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By Root 1064 0

weathered skin nearly the same, and on his lap he held a handmade sign, maybe twelve by eighteen inches, and on the sign a single word, plainly printed: FATSO. I watched him, there was nothing else to watch, only a parking lot behind him and the road ahead. And as we drove, he watched us too, watched the tinted windows of the line of SUVs. When we passed, I looked back and saw the man get up. He was walking to his car. The sign, I realized, was meant for me. It was a thrust of ugliness and meanness, meant to throw me off. This man had made the sign, driven to the airport, parked and sat on that bench for who knows how long, waiting for me to come by so I would read his sign, so I would see that someone, a plain old man, called me Fatso. When I saw him get up, I turned to the others in the car—there were three Secret Service agents and my little team, more than the usual load. “Did you see that guy?” I could tell two things from the way the Secret Service responded: they had hoped that I hadn’t seen it, and they were mad. Well, the Secret Service is not there to protect me from meanness, but if you could have seen their faces and particularly the faces of the younger agents, who had seen him from the cars in front of us and behind us. When they rejoined us at the town hall site, it was as if each of them wanted to find a reason to give this fellow the once-over. It was their job to protect me, and I now knew that they actually wanted to protect me. I wish I could have told that nasty man that although he was trying to hurt me, he had given me a very nice gift.

John and I had been to the 2000 Democratic convention. John, like most of the junior senators, had a five-minute speaking slot in the early evening. When he spoke, the audience was mostly the loyal North Carolina delegation. I sat with the North Carolina delegation and the Overseas Democrats delegation—each group had equally terrible seats—when Hadassah introduced Joe Lieberman. In 2000, John was a footnote to a footnote to a footnote, the dismissive slotting of the almost chosen. The experience of the 2004 convention was entirely different. In the first place, I didn’t see much of Boston. I spoke at breakfasts at hotels to which I was delivered by the Secret Service SUV. At the convention hall, I was shuttled from one network booth to another. Thank goodness for Peter Jennings, who told the NBC makeup girl, my third makeup girl in an hour, that I looked just fine, quit fooling with me. I would go up to our family box to see my family, Jay and Jackie and their boys Ty and Louis, my sister, Nancy, and her daughter Laura, and to see my friends—they were all there. And John’s family, his parents and his sister, Kathy, and friends who had become supporters and supporters who had become friends after two-plus years of working together. Then back to the hotel room to work on our speeches.

When Cate and I came back into the room, John pulled out a T-shirt someone had given him, boasting that he’d been told it was the highest-grossing T-shirt in Boston. The shirt, made by a group of Harvard women, had a line drawing of John and the words “John Edwards is hot.”

Cate took one look and said, “Dad, that’s disgusting. Do you want to burn that or do you want me to?” “Oh, yeah,” he answered, “I think it’s weird.” Then he showed it to the next three people who walked into the room. Cate said, “Dad, you are so proud of that.” “No, I do think it’s weird.” “Okay then,” she answered, “stop showing it to people.” John never had to worry about getting too full of himself with Cate around. Bless her.

The night we were to speak, John and Cate and I were each in our own worlds, going over our speeches one last time, pulling at our clothes, watching the convention coverage from any one of the seven flat-screen televisions in the absurdly plush suite the campaign had chosen. In another room, Heather North was dressing the children, and they traveled separately from us to the convention center. Although I had bought their outfits, I had never seen them in them. So when they walked into the