Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [95]
It was as if Cate and I were once again sitting on the curb at UPS in the rain long after Air Force One had left Raleigh. But I didn’t despair then, and I didn’t despair now. I had Cate and all those precious girls sleeping in her room, I had a little girl covered in a mop of yellow curls, I had a new baby boy with a freckle in his palm, and I had John. Instead of getting on that plane to Nashville, we made reservations at the children’s favorite restaurant for dinner. And John took a trash bag and picked up the remains of this adventure from the sidewalk across the street. Having these girls there—although they were just eighteen at the time—made it so much better. We had known them so long, coached them and watched them grow, and now, without knowing it, they were there, a soft, embracing pillow that—with our own children—broke what might have been a fall. We went out to dinner with the girls and the younger children, everyone laughing, the children misbehaving, everything back to normal.
It’s hard to explain, but we did not have a great sense of loss when we heard Lieberman’s name. We never really thought John would be picked. Our period of expectation was only the forty-eight hours or so after Bill Daly called, and I got a new wardrobe out of it. We heard the back story later—it drifts out, it always does—and it seemed that John was closer to being chosen than we had imagined. Once, months and months later, after the recount and the last concession speech, I saw Hadassah Lieberman at a Senate spouses’ event. She was nice, saying she had thought about me a lot and wished me well. I told her I had thought about her, too, only—after the recount and the election that would not end—I had thought, There but for the grace of God go I. I need to be a little more careful about what I say, I think.
All of this took place in a house we bought in Washington. We didn’t want to dismantle our home in Raleigh, couldn’t really, since we would be home for holidays. So we bought new furniture, or more accurately, I bought new furniture, for the D.C. house. To do that, I stepped into a world I had not known, of decorators and upholsterers, refinishers and showroom representatives. And they were fantastic. B.A. Farrell is an architect and designer who grew up in Troy, a town near where John is from. I accuse B.A. of designing a space and then having such allegiance to the space that he doesn’t want someone to ruin it, so he helps decorate it, too. He will take his collection of clients, mostly women, to High Point to buy furniture and fabric so the integrity of the space is retained. As odd as it sounds, this traveling group is its own community—“B.A.’s girls,” perhaps—women whose only connection is B.A. You travel with whomever B.A. collects for a day, women you don’t know, and you always have a great time. I went with a woman whose husband is an active Republican in the state. John came home and said, “Why is there a George Bush sticker on the car in our driveway?” “Well,” I told him, “she left her car here and we rode with B.A.” And I spent a day pulling out fabrics for this Republican woman’s bedroom, saying, “Would this look nice?” It was great fun.
We all know B.A. never feeds us, so we’ve learned to bring our own food. It was always good to go when Jane Henderson went, because she would bring her fabulous chocolate chip cookies. One time five of us went to Farmville, Virginia, to Green Front Furniture. It’s a good drive to Farmville, but worth it. They have furniture, but we were going for the carpeting and the rugs. We were each looking for carpet for ourselves, but as we moved through the huge rolls, we would call out to the others—“Is someone looking for a light blue?” We’d have to get Ricky, who worked there, to get carpet down for us, but even finding the rolls was hard work. After several hours, we stopped and ate the lunch we had brought.