“I’m not finished,” she interrupted. “Please… please let me just say this before I don’t have the nerve to anymore. I’ve prayed long and hard about it, and still, I feel like I could faint hearing the words coming out of my mouth.”
Mark removed his hand to lift both in the air, palms toward her as a gesture of peace. “Go on, then,” he told her. “I’ll try not to interrupt anymore.”
“Mark, do you realize how much I love you? I mean, deep down, do you see that I care about you and want the best for you, and for our family? I just…,” she paused a moment and just looked at him.
“I get so frustrated when I think you’re being honest with me, and then something big comes out to slap me in the face, like you don’t think I can handle whatever is happening with you. And maybe…,” she paused, taking a few sips of her water.
“Maybe I couldn’t at the beginning of our relationship, but tell me this, can you? Can you answer a few questions for me, and be honest… fully, no matter what comes, honest with me? Because right now… tonight, that’s what I need from you.”
Their waiter, once again clearing his throat, moved in to set down their appetizers: mozzarella sticks, fried zucchini, and small salads.
“I… yeah, I can do that,” Mark said, talking more into his salad than to his wife. He looked her in the eye. “Go ahead.”
Therefore, as the night wore on, he answered them as they came; tough questions he wasn’t sure how best to answer, but he laid out the truth, all the same.
Questions like, were you ever really in love with Paloma, or just jealous of Edward’s relationship with her? How did you and Arthur meet, and what compelled you to stay in touch after he was convicted twice in a row for harming people? And, just what possessed you to wait all this time before telling him what you’d done, if it weighed so heavily on you?
By the time they were finished with their chicken Florentine, he was in a sweat, ready to surrender.
The woman drove a tough bargain; not what he expected for Valentine’s Day.
Instead of the romantic feeling he’d hoped to rekindle with her, he began wondering, halfway through the dinner conversation if interrogations were anything like this.
At least she let me eat as she kept it up, he thought, scraping his fork against the remnants of sauce that were on his plate in order to capture them in one final bite.
How to answer that last question, he was still debating as he sensed Eugenie’s eyes on him.
“Well,” he began, “I guess I just… I was afraid, at first, and then, the longer I waited, the more the fear built up that there would be repercussions. I… I studied what the charges against me might be, versus just keeping my mouth shut. I mean, I had my whole life ahead of me; our life ahead of us… I really liked you and we’d only just had our first two or three dates by then, and I’d just graduated and begun to practice, and…”
He sighed.
Would she understand, or was he digging a hole for himself again?
He ran his palms over his thighs, and felt the familiar urge to check the seams. His fingers began to pull at them, and he forced himself to stop; to rest them instead on the table.
He glanced up at his wife, and found her smiling. A bit of her blonde hair had tumbled down from the clip she’d confined it to earlier on the evening, and in the light of the fireplace, she glowed.
“Thank you,” she said, reaching for his hand once more. “I… I know I’ve been hard on you, so thank you.”
“Well… you had a right to know. And I’m sorry… I’m sorry I didn’t just come clean earlier; not just for myself, but for you and Majesta, and for, well… everyone that has been supportive of me, in spite of how stupid I’ve been sometimes.”
“We all make mistakes, Mark… I… I appreciate it, and… now that you’ve come clean, there are a few things I’d like to share with you, too…,” she told him gently.
“But, um. Let’s pay and get out of here first. We need to talk in the car.”
Thirty
Meridian, Mississippi… February 14, 2025
Calico made her way through the living room, up the ramp to Angus’ room, and knocked on the thin door between them.
“They’ll be here any minute, Honey, are you going to join us?”
Part of their HUVA team had been delayed the day before, and so, they had yet to meet anyone aside from Mario Bianchi, their concierge.
“Mario, Clementina, Urban, Prudence, Cassidy, Joel, Amos, Mitchell, Bishop, Susan, and Casper,” she whispered to herself, trying to keep the names in mind.
She had finally memorized them from the board, and was thankful. It might not help her recall who was who, but it gave her more of a head start than she’d had the first time.
She waited a few more moments before her son popped his little red-blonde head out, stepping cautiously forward: he was already in his Minkle and Stub pajamas. The pair of cartoon alligators smiling brightly from the shirt, while miniatures of the pair were strewn in random patterns over his thin little legs, Minkle with his telescope, and Stub holding up his magnifying glass with, as usual, his electronic arm.
“Hey, Calico,” she heard her husband saying behind her. “You and Angus come here a minute, will you?”
She held her hand out to her son as he walked down the ramp, then let him go to scamper into the living room. On the Imagebar, she could see the faint outline of the president’s face as he began to make an announcement. Moving closer, the view cleared and she was able to see that he was at the Lincoln Memorial, and could read the words on the screen.
“It has come to my attention,” the president said, his thick, wavy hair blowing across his forehead, “that the people of these great United States have had enough. The war on terror that began so many years ago has only brought us so far. It has both harmed and helped us, in the end. However, as you know, I am not a man of conflict and combat. I aim to be a man of concord and peace in all my dealings. This has not always been the case, but from where I sit in the White House, and where I sit as a born-again Christian,” he continued to the mixed response of the crowd.
He paused to let the hissing and cheering die down before resuming. “As a born-again Christian, I have learned things the hard way. I will be real with you, and I will be honest,” he said, stopping to sip some water.
A few guards sat restlessly in the background, along with his wife and the vice presidential staff.
“Until I was nearly fifty years old, I was like many of you; I hated the ways of those who proclaimed to know and have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. But one day, I picked up an old copy of one of my children’s college textbooks. It was a book on war; war and nonviolence, to be exact. And, nothing else to do, with foul weather and nothing but candles and a few windup Luminosticks, I decided it was more interesting to read about war than to try to settle into something as frothy as one of the novels my wife loves to read.”
A titter went through the crowd, and the murmuring ceased, at least for the moment. It was apparent that the president was winging it now, his words something a speechwriter wouldn’t be disclosing.
A knock at the door interrupted, and Romeo moved to open it, allowing her to stay and listen, even if for only a few more moments.
“And in that reading, I learned things that appalled me; things I had not considered. At the same time, I learned about how to balance my view of the God of the Old Testament with that of the New. It impaled me with the sword of a deeper truth than I had ever known. It shined down onto my consciousness and convicted me, for I once was a man of war. You know my record; you know that I spent years in Iraq, and then in Afghanistan as a young man,” the president continued.
In the background, Calico heard voices as their guests arrived; there was sudden silence, however, as they entered the room. Mario and the rest of the HUVA team, still foreign to her, sat down wherever they could as the president continued to speak. Angus moved to sit on her lap, and she wrapped her arms around him as Romeo came a
nd sat next to her again.
On her other side sat a large black woman with bright blue curls, big green eyes, and a friendly smile. She wore all white: a skirt suit and two-inch heels.
Next to Calico’s trouser jeans and turquoise scoop neck top, the woman’s presence exemplified confident elegance and grace; her legs crossed and hands folded comfortably as she gave the president her full attention.
“To make a long story short,” the president said, “that book changed my life in ways that I never could have imagined. A book that had separated me from my son years before, in an emotional sense, now brought us back together. I got halfway through the book when the generator kicked back on, and decided I could no longer wait to call him. I made sure the signal was clear for my Mirage – at the time, I had a Ghost II, which is nothing like the fancy wave receptors we have now – and that the line was clean of extra listeners, and told him about what I was learning. It was the first time I had cried since I came back to home soil.”
A handful of people in the audience nodded and murmured as the president continued.
“A week later, my son was visiting, and we were reading the Bible together. I must admit it was the first time I had picked one up since I was thirty-three years old. Ironically, the age Jesus was when He died to save me. To save you. To save us from this violent world and make a new way for us to live.”
A middle-aged man carrying a walking stick threw an unidentifiable pink object at the president, and was escorted away as the crowd became more excited.
“Hmmm,” he said, laughing. “I’ve been attacked by a half-eaten hotdog.”
A ripple of laughter went through the heightened crowd before calming down again as he continued. Angus squirmed in Calico’s arms, and she let him go, hearing his footsteps as he ran back to his room, most likely to play.
“I learned that any violence with the intent to harm another human being is, in fact, not alright. That God never condoned it; not in either testament, and certainly not among His people. He gradually helped the people of Israel to become more like Him. We read the Scriptures closely, and see that, indeed, He fought for them much of the time. And when the people fought, they either lost because they fought from their flesh, or they won because they listened to what He was telling them.”
A few of the HUVA team nodded, as did Romeo, and the president took another sip of his water. One of the guards behind him walked across the screen to sit back down.
“Now, I’m not here for a theological debate. This country has people of all types of creed and religion, and it isn’t for me to tell you how to believe, but I tell you one thing: war is wrong. It has never been okay with God. And now that we have learned from the past, let us embrace those lessons so that they don’t slip away again.”
He paused as another murmur rose through the crowd, his hands gripping the dais in front of him now.
“We’ve seen the American Revolutionary War, the Northwest Indian War, the Quasi-War; we’ve seen wars against Barbary, and Indians, and the War of 1812,” he continued.
“We’ve seen anti-piracy wars and wars against slavery; wars with Mexico, and the list goes on. You get the picture. But where has all this war gotten us? Tell me that,” he said, his eyes riveted to the screen in front of him, that his eyes were on all of watching America.
“We sure got a lot of land and free stuff,” a young man that reminded Calico of a hippy called out from the crowd, to the cheers of many more.
“We got freed from Europe, and ain’t freedom a good thing,” a tall black man in a cowboy hat said.
“We lost our slaves,” a third man shouted, to the boos of people around him. His large round arms moved up to protect his face as a woman hit him over the head with her purse. “Assault,” he called. “I got a right to my opinion.”
“You indeed have a right to your opinion, Sir,” the president told him. “But that doesn’t make it wisdom to shout it, when you know there are others with very different views. Slavery is no laughing matter. But all three of you are right, we got land; we earned freedom; slavery was abolished, but at what cost?”
Calico could see the perspiration glistening on his forehead as he continued.
“The cost of human lives; lives that didn’t need to be sacrificed. Many people say that military service is a privilege, and in some ways, it is. But as a man who has served both in combat and non-combat situations, I will tell you: the place of the Christian is not with a rifle or a machine gun held pointed toward another human being. It is not to sit in a Humvee and watch in glee as people are blown apart. This is a high cost; the cost of life. And some willingly sacrifice this; others are simply used by the government… but I say, under my presidency, no more.”
The crowd was once again a mixture of cheers and jeers as the service members behind the president stood, looking around. Calico, along with the rest of the country, watched as three overly obnoxious protesters were escorted away before the president continued.
“This does not mean that war will never come. That is a reality we face, and my eyes are not shut, blind to the needs of the people of this great country, or of the countries we are in partnership with. Three wars still occur right now, but they are wars begun by earlier presidential generations. Wars that have both harmed and helped the people we fight to save. This is something that, God willing, will not continue much longer.”
“Please don’t give us the “Yes, We Can,” that turned into a “No, we really didn’t, for the better,” the woman who had clobbered the man with her purse earlier in the evening shouted.
“Don’t go makin’ promises that can’t be kept. We’ve had too many presidents tellin’ us all the good they’re gonna do, and then what happens? Not a lot of good, unless it’s an election year,” she continued.
The president held up his hands, waiting for her to finish.
One of his guards moved toward her, and the president shook his head. “Leave her be. It’s the truth, and she has a right to express it.”
Another murmur moved through the crowd like a tidal wave at his pronouncement before he continued once more. “Ma’am, what’s your name? I like your style of thinkin’,” he called to her.
“Daisy Mae,” she told him, smiling prettily, only to reveal a blackened front tooth. “Daisy Mae Wentworth.”
“Well, Daisy Mae, you’re right. There aren’t enough people in politics making good promises, or making good on the ones they’ve made. And I hope… this is my hope… that with God, this country can move back; that we can recenter ourselves to what’s important. Time is short in each of our lives, no matter how many days we’ve been granted; and what will we choose to be remembered for? What will we stand up for and be counted on to change for the betterment of our nation, and the world?”
“Good question,” Daisy Mae said with a shrug. “I don’t got the answer, but I hope that if God really exists, that He does. If so, I’m all ears, because things done got terrible at times. I’m no Spring chicken, and my memory is long for faults in this life, whether I want it to be or not,” she said to the president, ignoring the crowd now, as though they were the only two in the room and the cameras were gone.
“You know, I’m not, either,” the president said, laughing. “But God’s memory is even longer than yours and mine together. He knows what’s happened, and what there will be to come in the future. And He knows what’s best for this country.”
Now, he faced the cameras once more, addressing the nation. “And I pray that He will guide me, as your leader; that He will be the one leading this country through me. I will make mistakes, undoubtedly… but I pray that through His grace, we will be better for these years together. Thank you for your time and attention this evening,” he continued. “God bless you, and good night.”
Romeo cued the monitor to still, then walked up to it and pressed his thumb into the middle of the air, causing it to return to the screensaver, and then, calling Angus back into the room, he sat back down next to Calic
o.
And once Angus joined them, she waited, wondering what the future held for them all.
Not just because the president had just spoken, but because her family’s lives depended on the people sitting in their new living room.
Thirty One
Romeo pulled Calico and Angus closer as Mario stood at the head of the dining table, calling everyone to attention.
“We appreciate everyone’s patience as the president’s speech took us unawares this evening. I realize this isn’t how most of us planned to share the last hour. But perhaps at least some of the holiday can still be salvaged once we get our introductions in order. We can move on to other things, perhaps,” he said, looking over to a tall, stocky man of Spanish descent for a confirming nod, “in the next few days.”
“First, our family,” he continued, waving his arm out toward them.
“This is Romeo and Calico Ferguson, and their son, Angus. For the next fifteen months, they are our highest priority. God aside, this is where our focus needs to be. And this,” he said, pointing to the man he’d locked eyes with moments earlier, “is Joel, the leader of this HUVA team. I’m going to turn it over to him.”
“Thank you, and on behalf of the southern branch of HUVA, welcome to the great state of Mississippi. My name is Joel Rodriguez, and as Mario said, I’m the team lead here. There are two other suites on this floor, and my family and I are situated to your left,” he said, pointing, “in 500-03. Room 508-11 is still open in the event we have another family in need of our services.”
Rodriguez waved the woman to Calico’s left over to him, and she stood.
“This is my wife, Clementina, and we have five children. Two of them are here with us in our rooms, and the other three – all teenagers – occupy a room on the third floor, next to Cassidy and Bishop Stone, sitting over there.”
He pointed to the chairs on Romeo’s right, and the couple stood. Bishop, a man of mixed origins, was short, stocky, square-jawed, and sported a crew cut to his deep blue-black hair. His eyes were small and somewhat angular, but very alert; his lips, thin, but well defined. The loose, casual jeans and Fair Isle sweater he wore did no favors for his form.
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