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By Root 955 0

came in, holding a little plastic square with a negative sign across it, and said he was sorry. He left us alone, and although we were unhappy, we knew how lucky we were to have Emma Claire. We resigned ourselves to the great gifts we had in our daughters, and we’d started to get up to leave when the doctor ran back in. In his hand was the little plastic square, but perpendicular to the negative sign another line was forming. It was impossible to say who was most excited. And when we left happily, the doctor chased us out to our car; we’d forgotten the little plastic square with the perpendicular lines; he was sure we’d want that for the baby book. Those perpendicular lines would soon be our son Jack. There were, however, a few intervening events.

Cate’s life was in overdrive—she had the senior year she deserved. And we finally did some things we needed to do at our house. The family room had always been the center of our activities, or at least our activities outside the kitchen. We had so many memories of Wade coming home to that room, bounding through the front door, spotting us, sitting next to John, on top of him, really, pressing himself into whatever space John was in, and John would push him and tease him. When Wade was seven, it was there we watched Wade’s favorite team, the Denver Broncos, lose the Super Bowl. Wade had taken an orange football helmet and taped on the side a drawing he had made of the Broncos’ trademark horse. He sat in that family room, his chin in his hands, that enormous helmet atop his head, and tears streamed down his face as the Broncos were unable to stop the New York Giants. We had thirteen Christmases in that room. It is where we watched Tar Heel basketball games, political conventions, and approaching hurricanes. It is where we read whatever was assigned in English class, cuddled under a blanket my mother bought during my father’s last tour of duty in Italy. And it was now a room we did not want to enter, a place so filled with happy memories that it made us too sad to be there. Finally in 1999 we decided to make a change, and so the rooms changed places—the dining room, the living room, and the family room played a kind of musical chairs that disrupted the house through Cate’s entire senior year and through my last pregnancy. And through even more.

After Al Gore secured the Democratic nomination for president in the spring of 2000, Warren Christopher, perhaps as a courtesy, visited all the Democratic senators in an attempt to help Gore find a running mate. The famous Christopher reserve we had seen on television was, according to John, exactly what you got in person. He asked John about other senators, and John spoke highly of each one. All in all, an interesting experience. And Christopher certainly hadn’t tipped his hand to John, so with the rest of the country we waited for the names on Gore’s list. I admit that we weren’t on pins and needles. We had a growing two-year-old, and all of Cate’s end-of-senior-year events, assemblies, and parties were crowding the schedule. We were glad to be looking forward to them rather than dreading them, as we had three years earlier when Wade’s class graduated.

And I was very pregnant. If Trent Lott, then the majority leader in the Senate, agreed that there would be no votes that day, Jack would be delivered on May 19th. Honestly, we waited to schedule Jack’s birth until after Senator Lott agreed that there would be no votes. The doctors had been adamant that at my age, and after three previous cesarean section deliveries, Jack would be delivered by cesarean section a few days earlier than the due date. On John’s request, with Senator Tom Daschle’s help, Lott agreed, and May 19th it was. Cate and John and I went over to Chapel Hill in the early morning. Jack—John Atticus Edwards—was delivered before 9 A.M. He looked just like his father, in every wonderful way but in an odd way, too. His hair looked almost combed, and in his father’s hair style, when they first showed him to me in the delivery room. I thought it was a joke Valerie Parisi, my obstetrician,