Always Read Free

‘Tonight We Changed the World,’ and they sincerely believe that they’ll be a party to history. Pop icons Eric Clapton and Kenneth ‘Babyface’ Edmonds have both flown into town and will be onstage at some point tonight to sing a song they had on the charts a couple of years ago, ‘If I Could Change the World.’ That tune has been the unofficial theme song of this campaign in the last few weeks as it has been played at every campaign stop.
    â€œSo although it’s a dead heat for the presidency according to our latest polls, hope is very much alive here in Miami. This is Butch Harper reporting from the Davis campaign headquarters in the grand ballroom of the Fontainebleau Hotel.”
    Miami, Florida
    Fontainebleau Hotel
    Suite 1717
    â€œHail Mary, full of grace,” Leslie whispered, and touched her fingers to her forehead, her chest, her left, then right shoulder.
    The wife of the candidate stood slowly, rubbed her knee, and sat on the corner of the king-sized bed. With the black lacquer television remote in hand, she flicked through several channels until she found CNN and a familiar face. She’d liked Bernard Shaw, who was a friend of the family, even when he was at CBS, and on this night she needed him to hold her hand until it was all over.
    As she leaned back on her pillows and ignored the wrinkles forming in her designer dress, she kicked off her shoes and dug her toes into the thick paisley comforter. It felt good to relax for a moment.
    The bedroom of the jasmine-scented suite was completelydark except for the blue light emanating from the television, and she could hear the supporters in the living room erupt as soon as the H in her husband’s name was heard. Her administrative assistant had left the suite to meet with her press secretary, so Leslie took a half Valium with a glass of red wine to soothe her mind. She never allowed anyone to see her take medication. Not even an aspirin. No one, except her husband and a physician friend of the family, knew about the Valium, because they remembered ’88 and what Kitty Dukakis had gone through. If Henry were to lose, history would point to her as the reason, and she did not want to bring any additional harm to this campaign.
    LESLIE
    My name is Yvette Leslie Shaw-Davis. I am forty-seven years old, five feet six and a half, a member of Delta Alpha Rho incorporated, Ooop Skiii . I attend mass twice a week, and I am a graduate of Georgetown Law.
    I weigh just under one-ten, work out every morning with a videotape from our friend Billy Blanks, and I typically wear my shoulder-length hair in a soft flip.
    My complexion is what one may call cocoa, and my eyes and nose are nothing special.
    I handle the money in our family, and let’s just say we’re financially well off due to investing in a small Florida-based company when I graduated which is now known as Red Lobster.
    I was born in Rome, New York, in the autumn of ’53 and we moved to California for my dad’s job in ’67. He came home one Friday after work and announced to us at dinner that we would be moving, and my mom never stopped sipping her tea.
    My brother, sister, and I looked in her direction, and all she said was, eat your food and stop looking at me. Next thing we knew, she was calling movers, and in a week we were in the station wagon headed toward the Pacific.
    As we rode through the mountains of Pennsylvania, I realizedI could never be a woman like that. The kind of woman who would follow orders without question. The sort of woman who would find an unknown shade of lipstick on a shirt and simply put it in cold water or will herself to believe that men always kept phone numbers folded up in their wallet. That was my mom. Quiet. Reserved. Never going against the grain. I knew that could never be me.
    Regarding my name, I’ve never cared for it. It doesn’t seem to flow like other names, such as Eleanor Roosevelt. Her name floats from