"I will," Teresa said, nodding for emphasis, for she had made up her mind a few minutes earlier. Not to do his bidding, necessarily, but to leave this office under no pretense, as soon as she possibly could.

"You-- You will?"

Gerald fell from his crouch onto his ass.

"Oh God," he said. "Oh God I knew it. You are that person. You are that person!"

Gerald threw his face into his hands, and held them, and his face in them, for some time, while sitting on the floor next to her desk. His shoulders shook slightly. Teresa, having no other option, patted him gently on the crown of his head.

"There, there," she said. "There, there."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Twenty minutes later, Teresa was in the cold again, walking toward the Rob Jones campaign headquarters, still unsure whether she would actually steal the box of prepaid-postage envelopes, or simply go back to working for Jones, whose tactics -- the simple removal of enemy signs and trampling upon them -- seemed somehow less soul-wrecking than the mail fraud she'd been asked to aid and abet.

With her feet numb, she stepped into Archie's, a small narrow diner between an All-State brokerage and a karate studio. Just as she was pushing the door open and thinking how much it seemed like the setting for a candidate's diner-hopping, she caught sight of a man in a beautiful black suit standing on a chair, surrounded by two video cameras. Once inside she recognized him as Alexander Hamilton Washington, the distant-polling also-ran Republican candidate.

Teresa had not been paying close enough attention to the Republican side of the race, so hadn't yet figured out why an African-American real-estate developer and owner of an arena football franchise was running for the GOP nomination. She had seen a snippet of him in a debate with Carol O'Mealy, the terrifying radio person -- with the president notably but not unexpectedly absent -- and she'd been impressed by his good humor about the whole thing. He seemed to laugh a lot, at least in the short clip she'd seen. Sometimes, Teresa wanted only a protest candidate, or whatever he was, to give us a quick wink, acknowledge his place in the scheme of things, his utter lack of any chance to win, place or show, and then continue on his way.

Teresa had never seen him in person before, and as she found a table by the door of Archie's, sitting like a burrito in her thick faux camel's-hair coat, she was struck by the glow of his face, by the pleasing boom of his voice. There were perhaps eighteen people in the diner, and he had their attention in a way unfamiliar to her candidates-in-diners experiences, where those customers who weren't plants -- friends and relatives of the campaign staffers -- were invariably annoyed by the bustle of the cameras and reporters and handlers and wanted, very much wanted, to finish their cobbler and get back to wherever they were before they chose the most absolutely wrongest place to eat this particular day.

But Washington had these people listening, chuckling, their eyes actually sparkling. He was at ease, and they were at ease. That was a good deal of what made a politician palatable. At least, the people seemed to be saying, don't make me ever pity you.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

At the very same moment, though thousands of miles away, in Riverside, Calif., the parents, sister, brother-in-law and nephew of Alexander Hamilton Washington were entertaining a reporter and photographer from USA Parade magazine, a Sunday newspaper insert, who wanted to know more about the Washington, and could his family perhaps illuminate some kind of hardship he had to overcome to become who he is? There were rumors, the reporter reminded them, that he did most of his planning according to some hermetic calendar aligned with that of a breakaway sect of the Freemasons.

"The Freemasons?" Ben Washington, Alexander's father, said, raising his eyebrows in an exaggerated way. "Yes," the reporter said. "I read it online-- "

"The Freemasons?" Ben repeated, extending his eyebrows ever upward. Ben could raise his eyebrows to superior heights, which was intended to make the questioner sound silly, which in this case the eyebrows, hovering a few inches above his head, did.

The reporter, who until recently had only written fitness books for toddlers, was suddenly at a loss. She had no other questions in her notebook, which she'd bought on the way to the Washingtons' home. Her notebook looked like a reporter's notebook, and said Reporter's Notebook on the cardboard cover. But her editor hadn't prepared her for the prospect of the Freemason-calendar angle getting torpedoed so quickly.

"Well, sir, we're just trying to figure out what drew your son to politics. I think that's what I'm supposed to write about. That and who makes his suits."

At this, the assembled family of Alexander Hamilton Washington all shifted a bit in their seats, and each individually thought about how they might phrase an answer.

Alexander Washington Hamilton's family, by and large, didn't understand what had happened to him, what had gone wrong, and Alexander laughed about this, and sometimes they laughed, too. They loved him though he was a Republican, they listened to him though he didn't, to them, make any kind of sense a good deal of the time. How the Birmingham-born son of a U of A professor (his mother June) and a successful painter of landscapes (his father Ben) would grow to be one of the largest developers in the state, the owner of the Birmingham Blitz, political hobnobber, occasional CNN-FN pundit and now the first black Republican presidential candidate, was a stumper for anyone and beyond the powers of reasoning of his beleaguered family, particularly his mother June, who was scared to death that her son would be shot.

"I'm scared to death he'll get shot," she said to the reporter. Every opportunity she got, she said that, hoping that at some point her son would feel guilty enough about worrying his mother so that he would give up this crackpot bid and get back to his family. "I have a very bad arrhythmia, you know," she added. She added this whenever she could.

Her son had heard her worries and took whatever precautions he could afford, though he wasn't much concerned, given he wasn't a threat to anyone. He was seen, and he had come to peace with this fact, at best as a cheerful oddity, a harmless anomaly; at worst, a smiling Uncle Tom, a sellout, the Great Appeaser of the Republican Conscience.

Alexander Hamilton Washington was a handsome man of 55, a smidge over 6 feet tall and just now starting to gain weight around the midsection. He'd been married to Charlotte Menendez, whom he'd met in law school in Ann Arbor, for twenty years now, and they had three children, all in high school. Alexander was fit, his smile was easy without being exactly cheerful, and he walked with a briskness of step that underlined his sense of purpose. There was a large framed photo of him striding across the stage of the University of Michigan, and the USA Parade reporter asked about it.

"Seems like the stride of a man with a sense of destiny," she observed. She was out of her depth. What she really wanted to do was write about teaching yoga through Head Start.

"He always walked like that," June said to the reporter. "He walked very quickly to school, very quickly home. Very quickly to tennis practice, very quickly to his summer job. Head down, legs moving quickly, short strides--"

"He walked like a kid with a load in his pants!" roared Ben, who then laughed in a pained, wheezy way, which is how he laughed. "Anywhere he went, he walked like he had a load." Ben began to rise from his chair and, realizing he was about to imitate this walk, June lunged and kept him seated.