The Senator's Wife Read Free

fended off a snatch at the doughnut box. “If not literally, then figuratively. By the time Election Day rolls around, the good voters of Mississippi are going to perceive Mrs. Honneker to be a sweet southern lady who’s one of them. They’ll want to vote for him because of her.”
    “What do you think you are, a genie? I think we should just settle for them not hating her.”
    “Not good enough,” Tom said, stuffing the box of doughnuts into the trash and squashing it with his foot. He grinned as Kenny howled, and punched theTV’s power button. The screen went dark. “We’re on the comeback trail, remember? We need to razzle-dazzle ’em. So we bust our fannies, and we make the voters love her. She’s the key to this election. Come on, Kenny, time to go meet the boss.”
    “Happy, happy, joy, joy,” Kenny said, but allowed Tom to drag him from the apartment with no more than a single longing look in the direction of the squashed doughnuts.

Chapter
3
    M ISSISSIPPI IN J ULY had to be the hottest place on earth, Veronica Honneker thought despairingly. The temperature had already reached 94, and was still climbing. If the atmosphere got any more stifling, she wouldn’t be able to breathe. The big white canvas tent she stood beneath sheltered her from the sun, but that was about all that could be said for it. Though her purple linen shift was short and sleeveless, it was still too much to be wearing on so hot a day. Her pantyhose could have been made of lead for all the air they let reach her legs. Her bra pinched. She could feel her antiperspirant giving up the ghost even as she swung into the closing lines of her luncheon speech. Moisture trickled down her back; her armpits felt wet. The small electric fan whirring on the floor of the platform beside her, ostensibly provided for her comfort, barely stirred the air.
    “Remember, a vote for my husband is a vote for education. And education is the bridge that will take the state of Mississippi into the twenty-first century,” Ronnie concluded her standard speech, trying to ignorea fly that had buzzed around her head for at least the last three minutes. Swatting at flies looked ridiculous, as she had learned from watching other speakers do it on videotapes provided by one of Lewis’s many flunkies. Don’t swat flies, do smile, hang on to the sides of the podium if you can’t think of anything else to do with your hands.… She’d had so much advice drummed into her head since marrying Lewis that she was sick of it.
    Her smile was genuinely warm with relief as she finished talking. Ronnie unfolded her cramped fingers from the edge of the podium and acknowledged the polite applause with a wave. Almost before she had left the dais, her audience had turned its attention to their desserts. If not forgotten, she was certainly dismissed.
    They didn’t like her, she knew. She had never been, and never would be, one of them . She was a northerner, a carpetbagger as the locals called her behind her back, a young, beautiful woman of no particular pedigree married to a rich, distinguished older native son whose roots went deeper than those of the state icon, the five-hundred-year-old Friendship Oak.
    The hostess—Mary something, Ronnie hadn’t quite caught the last name—touched her elbow, steering her to the table closest to the speaker’s platform. As always, this was where the biggest contributors would sit. And she always, always had to make nice to big contributors.
    “Mrs. Honneker, this is Elizabeth Chauncey.…”
    Ronnie smiled and offered her hand to the elderly woman just introduced.
    “I know your mother-in-law,” the woman informed her, and proceeded to tell her in excruciating detail justexactly how that was. Ronnie listened, smiled, and responded as intelligently as she could before being drawn on. It took over an hour to greet everyone in the tent. By the time she had clasped hands and exchanged a few words with the last potential donor/voter,