Page 26 of The Light Year

“It’s my money to spend,” Barbie had said defiantly. “Mom left it to me, and I want to help where I can. Do you know how many people go hungry in this country, Daddy? Do you?”

Senator Mackey grumbled something she couldn’t understand. “Those are the people who need to learn to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Barbara.”

“Those are the people I want to help,” she said haughtily, feeling more defiant and also more firm in her beliefs than she had since her father insisted she rethink marrying a nobody like Todd Roman. “I want to set up a foundation in Mom’s name,” she’d said, inspiration striking in the moment. “The Marion Foundation.”

George Mackey was fuming on the other end of the line. Barbie knew her father well enough to know that he was probably standing at his desk, one fist on his hip, staring out the window at the autumn trees and fallen leaves, his face as stormy as the gray November sky.

“Any foundation formed with the money your mother and I set aside for you should be called The Mackey Foundation.” He paused, leaving a wall of silence between them. “If you’re going to give our money away, then at least help your brother’s political career by shining some light in his direction.”

Barbie had rewarded that comment with silence; she and Ted were not particularly close, nor had they been since childhood. And anything she aimed to do altruistically really had no weight on his political aspirations. But she knew that saying those things over the phone to her father was just a faster way to get him to intervene and disrupt her plans, so she'd simply moved on.

"I'd like to look into the formation of a foundation, Daddy," Barbie said instead. "Can you give me the name of a lawyer to speak to?"

The rest of the conversation had been brief, but Barbie knew from experience that her father would not roll over so easily. They'd ended the call with him promising to set her up with legal counsel, and Barbie had hung up, feeling tentatively proud of herself for coming up with the idea at all, much less posing it to her rather imposing father.

Now, as the day has worn on, and Barbie has lost herself in the daily details of her life, she's played the conversation over and over in her mind, worrying each word from her father like a pebble worn smooth.

Any foundation formed with the money... at least help your brother's political career... that's insane... those are the peoplewho need to learn to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Barbara...

Her father's words and opinions bounce around in her head as she opens the front door and greets Henry and Heath at the end of the school day. The same words echo in her ears as she cuts up celery and spreads peanut butter in the little troughs of the vegetables. She puts the plate on the table with three glasses of milk and calls the boys to come eat so they can all walk to the park together and meet up with Carrie and her kids, but all the while as her children snack, Barbie is standing at the kitchen counter in her knee-length skirt and Keds, doodling thoughts onto a notepad and only half-hearing what the kids are saying.

This is important to her, and she's going to make this work—there is no other option. The Marion Foundation--even the very notion of it--is scratching at an itch that has, thus far, felt totally elusive for Barbie. But finding her way out into the world, the actual,realworld, has opened her eyes. Life is not just cocktail parties for politicos, and it's not skiing in Vermont at Christmas. Of course, marrying Todd all those years ago had given her entree into a lifestyle far more common than her own, and she'd loved walking into the Roman household and seeing the family she'd always wanted for herself: happy, warm, contented, and not the least bit ostentatious.

But Barbie had also loved her own upbringing; there's no way to pretend that the comfort that money provides doesn't havesomeupsides--it just does. And, as a young girl, the life she'd known had been, well, the only life she'd known. Living entirely without creature comforts isn't something that Barbie is keen to do herself, and a big part of her goal with the foundation is to provide every human she can with some of those comforts. Or, at the very least, with the basic necessities for life.

What that will all look like is as yet undecided and unknown, but her mind is whirling with the possibilities. She puts apackage of chicken breasts into a glass casserole dish and bathes them in broth and spices, then puts the dish in the fridge until she gets back from the park with the boys.

There's plenty of work to be done and there are still a million details to hammer out, but Barbie wants to sit down with Carrie on the park bench as the children play together so that she can tell her all about this big idea. If there's one person in her life who she knows will be excited to see things move forward, it's Carrie, and so Barbie grabs the list she's been making on the kitchen counter and shoves it into her pocket, ushering her now-fed boys out the door and into the afternoon sun.

bill

. . .

He and Jeaniehave spoken--of course they have. Bill has apologized for the public nature of his display of affection, but not for its occurrence, which feels honest to Bill. He'd been so moved by seeing her out there at the fence that day that doing anything other than holding her, kissing her, and making his feelings known would have been entirely disingenuous. And, to her credit, Jeanie has owned up to her own decision to lean into the kiss, though Bill would have been fine taking the full blame for such an action.

In the ensuing weeks and months, they've had heated discussions outside the building during smoke breaks (Bill puffing away at a cigarette from the pack he keeps stashed in his drawer at work), and in stairwells, though they now know well enough that to touch one another in the stairwell would be akin to announcing to the world that something is going on between them.

And that, Bill thinks, is the ultimate question:isanything going on between them?

Surely what has happened so far would be enough to cause irreparable harm to Bill's marriage, and without a doubt, theirongoing fascination with one another (though, would Bill call it a fascination? Maybe an attraction? Interest? Emotional pull?) will have to come to a finale of sorts. They simply cannot go on as they have been, and so, just days before Thanksgiving, Bill has asked her to meet him at The Black Hole for a drink after work, which should give them the cover of seeing one another publicly and with coworkers, and will ideally loosen them both up enough for a quick walk by the pier so that Bill can explain himself further to her.

What the drink amongst coworkers really does is allow Bill to observe Jeanie as she laughs and talks with the other astronauts and engineers, and in doing so, he sees the way she's lit from within. Her witticisms and funny comebacks as the engineers crack jokes make Bill smile as he watches her, and when she turns to look at him mid-sentence, Bill gets caught staring.

The smile on Jeanie's face grows serious. "I think so, don't you, Bill?" she asks, including him in whatever discussion she's been having with a guy named Jack.

"You'll have to excuse me," Bill says, feeling embarrassed, "I got lost in thought. Say again?"

Jack leans on his elbow and raises his voice, preparing to be heard over the din of the other happy drinkers. "We were just saying that we're rounding the bend into '67, and that means we have three more years to get to the moon. Jeanie thought we should start a pool to see who thinks we'll make it before 1970, and she said the two of you both believed we'd have boots on the moon during this decade."

Bill looks down into his glass as he smiles; this is a frequent topic of conversation over drinks, and Jeanie knows that he not only thinks it's possible, but inevitable.

"I do think we'll make it," Bill says definitively. "Absolutely. Put me in the pool for ten bucks."

"Bets start at twenty," Jack says with a smirk. "Count you in?"

"I'm in." Bill lifts his glass and knocks back the last swig of whiskey. "But for tonight," he says, patting the table as he stands. "I'm out."

The Beatles are on the jukebox, and there is a holiday warmth to the bar, with people who are already free for the holiday relaxing into second and third drinks, and layers of tinsel criss-crossing the bar and hanging from the ceiling like streamers at a birthday party.

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