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Wednesday, January 20, 2021, 8:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

Mary sat back silently in the passenger seat of the old Buick and closed her eyes. Her husband Jeff was still muttering about the neighbors’ Black Lives Matter sign as he pulled onto the highway. “No respect for what the man has gone through,” Jeff snarled.

The morning drive to her job at Ball-Mart was longer than she might wish, about 35 minutes. There was, however, no longer any public transportation option in the ex-urban Midwestern area in which they lived. Her job was a grind, but she was grateful to have it. Very few people had made it through the 2020 crash and accompanying social unrest without being laid off for substantial periods; she had been one of the few lucky ones. The job provided a level of stability that had been missing for far too much of their almost- 25-year marriage.

Twenty-five years coming up. She folded her arms and her mind drifted back to how happy she and Jeff had been when they had married in 1996. Jeff was everyone’s favorite. He was tall, good-looking, funny, cheerful, the life of every party. The idea that he would ever snarl at his neighbors over politics was unthinkable back then. He got along with everyone, and everyone seemed to love him.

And everything looked like it was coming together. The economy was booming. Jeff was working at a local manufacturing plant after his return from the Air Force, taking courses at the local community college, and was talking about transferring to the state university to get a bachelor’s degree. She was taking courses there as well, in accounting. But she had to stop them when she got pregnant.

When their son Danny was born, in 1999, everything had seemed perfect. Her college plans had to be put aside for a few years, but that was okay. She was in love with her son. Jeff was working extra shifts to save up for a house; their apartment was really too small for their family. And then she was pregnant again, and now the apartment really was too small.

By 2005, her son Danny had started school; by 2007 her daughter Jane had entered kindergarten, and Mary was able to start working part-time. She and Jeff were finally able to get a loan for a house big enough to fit all of them with some room to spare. She finally felt like she could breathe again, and that summer, on the Fourth of July, she invited some of her relatives whom she had not seen for a long time to come out from the city for a pool party.

Her cousins had all finished college, and most of them had gotten advanced degrees. When they talked about their work, she couldn’t figure out how people got paid for it. As she walked around with a tray of chips and spinach dip, she asked one of them what he did.

“I’m a consultant,” one cousin said. He took a chip, dipped it, and took a swig of beer. “We do software installations,” he continued, mouth full.

“So you’re like a computer guy?”

“No, not exactly. We have engineers for that. I sell the projects and then manage them.”

“But you don’t know the technology?”

“Well, I know what it does. The engineers aren’t good at dealing with customers. The customers are all manager types. I do relationship management, and the engineers do the work under the hood.”

She walked to the other side of the yard and tried another cousin.

“I’m in finance,” the cousin, who was monitoring her own young kids, frolicking in the above-ground pool, answered.

“What kind of stuff?”

“Well, most of it’s mortgage-backed securities,” she said.

“Mortgage-backed?” she asked, holding the tray out to her. “What does that mean?”

“Well, it’s pretty complicated,” the cousin answered, waving the tray off, “but I like to think it boils down to, we spread risk around so that more people can buy houses. We take what would be risky investments by themselves, and by putting them together in a giant pool, it smooths out the risk.”

“Wow,” Mary said. “Sounds complicated.”

“It can be, I guess,” her cousin said.

“So maybe you helped us get a loan finally,” Mary said.

“I hope so,” the cousin replied. “So, was this a balloon payment loan you got for this house? Was it a NINJA? You guys have jobs, though, right?”

“NINJA? I don’t know. But sure,” she said. “I’m working part-time at Ball-Mart and Jeff’s a foreman at the factory now.”

“That’s great,” her cousin answered. “The American Dream. Where does he work?”

“JDS,” Mary said.

“How are they doing with all the new Chinese competition?”

“Fine, I guess,” Mary said. “Excuse me… I have to get some of this food over there.”

“By all means, don’t let me hold you up,” the cousin said, smiling. “Congrats on the house!”

But she could not squelch the seed of doubt that instantly took root in her mind. Ninja? Balloon payment? It’s too good, she thought. We’re too lucky. The house is too big, we’re too happy.

She walked around with the tray to the other side of the pool, where Jeff was talking to a younger cousin, Joe. Both had bottles of beer; Jeff was holding a spatula and keeping an eye on some burgers on the grill in front of him.

A couple of five year-old nephews or cousins ran up to Jeff and made faces at him. Jeff pretended he did not see for a second, then turned suddenly toward them and his mouth dropped open in feigned shock. The boys danced mockingly in front of him, and Jeff made a sudden lunge for them. They screamed in laughter, raced away, and hurtled into the swimming pool just before Jeff was about to catch them. Jeff gave a “Curses, foiled again” look, then turned and walked back, spatula still in hand.

“Our baby cousin here is enlisting,” Jeff said, grinning and puffing from the exertion. He took a chip and a healthy scoop of spinach dip from Mary’s tray and went back to tending the burgers on the grill. Joe declined her offer with a shake of his head.

“Really?”

Mary was surprised. Joe had always seemed shy and somewhat sensitive. She had never really gotten to know him, but he seemed to always be surrounded by girls, and was a very good musician.

“Didn’t you want to finish college?” she asked him.

“I just couldn’t get into it,” Joe said. “It seemed, I don’t know, fake. I didn’t want to end up an accountant or something.”

“How are your parents taking it?”

Joe’s parents were recently divorced; he had been living with his mom for the last year or two.

“Mom’s more upset. Dad’s… I don’t know. He’s hard to read.”

“When do you go?”

“A few weeks.”

“Well I’m glad we got to see you before you went. You know Jeff here was in the Air Force.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “We were just talking about that.”

“It was nothing like what he’s going into,” Jeff said. “Rangers is a lot different than being a Water and Fuel Systems Maintenance Journeyman.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’ll make it as a Ranger. It’s just a goal. Besides, without your stuff, nothing happens,” Joe said.

“Sure. But you’ll be the tip of the spear. I was just a REMF.”

“Remph?” Mary said.

“Rear echelon…maintenance facilitator,” Jeff said, smiling crookedly. Joe smiled and looked away.

“I better distribute these burgers,” Jeff said after a moment, after grabbing a platter and beginning to offload large patties covered in melted cheese onto it with the spatula.

“And I’d better bring out more plates,” Mary said turning toward the back door. “Sure,” Joe said, still smiling, making room for their movements by backing away.

Nice kid, Mary thought. I like him better than his parents.

** *

Almost 14 years later, that cookout now stood out to Mary as the high point of their life. Big house… pool… kids running around happy with cousins and friends. Jeff with a twinkle in his eye, giving advice to a younger man. And her cousins, whom she had always felt saw her as somehow lower-class, impressed with all they had. The American Dream.

The car hit a pothole and Jeff issued a muffled curse. Mary’s eyes opened and she saw they were about halfway to Ball-Mart. She closed them again. The American Dream.

** *
After that pool party, it had all begun to fall apart, as if God had looked down and put his finger on them and said, Now you will know what Job suffered.

It started with Jeff. The stable, generations-old family business was suddenly not so stable. Suddenly they had to lay off half their workforce. Jeff was kept on a part-time basis. His hours seemed to be just as long, though – he was management, and could not invoke union work rules.

Then Mary’s hours were reduced. She and Jeff spent long nights at the kitchen table trying to figure out how to make ends meet. The kids could tell there was something wrong. The big balloon payment was coming due, and they had to refinance. They had been assured that doing this would be child’s play. It was not. They had six months to come up with a huge amount of money, just when each of them was bringing in about half their previous salary.

“Nobody ever told me it was going to be this hard,” Jeff had repeated, night after night.

Mary gritted her teeth and started asking relatives for money, without telling Jeff. She was still hoping that it would blow over if they could just borrow the money to get over this hump. Her parents and siblings were in no position to help. Her cousins were the ones on whom she pinned her hopes.

But her cousins, nearly all of them liberal Democrats who constantly bewailed the greed and stinginess of Republicans, all pled poverty when she approached them. Joe’s dad Mike was the most disappointing. She had always looked up to him when they were growing up. He went to a fine Ivy League college and seemed to have a glamorous career in some strange branch of insurance. But he, too, said he was not in a position to give her much of anything.

“I could manage maybe a thousand,” Mike said. “But I kind of got the shaft in the divorce. And things are pretty dicey at my company too.”

Mary took the thousand. But ever after, she could not meet Mike’s gaze, even though he never brought the loan up. Gradually, they completely stopped seeing one another.

Then the next domino fell. Jeff was working late one night when he injured his back in a forklift accident. The immediate financial hit was small, and he got back to work quickly. A bit too quickly, Mary thought now. She could tell he was not sleeping well. He could not find a position that was not painful.

So the doctor prescribed him some pain pills. It seemed to solve the problem, until the prescription ran out. After that, Jeff began driving all over their part of the state, looking for a doctor to prescribe him more pills. He succeeded, and kept working.

The balloon payment came due the very same day Jeff was laid off. His boss called Mary a day later and told her that they had been concerned for some time about Jeff. He seemed not to be himself. Had she noticed anything strange? She loyally answered negatively. But she knew from the pupils of Jeff’s eyes that he was taking something powerful. Where he was getting it was another question, one she did not want to think about.

The clock began ticking on their eviction. Jeff was no longer the twinkly cheerful man she had married. He was by turns was frantic, then grandiose, then in a daze. There were no more relatives to ask for money. She began avoiding family and friends. When her mother died, right about that time, at the wake, there was a new distance between her and the other cousins. They all seemed to be in fine shape. The kids looked well and their clothes looked newer than the ones her kids wore. She apologized for Jeff’s absence, and told them all that he had had to work. None of them pressed her. She knew Jeff was not at home, but it was anyone’s guess where he was.

Things spiraled down from there. Jeff got arrested the first time even before they were evicted. He had lost a ton of weight and looked almost feral when she visited him at the county lockup. The creature on the other side of the glass bore only a faint, mocking resemblance to the happy, laughing boy of fifteen years earlier – or even the cheerful backyard dad of just a couple of years previous.

There was no money for a lawyer. Eviction was scheduled in a week. Mary told him she would find a place for herself and the kids, but he should not come home until he was straightened out. He punched the plexiglass between them, but seemed to agree.

The place she found for herself and the kids, after the eviction crew had put their things out on the lawn, was a shelter. Her daughter cried every night they were there. Her son shouted in his sleep. Mary had to leave them in the shelter’s day care center when she went to work at the Ball-Mart. She would never forget the terrified look of abandonment in her children’s eyes that first day she had to leave them there.

The overriding memory for Mary of this time was the intense, pervasive shame she felt at how far they had fallen, and how quickly. She had just come to think she was good enough, and had worked hard enough, to deserve all that they had had. But she was wrong. There was something fundamentally wrong with her life.

What had saved her and the kids back then was a minister who came to the shelter to bring food, blankets, and toys for the kids. He listened to her story and told her she had nothing to be ashamed of, that God loved her and her kids and even Jeff, and would provide. He got them transferred to a better shelter closer to the kids’ school, and helped her look for an apartment she could afford. She began bringing the kids to services on Wednesday nights and Sundays. She drew some measure of solace from these services, and from the friends she made there. Everyone there seemed to be dealing with some aspect of the national crisis: eviction, bankruptcy, addiction, depression, cancer, old age. She did not feel alone anymore.

When the 2008 election had come up, she felt she had to vote for change. She admired the Republican candidate deeply, and his Christian female running mate rang a lot of bells for her. But Okomo was such a magnetic and hopeful figure. She had to vote for hope.

But things got worse for Mary’s family for a while under Okomo. Her son began acting out, and her daughter seemed listless and depressed. God knew where Jeff had ended up. They had gotten a small subsidized motel room not too far from work. She car-pooled to save on gas. Thank god they had at least paid off the car and did not have to worry it would be taken from them. Mary slowly began working to pull together the scattered and smashed bits of her family’s life.

The 2010s were difficult years. She struggled her way into a subsidized rental house after a year and a half. It took most of the decade, but Jeff had finally come back into their lives as something like a father figure. He was on Social Security Disability now, which cushioned their monthly financial burden; when he could find an odd job off the books, he took it. And she was now a grocery supervisor at the Ball-Mart, with full benefits.

But their son had never really recovered from the trauma of his childhood, and his teen years were troubled. She had come home one day when Jeff was out at one of his jobs and Jane was at a school friend’s to find Danny hanging by his belt from a high hook in the bathroom.

If it had not been for the church, she might have completely lost her mind then. But Jeff, against all expectation, stood by her, and she knew her daughter needed her. None of her relatives, of course, were at the funeral. She had not informed any of them; overcome as she was, she probably would not have been able to get the message out anyway. But later on, thinking it over, she had felt a coldness creep into her heart toward her family. They weren’t there for me or my family when we really needed help, so they can go to hell, she thought. She had a new family.

She had voted for Okomo twice, though the second time with far less enthusiasm. Jeff did not vote, since his jail time had revoked his registration, but expressed contempt for the man. “What did he really do for us?” he had asked. “Okomocare is too expensive. And I don’t think he’s a Christian.”

Jeff had gained a lot of weight, and was spending more and more time in the small dilapidated rental house on an old used laptop. Every day he had new shocking revelations to reveal about Okomo and his party. Okomo was a Muslim, with terrorist sympathies. He had doubled the national debt, as part of his secret plan to hobble and destroy America. He never put his hand over his heart during the National Anthem. And then he had said that thing about people like them “clinging to guns and religion.” Jeff still snarled about that.

***

As they drove on, Mary thought about “the new Jeff.” It suddenly occurred to her, looking over again from the passenger seat, that she had completely lost the occasional pangs of jealousy she used to feel when Jeff would be laughing and joking with another woman. She was no longer worried that another woman was going to be attracted to the new, battered, heavy, politically-obsessed Jeff.

She had been bemused by Jeff’s political theories and time spent on-line, and thought maybe he had just replaced one addiction with another. Yet the “new Jeff” had some useful attributes. She could have done without his AR-15 in the closet. But his new addiction to on-line politics didn’t bankrupt them or send him to jail, and she had to admit she had developed some doubts about Okomo and the Democrats too. They talked about how great the economy was, spouting statistics, but it sure didn’t feel like it.

And then there were the Mexicans. She was no racist, but many more Mexicans were working at Ball-Mart. She had to admit they were almost all very nice, quiet people; but they seemed to be taking a lot of jobs.

And she remembered that during the worst of their bad years, the early 2010s, when Jeff had run through all his prescription medications, polite well-mannered young Mexican men would knock on the door to supply him with what turned out to be tiny balloons containing little balls of black tar heroin. She didn’t like to admit it, but she could not think about Mexicans anymore without remembering how they seemed to be both taking over her town and poisoning its people.

So when the President announced his candidacy in 2015 and said that the Mexicans were bringing drugs and crime, she was ready to hear him. She did not like him at first. He was such a blowhard. But he kept assuring people like her that he respected them and he would put them first. Hope and change had been promised in 2008, but precious little of either had made it here. And she remembered that her better-educated, wealthier cousins were all Democrats. They looked down on her and her church and her people. It was time to vote for change again.

To hell with Okomo, she had thought at the time. He might have not grown up rich, and maybe he was born in America. But everything fell apart on his watch for us. Maybe somebody had recovered in his eight years. Her cousins sure had. But all she had known was eight years of desperate back-breaking labor under constant uncertainty.

Things weren’t as bad in 2016 as they had been when Okomo was elected. But Mary was through with hope. It had all been too hard. This time she was voting out of anger, to send a message. And even though things had taken a sudden u-turn with the virus after three solid years under the new President, she still trusted him.

Democrats seemed to be out to get him from the time he got elected, and the virus was just their latest attempt. Eventually she started believing more of what Jeff told her from the Internet. There was a Deep State out to get him, and the virus had been hatched by them. Everything said and done against him was part of a big Hoax designed to overturn a legal election. Remember when Ruppert had come out with his report? It seemed like a decade ago now. But the Democrats couldn’t even get Ruppert to say the President had committed a crime, and well, that just drove those Democrats crazier. They impeached him over some phone call with another country’s leader. A phone call!

And that had failed too, and the Democrat candidates were terrible, twenty-plus people falling all over each other to get the cameras on them. And then the last two were really old men, older than the President, and anyway they all had said they would give free health care to illegal immigrants even though real Americans didn’t even get that, just when the Deep State Virus Hoax hit. And their responses to that virus just seemed like more giveaways to lazy people.

And later on that year, after all the riots by scary black-clad extremist liberals on Jeff’s YouTube channels, and black people burning down cities after those bad cops killed one of them (she couldn’t blame them for being angry, but they scared her anyway), and maybe the fact that she assumed (but did not know for sure, since they didn’t talk anymore) that her cousins hated the President, made her like the President even more.

So, her vote was never in doubt by November 2020, not even as people she knew or worked with were incapacitated by illness, and some even died. And the President and First Lady got the virus. Heck, she had even gotten it, or so she thought, anyhow. It was like a bad cold for her, but she never felt like she could afford to stay home from work, the way all those rich liberals kept telling her to do. Even with the President getting it, all this nonsense about the virus coming back and the administration covering it up was just more Democrat whining, or maybe another Deep State plot to make the President look bad.

***

And so, she was glad the President was getting inaugurated again today. She looked over at Jeff again. He was right, she decided.

As Jeff turned into the lot and pulled up to the entrance to the store, she saw the long line of people waiting for the Food Pantry, situated next door in a failed big-box store, to open. They looked sullen, beaten, somehow less than human behind their cheap masks. They were the losers; they were the ones looking for handouts; she had risen above them, and she would never be where they were, never again.

“Thanks, hon,” Mary said, kissing Jeff on the cheek as she opened the door and got out. She opened the back passenger-side door and got her purse out. Jeff rolled down the passenger side window.

“8:30,” she said to Jeff. She suddenly thought about her daughter Jane, who had been coughing in her rear bedroom when they left. “Remember, if Jane’s cough gets worse, bring her to the doctor.”

“I will,” Jeff said. He called to someone behind her. “Hey, Geno. How are you? Nice piece.”

“Hey, Jeff,” replied the armed guard, toting an AR-15 a lot like Jeff’s. He grinned and said, “Nice shirt.”

“You know him?” Mary said, putting her purse over her shoulder.

“Sure. Met him at some on-line meetings,” Jeff said. Mary turned and looked at the guard. All the entrances had been similarly guarded ever since the food riots that had started about the same time as the Black Lives Matter protests the previous year, then increased as rent forgiveness ended and unemployment supplements lapsed and destitution became more widespread. She had wished back then that she could wear body armor at work. Sometimes she still did. She waved to Jeff and walked toward the door.

“Hey, Gene.”

“Hey, Mary.”

She took one last look at Jeff and smiled. He smiled back as he pulled away. Her family had been through hell the last twelve years. But now at least they were not going to be last in line for anything.

Happy Inauguration Day, Mr. President, she thought. You might be far from perfect, even a real dirtbag in some respects, just like the Democrats said.

But you’re our dirtbag.