a very bad day

“Tragic buffet table. Those hot dogs were in that slow cooker for at least a couple of days before we got there.” This is Arthur, Neale’s father, sitting in the front passenger seat, critiquing the food at the campaign office. Cate sits beside Neale, both of them slouched across the back seat of Arthur and Rose’s menacing Dodge Challenger. They are politically progressive and concerned about the environment, but they are also from Detroit, and have always driven union-made American muscle cars like it’s part of their belief system.

Cate sits behind Rose, noticing her long, salt-and-pepper hair tied in an elaborate knot at the back of her neck. She has worn it this way since Cate has known her. At one time she was pretty in a hippie way, like those small women folk singers who wielded big, acoustic guitars. Over time, particularly time spent trying to mend a broken world, her features have loosened. Her eyebrows, which used to be dramatic, are now caterpillars. The lid over her right eye now sags. When she was younger, Cate wished Rose could have been her mother. She was so not-Ricky. She was the first woman Cate knew who had tattoos. From where she sits, Cate can see the fading peace symbol on the side of her neck.

When she met Neale, Cate loved to go to her house after school. Rose would be there, ready with her stripped-down version of the mothering shown in TV commercials. She wouldn’t bake cookies, but she stocked rolls of Pillsbury dough in the fridge so the girls could bake their own. While they waited, she’d get out a globe so old several countries had to be redrawn or renamed with a marker. They went through the New York Times until they found a story. Indira Gandhi, assassinated. Why? It was Rose who gave Cate the idea of a larger world, and that even if she was only a teenager in a smug suburb, she was part of that world. Because of Rose, Cate has volunteered around elections since she was in high school.

They are heading back to Chicago after getting out the vote in a town in western Michigan. The town is really poor. A lot of the voters on the Democratic rolls there live in rural versions of projects—town houses with dirt front yards, nobody outside, not so much as a potted plant in any window. Cate isn’t sure if they are really going to make it to their polling place today. It’s hard to counter their apathy.

“Good cake, though,” Arthur says. “The poppy seed.”