The Senator's Children by Nicholas Montemarano

Author:Nicholas Montemarano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2017-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

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The day, the long day ahead, frightens Betsy. It’s 10:30 AM and she’s alone, tired, nauseous; she doesn’t know what to do. She’s always known what to do: stay busy, work hard, get things done. But today? Plan for the wedding? Read baby books? Get healthy—whatever that means? Since the move back to Philadelphia in November, she has continued to work remotely. Just enough to feel as though she has a purpose. But the interim director seems to be doing well, and some days Betsy feels that she needs the foundation more than it needs her. She was the one who started it and grew it. She was the one who named it the Danielle Glass Foundation, as her mother had wished. Betsy suspected that this would hurt her father, and her mother had expressed her preference verbally, not in writing, so Betsy could have named it the Danielle Christie Foundation. No one would have known the truth. But she wanted to honor her mother’s wish—funny, she thought at the time, how the feelings of the dead often trump those of the living—and maybe she did want to hurt her father, just a little, wanted her mother to get in the last jab. No matter, her father said he liked the name, liked to think of Danielle Glass, the young woman he fell in love with in college.

In twelve years the foundation has helped hundreds of high school students from economically depressed communities become first-generation college students. Betsy’s mother had been the first in her family to attend college. Betsy knew how to recruit people—teachers, camp counselors, guidance counselors, therapists like Cal—and how to raise money, and how to publicize the foundation’s work. The foundation was her baby, and there were always things to do.

But today she’s scared: she can’t think of what to do. Except sleep. If she sleeps, then at least she won’t be able to think. The problem is, she’s too anxious to sleep. She could go somewhere, get out, take a walk, but it’s pouring, sheets of rain windblown against the window.

She walks around the house. She’s been living here four months after not having lived here since she was eighteen, half her lifetime ago. She’s confused by the rooms. Maybe it’s from being so tired lately, her brain not as sharp, but as she moves from room to room, she isn’t sure she knows what year it is or how old she is. She imagines for a moment that the past two decades have been a dream. Longer than that. None of it ever happened; they might try again. These rooms, to varying degrees, contain the past: her father’s desk, his old Rolodex, his robe still in the closet, her mother’s snow boots, too big for Betsy, a shelf of her mother’s books, a bottle of her mother’s perfume, one of Nick’s football jerseys hanging in the attic. Too much of the present—Betsy’s things, mostly—remains unpacked: boxes in the corner of the bedroom, in the basement, in otherwise empty rooms on the third floor.

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