploration of the hierarchy of a beehive—which had won first prize that month. Of how her dad had kept telling her to hit his palms harder and harder, then harder still, and how he was sweating by then, and Cleo was a little worried about him to be honest, but she put some muscle behind it, and then the phone rang, and her dad startled, and Cleo inadvertently hit him square in the jaw. He refused to allow her to apologize. She was just doing what he asked, he said. Cleo felt guilty for the evening but then resolved that he was right. He told her to assert her strength, and she did. She shouldn’t be sorry. He was the one who had jolted. (But she did check on him and bring him another ice pack. She loved her dad something fierce.)
“Also, Arianna, can you check my passport and ensure that everything is up-to-date? I am heading out on the delegation trip to the Middle East in a few weeks.” Technically all her papers were in order, but Cleo liked to be sure before each trip anyway. There was something methodical about her process that she found reassuring.
Arianna squeaked that she would and shut the door behind her, the hems of her pants swaying as she went.
“So,” Gaby said. “This story isn’t going away.”
“But I did Wolf Blitzer!” Cleo swallowed a bite of the muffin top and wondered if her assessment of banana nut was wrong. What else could it be? It wasn’t carrot; it wasn’t banana nut. “What kind of muffin is this?” She broke off a piece and offered it to Gaby.
“Technically I’m off gluten, but this is what you pay me for, so . . .” She placed it on her tongue, assessed. “It’s vanilla macadamia.”
Cleo was impressed not just with her palate but also with her certainty. Indeed, it was vanilla macadamia, which she’d never have sussed out on her own.
“It looks like MaryAnne has some clout up in Seattle. Turning this into a