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Back Ladies of the House Save as PDF
Chapters (59)
  1. Cover
  2. About the Author
  3. Praise
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. January
  7. One
  8. Two
  9. Three
  10. Four
  11. Five
  12. February
  13. Six
  14. Seven
  15. Eight
  16. Nine
  17. Ten
  18. Eleven
  19. Twelve
  20. March
  21. Thirteen
  22. Fourteen
  23. Fifteen
  24. Sixteen
  25. April
  26. Seventeen
  27. Eighteen
  28. Nineteen
  29. Twenty
  30. Twenty-One
  31. Twenty-Two
  32. Twenty-Three
  33. Twenty-Four
  34. Twenty-Five
  35. May
  36. Twenty-Six
  37. Twenty-Seven
  38. Twenty-Eight
  39. Twenty-Nine
  40. Thirty
  41. Thirty-One
  42. June
  43. Thirty-Two
  44. Thirty-Three
  45. Thirty-Four
  46. Thirty-Five
  47. Thirty-Six
  48. Thirty-Seven
  49. Thirty-Eight
  50. Thirty-Nine
  51. Forty
  52. July
  53. Forty-One
  54. Epilogue
  55. Acknowledgments
  56. Author’s Note
  57. Ladies of the House - Reader’s Guide
  58. Questions For Discussion
  59. Excerpt

“Miles had to protect his office. I could distract the public, his Senate colleagues, from his goals, impede on his ability to get things done, hurt his credibility.” I held the phone between my shoulder and ear and took the box out of Cricket’s apartment and to the trash room on the other side of the hall. “Cricket just gave me a lovely little pep talk. Part of moving forward means finding a way to protect myself, too. The Melinda Darley thing made that more than clear.” Into the chute went the box, thudding on the way down—the sound, I imagined, of my father spinning in his grave. “So, first, I’m going to rest. Then, I’m going to try my hardest not to say the name Gregory for a few days, or maybe ever again. My family needs me employed. I need myself employed. Forgive me?”

“Nothing to forgive,” he said. “You think this is the right thing, Daisy, and I believe you.”

“Okay,” I said, not knowing what else there was to say.

“Okay,” he said. And the silence between us, usually comfortable, grew awkward.

Once I was back in the hall, I gave conversation another try, hoping our friendship could resume as normal without this decision hanging over our heads. “Well, I guess—”

But just then he spoke, too. “I’ll let you—”

We both said oops, and Atlas laughed, but it was tinny and weird, and once again things ground to a halt.

“I was going to say, if you’d like, you can read the piece before it runs.”

“Thank you. I’d like that,” I said, simultaneously appreciating the gesture and dreading it.

He said something like, I’ll let you go. And I said okay for what felt like the hundredth time. Then we hung up.

In the end, I saved a picture of Gregory in a suit—probably a class photo—and his yearbook from 1973. I also kept Richard II. I stored them in a plastic grocery bag in the back of my closet, imagining that one day, far in the future, I might draw Wallis’s children around and say:

Here, you see? Witness the artifacts of a man who treated politics as an art until it became a business. Notice how it began. Remember how it ended.

April

April

Seventeen

A gloomy Sunday afternoon; winter was back, annoyingly, and DC was complaining that we had already suffered enough. There was talk of frozen cherry trees and frost on the Mall.

Thirteen days out of the office, and I was running out of things to keep me occupied. Out of habit, I still wrote tasks in my day planner. I didn’t like seeing it empty of meetings, panels, commitments.