She remembers the bitter arguments that led to estrangements when she began dating Bill. Thankfully, Divya apologizes immediately, profusely, and Seema can relax. She doesn’t want to have to forswear Divya too.

They work together even more closely than before, a new sense of shared endeavor and private intimacy taking root, especially as their fundraising turns more successful, the shocking possibility of Palin succeeding a seventy-two-year-old president considerably loosening the pocketbooks of their prospects. If Bill has concerns about her time spent with Divya, they seem allayed by her accounts of their fundraising triumphs.

On the weekends, Seema accompanies him on the four-hour drive to Nevada, leaving immediately after work on Friday. The days are long and tiring—she knocks on doors armed with the annotated lists that Bill has helped produce, urging supporters to vote early, and attempting to persuade the undecided—but there’s benefit to not having time to think except to follow directions, to not brood in exhausting circles. She’s making up for the months of doubts and distrust and disinterest, and bruised feet and exhausted trips back to San Francisco on Sunday evenings are a small penance.

She doesn’t slow down, not even after Sarah Palin crashes and burns as spectacularly as she’d risen, not even when the polls once again show Obama in the lead as he emerges victorious on the debate stage, and more presidential on the national stage with his cool-headed response to the banking crisis that rocks the country in the second half of September. Bill’s dread that some conspiracy could bring down Obama before election day has infected her too.

The intensity of anger and vitriol she observes on the right reaches new heights. Palin draws record crowds everywhere she goes, her supporters matching and even overtaking the loyalty and adoration that Obama inspires in his. With her trademark smiling sneer, Palin fires up her supporters, lending a benign face to the abuse and threats shouted at Obama at her rallies: Traitor! Terrorist! Bomb Obama! Kill him!

Nevada is the first state to shift from leaning McCain toward Obama, which is encouraging and gratifying. At Bill’s urging, they’ve agreed not to discuss election outcomes or their hopes and doubts. But as November approaches, and nationwide polls predict a blowout for Obama, it’s Bill who starts talking about post-November plans on their drives back from Reno.

“Would you mind moving here?” he says as they drive through Oakland, the lights of San Francisco twinkling across the bay.

He describes biking in his childhood neighborhood, down its potholed streets and past its stunted houses, with their stoops and small gardens and their multihued facades of burgundy, peacock blue, chocolate. “I’d like to buy a house here, before they all get torn down and replaced by huge-ass condos for yuppies from SF.”

Seema recalls the flaming-scarlet gulmohar tree in their compound in Chennai that she loved to climb. Would it grow in Oakland?