she’d always worked several others simultaneously. If she finished one, another inevitably bubbled over. In Washington, Russians were her only target. They were professionals, and they worked that way, mostly nine to six, nights and weekends only on special targets. Plus the deputy assistant director who ran her unit discouraged his officers from helping other desks. There’s going to be times I need you quick. I don’t want to have to pry you from some van outside a mosque when I do. For the first time, Rebecca saw the bureau’s Washington fiefdoms up close.
* * *
She spent the extra time at home. She saw the kids nights and weekends. She glimpsed what she’d lost by being so absent in Houston and Birmingham. Sometimes Kira and Tony and Brian seemed to be a single unit, with their own in-jokes that she didn’t always catch. She tried not to let the three-against-one vibe bother her, and over time it faded.
As for Brian… she didn’t know what to do about Brian. The more time she spent with the kids, the more she respected how he’d parented. Kira and Tony were smart, decent, and fundamentally happy.
Yet he was as directionless as ever. The gap between her success and his stillborn career had grown painful. And they needed him to make some decent money. Money was by far their biggest problem. Though she was making more than she ever had.
She’d gotten a promotion in Houston and—unusually—another soon after she arrived in Washington. Between those two and her annual seniority bumps and the cost-of-living allowance the bureau gave its D.C. agents, she made ninety-nine thousand her first year, about what they had earned together in Houston. And the FBI had gold-plated health insurance and a great pension plan, if she got that far.
So they weren’t poor, not by any means. But the cost of housing around Washington meant ninety-nine K in D.C. was more like fifty in Texas. No joke. They didn’t have a prayer of buying a house here, not anywhere that wasn’t an hour-plus commute. They couldn’t afford private school, so they needed a town with decent schools. After a frantic search, they found a rental in Chevy Chase. Thirty-five seventy-five a month, on a busy street, and not half as nice as their house in Houston.
The taxes were brutal, too. Everything seemed to cost more. Electricity, food, laundry—Rebecca didn’t know why dry-cleaning a skirt cost twice as much in Maryland as Texas, but it did.
She tried to spend less. No new suits. She hung on to the 330, though she’d already put more than a hundred thousand miles on it. All those trips to the border. She had teased herself with a test-drive of a 335, the new model. She shouldn’t have. It had 300 horsepower and tons of torque. Every so often she would drive by the dealership in Rockville just to torment herself.
Fine. She didn’t have to have a BMW. But she didn’t want Kira and Tony to feel like they were the only poor kids in a rich town. They needed clothes, new bikes, decent vacations.
Fact was, money mattered way more in Washington than Houston. Houston was fundamentally a middle-class place. River Oaks was rich and the east side was poor, especially down toward the refineries. But mostly the city just stretched on and on. The neighborhoods blended into each other. The schools were not-great-not-terrible. People just wanted to work and drive their trucks and play catch with their kids.
Not Washington. The most powerful person in the world lived in the middle of the city. The biggest business in the world—the US government—filled it. D.C. was filled with people who wanted power and money, money and power. They judged one another ruthlessly, by their jobs and cars and clothes. And the Unsworths were not keeping up.
During the first year in D.C., they fell into a twenty-grand hole. Rebecca started paying the minimum on credit cards, got the rent in the last day it was due. Luckily—though luckily wasn’t the right word, she knew—her grandfather Jerome died, leaving her thirty thousand dollars, enough to square them up.
But she couldn’t lie to herself, she only had one rich grandfather. That bequest was a one-time windfall. They needed to be careful about money. All the time.
Being careful about money all the time sucked.
* * *
Of course, the problem had a solution. Dear hubby could find a job that paid decently.
Only he wouldn’t. Or maybe he couldn’t. She wasn’t sure anymore. He insisted he