Addie served us light and fluffy Victory Waffles with butter and warmed maple syrup.
We told ourselves how G.T. was going to pull it off.
How sweet it was going to be and we weren’t going to be bad winners.
At 11:23 the results finally came in.
G.T. had lost by 114 votes.
There were simply no words.
Only tears.
18
You don’t understand the power of loss when it first hits you like a baseball coming fast from an out-of-control pitcher. You reel back stinging from the blow.
It’s the third day after an injury when the pain really starts to throb.
I’d known enough blows in my life, but this one had a special sting.
When a good man gets beaten by a bad one it makes you not want to get up in the morning.
It makes you hate the whole world.
“Well, we sure gave it all we had,” G.T. said. “We made an inroad in people’s consciences.”
But I didn’t think we’d made enough of one, or we’d have won.
I wasn’t accepting Miss Congeniality for anything.
Lots of people were having this problem.
Adam was bitter about everything. “Millstone stole this election! We should have fought dirt with dirt!”
Sid Vole, whose candidate in Virginia had won, had personally called the governor of Wisconsin to see what could be done about it. After two weeks of intense checking, the official word was out: There were no signs of election tampering.
The results stood.
G.T. seemed a little lighter without the burden of campaigning on his shoulders. Addie said she had never much wanted him to be mayor anyway.
“Losing,” G.T. offered, “isn’t anything to be ashamed of.” He told every campaign worker personally how much he appreciated how we’d worked for him. When he came to me he said, “Hope, I want you to know how much your strength supported me these many months. You’ve got an inner courage that is a powerful thing to witness. I thank you for bringing that up here. I really needed it.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Pastor Hall said this was one of those times when we just had to trust the Lord’s ways.
I wasn’t trusting anything.
The few reporters left in town had done what they called “postmortems” and moved out because we weren’t important anymore.
I tried to pull from the power in my name, but everything hopeful in me was dead.
* * *
We limped through November, having a depressing Thanksgiving even though the food was brilliant.
“You can’t enter a political campaign without accepting the fact that you might lose,” Mr. Sage told our class.
He had gotten a copy of the voting statistics from the election, which showed us who voted and who didn’t, not who they voted for. Eighty-five percent of the adult population in Mulhoney voted. “I want you to be proud of these numbers. You were responsible for the highest voter turnout this town or any town has ever seen.
“I want you to think about all the people who registered to vote that probably wouldn’t have if you hadn’t been involved. I want you to try to recognize how you all learned to have a voice in the system.”
And you could have knocked me over with a cheap tip when I saw the name of my cranky customer, Mr. Woldenburg, there on the voting roster. He and his wife. They’d voted! They’d taken part in the process.
We had to write a paper on what we remembered most about the campaign, what we thought our biggest contribution was. I wrote about passing out brochures and campaigning with G.T. I wrote about Mr. Woldenburg and how you never really know sometimes when you’re making a breakthrough with certain people.
Mr. Sage wrote in the margin of my paper, “One person touching many.”
“What kind of a world is this when Gleason Beal gets away clean and free and G. T. Stoop gets beaten by a crook?” I asked Braverman.
He hugged me hard. “I’m the wrong one to ask, Hope.”
We spent lots of time hugging. At least something felt good.
* * *
I was in the A & P, looking for boxes of macaroni and cheese that I hid under my bed and made on the sneak when Addie wasn’t home. Addie never cooked from mixes. That’s when I saw Mr. Woldenburg, my best success of the whole election. He hadn’t been in the diner for a few weeks. I looked in his shopping cart. He had two packages of cheddar cheese, no American. Will wonders never cease?
“Hi, Mr. Woldenburg. Remember me?”
His eyes squinted. “You harped on me to vote more than a human has the right to.”
I laughed. “I’m sorry it seemed that way, but I’m glad you and your wife voted, Mr. Woldenburg. That’s terrific!”
“What in the world are you talking about, girl?”
“You voted, Mr. Woldenburg. I don’t know if you voted for Eli Millstone or G. T. Stoop, but you took part in the election process, and that’s a really good thing.”
He looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
“I wasn’t checking up on you, sir. I was just looking at the voting records and your name was there along with your wife’s. It made my day, I’ll tell you, when I saw you’d done it.”
“That’s the biggest fake I ever heard. I didn’t register. I didn’t vote. And neither did the missus.”
I looked at his stern face.
“Mr. Woldenburg—you’re not just kidding me?”
“I work two jobs. I don’t have time for kidding or voting.”
I tried to process this.
“Mr. Woldenburg, your and your wife’s names were on the official election list as having registered and voted.”
“Don’t care if you saw it written in the sky. We didn’t do it!”
My heart was in my larynx. “Will you tell what you just told me to the Election Board?”
He said he wasn’t going out of his way.
“They’ll come to you!” I didn’t know if they would, but I was willing to drag them.
* * *
The Election Board sent workers out to get the truth—covering Mulhoney like cockroaches in a cheap fourth-floor walk-up, checking every registered voter’s vote against whether they actually voted or not.
Braverman was doing big-time spatula tricks in the kitchen again.
At the end of ten days, we had a new ball game.
One hundred and twenty registered voters on the official books claimed they never registered, much less voted.
Eli Millstone was political toast.
A few reporters proclaimed us a hot spot again.
Then Braverman and Adam led the students of Mulhoney High to circle Town Hall with banners and posters, shouting down dishonesty in government. It was the third week in December, and Wisconsin was a vast, frozen tundra. My screaming taunts turned to ice crystals the minute they left my mouth. I mentioned to Adam that it would be warmer protesting inside Town Hall, but he said we needed to be poised against the pureness of the freshly fallen snow to make the point that we, the teenagers of Mulhoney, were not going to take this anymore.
We stood firm, 297 frozen teenagers dressed like Eskimos it was so mind-numbingly cold, and held a candlelight vigil outside Town Hall singing “We Shall Overcome.” And as our united voices rose in force, Adam Pulver marched through the crowd, stood at the door of Town Hall, and shouted, “Mr. Mayor, we, the teenagers of Mulhoney, demand to live in a town that is not governed by lies and deceit. We demand your resignation!”
Adam raised his hands, embracing the spirit of the season, and started shouting, “Time to go! Ho, ho, ho!”
We shouted it into the night until we thought our voices would give out, but they didn’t—we were too strong and too fed up.
You don’t understand the power you have until you use it, that’s what my boxing coach used to tell me.
Finally, Eli Millstone’s spokesperson came out as dawn broke against the sky. She read a statement from the mayor.
> “I have served this town faithfully as mayor, but it appears now that I cannot finish my third term because of the dissension of certain factions. I am resigning. I pray that Mulhoney will continue on in the great tradition I have set.”
“We might change it a little bit!” Braverman shouted.
The whoop that went up from all of us was great and full. Al B. Hall showed up with seven GOG members, and they began serving us hot chocolate and doughnuts from the Gospel van. We stayed there shivering and savoring the victory.
Pastor Hall said we had shouted down the walls of Town Hall just like Joshua shouted down the walls of Jericho.
* * *
It happened finally on January 12 at high noon.
G. T. Stoop stood on the platform that Eli Millstone had built for himself, put his hand on the Bible, and took the oath of office. He swore to uphold the laws of Mulhoney to the best of his ability, so help him God. Everyone there knew we’d heard an honest man make a pledge that he would take to heart every day he was mayor.
Al B. Hall stood before us, his wool coat blowing open in the winter wind, and offered the prayer.
“Lord God Almighty, bless your servant, Gabriel Thomas Stoop, with the fullness of your wisdom, strength, and courage. Give him a fierce faith to lead this town and let the love and kindness you’ve placed inside him pour out toward all.”
Snow started falling like a promise, dusting the streets with anticipation of good things to come.
Everyone there felt the hope.
Addie said it was like the thrill she got shoving a raw plucked chicken into the oven and knowing that in a little while she’d have a soul-satisfying entree.
It takes a great cook to pull life truth from poultry.
19
The first thing G.T. did as mayor was appoint Brenda Babcock as sheriff. Ex-Sheriff Greebs was up to his earlobes in corruption charges courtesy of the state’s attorney. The second thing G.T. did was to slap a fat fine on the Real Fresh Dairy and give them sixty days to pay their back taxes or the town would take them to court.
The third thing he did was marry Addie.
It was a simple ceremony with breathtaking food.
Addie cooked everything, even though people said she shouldn’t. It was her day to shine. I was the only person who understood fully that Addie only half shone if she wasn’t cooking.
She was a bear to live with during the last week because she’d put together a four-course dinner for over one hundred people and she hadn’t gotten her wedding dress yet. I tried mentioning this to her and didn’t get far.
“The bordelaise sauce is in the toilet, Hope, because I can’t get decent mushrooms. You want me to think about fashion when my sauce is at risk?”
I went out, found her a dress, and dragged Braverman with me.
I held it up for him to see. “What do you think?”
“It’s a dress.”
“Right.”
“It’s not white.”
“Wedding dresses aren’t always white.”
“Since when?”
Males can be so dense.
I dragged Addie to the store to try it on.
“Buy it, Addie. You can’t get married in your apron.”
She bought it and on the day of the wedding was running around in the kitchen in that rose-colored dress with a big white apron tied around her, screaming at everyone that the whole meal was going to be awful, wearing a very big smile. When she got to the church, she forgot to take the apron off and Flo ran to her and set things right.
At the close of the ceremony, Pastor Hall said an extra long prayer for Addie as first lady.
We all knew it was going to be a rough ride.
* * *
It was a whirlwind thirty-six-hour honeymoon back and forth to Milwaukee, where Addie said the food at the hotel was “passable, if you were close to starvation.” She and G.T. stood in the entrance to the Welcome Stairways smiling at the white helium balloons that Flo and Yuri had decorated the place with.
“Happy life!” Yuri cried.
Addie gave herself a full fifteen seconds of back-home celebration and then marched into the kitchen and told Braverman that she’d thought of a new veal shank recipe that would get the locals going.
Only Addie would think about veal shanks on her honeymoon.
G.T. had been thinking, too. “Hope, I was wondering if you’d consider letting me adopt you, because I’d like more than just about anything to do this father thing officially.”
You could have knocked me over.
Then he said he wondered how the best way to start with all of that was, and I smiled really big, because I didn’t have to sit there like a dumb cluck.
* * *
I piled all my scrapbooks on the desk in the back office in chronological order. My heart was beating so hard and happy I could hardly stand it.
“These are all my significant life moments, G.T. You want the in-depth tour or the Cliffs Notes version?”
He sat in a chair. “I don’t want to miss a thing.”
That’s exactly what a father should say.
I took out the baby animal book that showed my and Addie’s life together reinforced through the animal kingdom. I showed him all my report cards and the photos of all the schools I’d attended. I showed him my thoughts on food service in three time zones. I showed him all the menus from all the places Addie worked at. I showed him a piece from my cast when I broke my leg in fifth grade; I showed him the first dollar I’d ever gotten as a waitress, plasticized right there by the picture of me standing at the counter of the Rainbow Diner with Spiro, the owner, doing his Greek dance by the decaf urn.
“I’ve been keeping these for my real father, who I’ve never met, G.T. But you’re as real and true a father as a human being will get in this world.”
He grinned so big. “That’s the nicest thing anyone ever said to me.”
I showed him my mother’s Christmas letters. He put his hand over my hand when I told him about Deena. I showed him my savings account book with all the money I’d saved for college. It took a while to get through the scrapbooks because you can’t just rush through a life. I decided not to tell him about Gleason Beal—passed over the letter I wrote to Gleason before we left Brooklyn. I didn’t want to sound stupid.
He listened and listened and when I was through he said, “I am so glad you did this for me.”
All along I was keeping these for G.T., I just didn’t know it.
Then G.T. got up and walked over to two little trees that were growing in pots under special lights in the corner by the window. They were a wedding gift from Pastor Hall. G.T. was going to plant them out back in the spring. He lugged them over to where I was standing, knelt down, took out his Swiss Army knife and sliced a branch off one tree; he sliced a bit off the other tree. Then he held the cut branch over the other tree’s cut part.
What was he doing?
“Get me that twine, Hope, over there on the table. Get the scissors, too, and that tape.”
I got everything.
“Hold this branch on there with your hand.”
I held it as he cut a piece of tape, cut a piece of string, and taped that small branch to the other tree, cut parts touching. He tied it with twine to make it sure.
He stood up, put the tree back under the grow light. “There. That’s what’s going to happen to us. It’s called grafting. Taking something from one place and fixing it to another until they grow together. We didn’t start from the same tree, but we’re going to grow together like we did. You watch it in the next month or so and you’ll see.”
I don’t think there was a better thing a father could have done.
* * *
I watched that plant in the office every day.
Watered it; misted it. I loved thinking about it like G.T. said, but part of me was worried the tree surgery wouldn’t take. Something would go wrong and then I’d be stuck with a metaphor that couldn’t go the distance.
“Don’t kill it with fretting,” G.T. said.
February hit hard; I felt like I was in Alaska. Snow two feet deep; wind chill put life in the deep freeze. But slowly, surely those two branches knit together, and when a month was up, G.T. pulled the bandage off and said, “There. That’s us now.”
I stared at the branch that had grown into the other tree. Here all along I’d thought I was going to get a father in a completely different way. But that’s the lesson of the Welcome Stairways—you don’t know which way a thing will come at you, but you need to welcome it with your whole heart whichever way it arrives.
* * *
The best thing about having G.T. as an official grafted father was that he lived each day to the full.
The worst part was that we didn’t know if he would stay in remission.
Leukemia can come back, the doctors warned. You live with that.
Addie helped me deal with the uncertainty. “We’re going to get as much as we can with the time we’ve been given. We’re going to be grateful for whatever time that is.”
I was used to living with unsureness, but it’s so hard when you love someone so much and you want them always to be there no matter what.
It made the days extra special somehow—everything we did was heightened. Every day after school G.T. would ask me, “What’s the best thing that happened today?” Some days were completely without meaning, but it got me thinking about the little surprises the days hold that sometimes we pass over.
It’s a complete rush to get what you’ve been hoping for—to get it so full and complete that it fills your senses. I’m not saying it was perfect. I’d lived all my life having to contend with only one full-time adult, and now I had two stubborn ones trying to steer my life and they were getting used to each other in the process. We were also trying to merge two apartments and make them one. G.T. put in a door connecting the adjoining walls, but Addie thought the door looked out of place. G.T. mentioned that it was too late to change it now. They both looked at me.
I backed out of the room.
I wasn’t walking through that minefield.
Last week I looked up the word father in my dictionary. Here’s the definition: A man who has begotten a child.