Rise: How a House Built a Family(84)

Drew had dropped out of band and didn’t have a single extracurricular activity. Thanks to social media and his school classes, he maintained a few good friendships. But he was missing outings to movies and paintball fights.

Hope was old enough that our work was affecting her future in a more profound way. She had become involved in local politics and was offered a position at the beginning of summer as an intern at the Democratic Party of Arkansas under Bill Gwatney. She was planning to become an attorney, to change the way domestic-violence victims were treated in court, so the internship was an important foundation for her career. I wavered for only a minute before I told her to take the job. And she was diligent about working double time cooking and cleaning at the house we lived in and building on the job site whenever she wasn’t at her internship. It made things more complicated, but it was the right thing to do, deadlines be damned.

She decided to attend the Democratic National Convention in Denver, with the hope that her hero, Hillary Clinton, would be the Democratic nominee for president. It was going to be an expensive trip, so she set up jobs cleaning several houses in order to raise the money. She would miss the first couple of days of her senior year because of the trip, but it would be more educational than anything she could pick up in a textbook.

By August, her schedule was taking a toll on all of us. She was exhausted by the extra work, and we were so far behind schedule that we desperately needed her help.

“I think I’m going to quit the DPA,” she told me late one night while we were gluing the first narrow slats of cherry hardwood across my bedroom. “I got an offer to work on a local campaign that will be fewer hours until we finish the house.”

“That’s a bad idea,” I told her. “You gave the DPA a commitment. You shouldn’t go back on that. It’s your word.”

She argued the pros and cons of each job, and I listened without giving more advice. She knew where I stood, but she also knew that my policy was for each of the kids to manage their own lives from the time they turned thirteen. I was there to guide them, of course, but I let them make their own life decisions. My own grandmother had been on her own by thirteen during the Great Depression, and through most of human history it was considered near adulthood. Obviously, they weren’t fully on their own, but after they hit thirteen they did their own laundry and their share of the household work. With all that responsibility, it seemed only fair that they also became responsible for their own class selection and planning for their futures. Five years of cushioned decision making before they were fully on their own was the best way I knew to prepare them for the real world.

Hope decided to quit the job, and I supported her. Because that’s the other part of my policy. After I gently give my opinion, I’m behind them all the way no matter which way they go.

The Wednesday after she quit, I was at the office and my phone went nuts with e-mails and text messages from friends.

Have you heard from Hope yet?

Is Hope at the DPA?

Where is Hope?

Oh my God. Is Hope there?

Let me know if Hope needs anything.

I imagined car accidents and all manner of horrible things. Hope didn’t answer her phone. The DPA was only blocks from my office and I had heard sirens screaming by, but as far as I knew, she wasn’t supposed to be there. She had quit. Would she have gone back for any reason?

By the time I finally reached her, I had scanned the local news and heard the worst of it.

Bill Gwatney, the chairman of the DPA—and Hope’s boss only days before—had been assassinated. He was forty-eight.

“I just respected him so much,” she wept over the phone. “He was a mentor. He promised he would be there for me when I went through school and was looking for a job in politics. And he was always just so positive and supportive.”

She was a wreck, and so was I.

“If I had listened to you and stuck through the last week, I would have been right at the front desk. I would have been the one to let him in. I would have seen Bill shot again and again. What if I had tried to stop it? I mean, I don’t know what I would have done.”

It was close. Too close.

“Anytime you want to quit a job, you do it. Don’t listen to me,” I told her, frantic to push the images from my head. We hadn’t heard who had done it yet, or why. I had a terrible thought that it could be Adam. He was crazy enough that he could do something exactly like this.

We hadn’t heard from Adam in quite a while, and Matt was largely out of our lives while he got his life together. Yet here was another insane man reaching into our lives and taking something away. Just when we thought the waters were safe, we were reminded that life is never so neat and simple.

Within hours the gunman was run down and shot by the police. No motive was ever discovered. He had written profanities on the wall at a Target where he worked and walked out of the job earlier that day. They had found a Post-it note at his home with Bill Gwatney’s name and a phone number but no other connection. It wasn’t Adam.

Friday night I went with her to a vigil on the steps of the courthouse where Bill had been a state senator for ten years. The atmosphere at the courthouse was nerve-racking. Everyone was afraid, wondering if someone would shoot into the crowd. Wondering what terrible thing would happen next. Hope’s friends who had been in the building or in the same room with Bill needed to talk. They needed to share the horrible details. No matter how badly I wanted to plug her ears and run away, I stood with Hope and we listened.