video.”
“Maybe it was Photoshopped.” Such things could happen. Hadn’t there been some kind of movie-star sex tape later proven to be a fake? And what about the time that talk-show hostess’s head had appeared on a magazine cover on top of someone else’s body?
“It wasn’t. God!” Diana bounced back to her feet.
Lizzie edged toward the window, turning away from Diana’s rage. She looked at her phone—her father had called her twice, probably while she’d been coaxing Milo out of the water, and it was almost five o’clock. “Milo needs dinner.”
“Fine,” Diana snapped. “Take him to McDonald’s again. Take him to Wendy’s. Get him pizza. Whatever he wants. I don’t care.”
“Are you going to tell him?” Lizzie asked.
Diana lifted one hand to her face and swiped at her forehead, and when she spoke, she sounded, for the first time, unsure. She walked to the window to stand next to Lizzie. The blue of the sky had deepened, and the angles of her face, the line of her lips were lit by the twilight glow. Lizzie reached for the camera that hung against her chest, then stopped her hands. Diana hated having her picture taken, and now was definitely not the time, even though she didn’t think she’d ever seen her sister looking so beautiful, or so sad. “I don’t know,” Diana said, and then startled Lizzie by asking, “Do you think he needs to know?”
Lizzie thought it over. If Milo was in school or camp, surely the other kids would have overheard their parents’ conversations and would possibly be talking about it. But school was out, and Milo had refused to go to computer camp or cooking camp or, heaven forbid, sports camp, which meant that he went for days without talking to anyone but his parents and Lizzie. He hardly watched TV—his mother carefully monitored his screen time, and what he did see was mostly nature documentaries, which Diana approved of, and cooking shows, which Milo loved.
“Maybe we shouldn’t tell him yet,” said Lizzie.
Diana gave a brisk nod, herself again. “Okay,” she said. “Give him dinner. I’m going to stop at home to change. I’m going out with Gary tonight, remember?”
Lizzie slipped her phone back in her purse. The two of them walked into the waiting room and found Milo sitting with his Leapster abandoned on his lap and his gaze trained on the television set.
“I think we’ve all got scandal fatigue,” said a redhead in a sweater that struck Lizzie as too low-cut and clingy for TV, or for someone who was old and emaciated. “Giuliani, Spitzer, Edwards, Sanford … what’s surprising at this point is the politician who doesn’t have something on the side.” She gave a bright little laugh as the screen filled with a shot of Milo’s Grandpa Richard, murmuring into the curly-haired woman’s ear. “The only interesting thing at this point is how the wife’s going to behave. If she’s going to stand up at the press conference or make him go sleep in the barn.”
“Those are the options?” The host sounded amused. “Stand by your man or go sleep in the barn?”
“Personally, I’d respect it if one of these women told her guy to go sleep with the fishes,” said the redhead. Her collarbones bounced up and down as she giggled at her own wit.
“Let’s give the senator credit,” said the young man in a bow tie who sat at the table beside her. “At least he didn’t use taxpayer money to pay for hookers. Or tell his constituents he was hiking the Appalachian Trail.”
The redhead gave him a thumbs-up. Her face was tight as a tambourine, but Lizzie could see blue veins bulging across the backs of her hands, and her skinny fingers looked like claws. “Bonus points for that.”
What if it was your dad? Lizzie wanted to call, assuming the brittle, bony old crone had ever had a father, that she hadn’t been hatched in some conservative think tank’s laboratory. How would you like it, if it was your father, and I was the one on TV,