29. Reasons

At twenty-six feet in length and nine feet across at the beam, the Wyndham-Pryce motor boat was a commodious, richly-appointed craft, but, even so, it could not accommodate at one time all the party-goers who thronged the boardwalk in anticipation of the promised hour-long lake cruise. The Senator, claiming that a chaise longue was calling his name, had delegated his tour guide duties to Trev, and had strolled down to the dock with the sole intention of seeing the boat off. With Solomon-like wisdom, he decreed that those who had never yet had the pleasure should be the first aboard, and, as that criterion applied to nearly all the campaign volunteers, the fore and aft lounges were soon crammed with chattering young people. At Emma's urging, a few more inches of bench space were freed up for herself and Mitch, and, with that, the boat was filled to capacity. From his raised seat at the helm, Trev scanned the closely-packed passengers for any more wiggle-room, but there was none to be had. He was standing, irresolute, looking at Bonnie stranded on the shore, when Vanna suddenly popped up from her seat, and moved toward the boarding gate.

"Bonnie," she called, preparing to disembark, "take my place. I'm not that big on boating, anyway."

Bonnie's protest was immediate, and firmly seconded by the Senator. "That's very kind of you, my dear, but Bonnie's done the lake cruise so many times, I doubt she'll mind missing it this once. Add to that, if you sit yourself back down, you'll be doing me a favor. It's not often I get this lovely creature all to myself." He turned to Bonnie, his craggy face transformed by his courtly smile. "What do you say? Will you keep an old codger company while he puts up his feet for a while?"

Bonnie found herself absurdly tempted to curtsy at so gallant an invitation. "It'll be my pleasure, sir."

They waved the boat on its way, and turned their steps companionably up the long sloping lawn. The Senator set a leisurely, not to say plodding, pace up the hill, and dropped with a grateful sigh onto one of a line of thickly-padded lounge chairs set out at the top of the rise. Bonnie, settling onto the chair beside his, noticed a certain pinched look about his eyes and mouth, and wondered if he wouldn't do well to take the short nap Vanna had teased him about in her song.

Her concern must have been evident, as the Senator smiled a touch ruefully. "Getting old is not for the faint of heart, Bonnie." He stretched out his long legs, and leaned back into the cushions. With his right hand, he kneaded his left shoulder, beginning at the neck and continuing down to the upper arm. "Time was, I could take out a canoe, paddle the morning away, and be none the worse for it the rest of the day. Now, especially early in the season like this, the muscles complain like nobody's business."

Bonnie frowned in sympathy. "Can I get you anything for the soreness? Aspirin? Ibuprofen?"

"Thank you, no. All taken care of." His hand slid down to his breastbone, and began to scrub at his chest. "But if you wouldn't mind fetching me that birthday jar of Tums, I'd be glad of a tablet or two. You'd think I'd know better than to stuff myself with buffalo wings…"

Bonnie took the time to remove the container's stubborn security packaging and loosen the lid before returning with it to the Senator. He took it from her with thanks, and, plunging his hand into the wide opening, brought up a fistful of pastel-colored discs which he proceeded to pop, one after another, in his mouth, like candy. Watching him from only the corner of her eye as she sat looking out over the tranquil scene before them, Bonnie thought she saw him ingest at least four.

At length, he lowered the jar to the ground, and, lacing his long fingers together, rested his hands on his abdomen. He rolled his head slightly in her direction. "I'm sorry you weren't able to make it out here last night, Bonnie. We missed you."

Bonnie could not think how to respond to this, and covered her confusion with a weak smile. "I heard Mitch was here," she said, trying for lightness.

"Mitch!" The Senator snorted. "He certainly suffered by comparison, let me tell you! Honestly, I don't think I've ever met anyone with so little to say for himself. Where does Emma find these guys, can you tell me? It's getting to the point I think she scrapes the bottom of the barrel just to provoke us!"

The Senator appeared to be joking, but there was, Bonnie thought, a kernel of truth in what he said: Emma did routinely take up with men almost certain to trigger her parents' disapproval. All told, apart from his predilection for monosyllables and his general lack of animation, Mitch had struck Bonnie as an inoffensive specimen. "Maybe Mitch was just feeling a bit out of his depth. You know, new people, unfamiliar surroundings…"

The Senator harrumphed again, and fell silent, his gaze fixed for a spell on the idyllic panorama spread out below. The sky continued an unblemished blue over the slightly darker lake waters that stretched, barely ruffled, between the newly-green, tree-lined shores. In the distance, a lone pontoon boat motored sedately past one of the multimillion dollar showplaces that were increasingly replacing the area's older, more modest vacation homes, while closer in, a number of rubber dinghies, small row boats and colorful canoes made their slow way along or bobbed gently in place. Bonnie could not quite stifle a contented sigh at so peaceful a sight.

"It is a beautiful view," the Senator said, as if she had spoken. "I never get tired of it, even after all these years. It's a delight to the eye, and restores the soul somehow. Which reminds me, Bonnie, I've been wanting to tell you all day how much I love the Virginia series paintings. I always knew you were talented, but you really outdid yourself with those three. I can't wait to hang them in my Capitol office. My fellow senators will be green with envy. Thank you, my dear."

Bonnie smiled at this extravagant, if no less genuine, praise. "I'm so glad you like them, Senator. But, to be fair, you've no cause to thank me. I may have painted them, but it was Trev who thought to buy them for you. It was all his idea."

The Senator's brows drew down in confusion. "I thought… Are you saying they're not a gift from both of you?"

Bonnie shook her head, sorry to be the one to disabuse him. "If Trev told you otherwise…"

"No," he broke in quickly. "No, he didn't. It's on me, my mistake. I guess I heard what I wanted to hear instead of what was said." He grimaced apologetically. "Now you know why all my speeches are carefully scripted. Left to my own devices, I invariably stick my big foot in my mouth. I'm sorry, Bonnie. I hope you know I'd never try to pressure you."

"I do know that," she assured him. "And I'm sorry this is all so awkward just now. Believe me, there's nothing I'd like better than to put all this indecision behind me, one way or the other. It's just… I don't want to have any doubts, for Trev's sake as much as for my own. Marriage is a huge step, with a lifetime of consequences. I don't want to get it wrong."

The Senator nodded his understanding. "Until death-do-you-part is a very long time. You don't want to make a commitment like that without some degree of confidence."

"Exactly." Perversely, though, the Senator's evenhandedness made Bonnie feel rather worse than better. She considered him uncertainly. "I suppose," she ventured, "you accepted Freya's proposal the first time she asked you."

He burst out in a short laugh. "She told you about that, did she?" Freya, seated some feet away at a patio table with her sisters, looked over at the sound of her husband's laughter, and regarded them quizzically. At the Senator's grin and wave, she smiled indulgently and returned to her conversation. "The old girl's still proud of herself after all this time, and why not? I put up quite a fight."

Bonnie jerked her head round to stare at him. "You turned her down?"

"Hard to credit, isn't it? Here was this beautiful, intelligent, amazing woman throwing herself at me, and all I could do was try my best to push her away." He shook his head ruefully, and seemed to lose himself for a time in contemplating the folly of his younger self.

Bonnie waited, hoping he'd continue on his own, but when he didn't, she prompted, "You didn't love her then?"

"Oh, no. Just the opposite: I was crazy about her. And I wasn't the only one. She had any number of suitors, all men with much more to offer her than yours truly."

"That can't be true!"

He rewarded her indignant outburst with a faint smile. "Trust me, Bonnie, I was not the prize back then that I am today. Sure, I boasted a prominent family, and a very healthy bank account, but that hardly made me unique in her social circle. In fact, when we first met, rumor had her all-but-engaged to a real up-and-comer, a brilliant guy with silver-screen good looks and enough drive and ambition to make the world his oyster. He made good on his early promise, too. The name Kingston Ross ring any bells?"

Bonnie gasped. "The Vice President?"

He inclined his head. "And the man widely predicted to be the next Republican occupant of the Oval Office. At this very moment, Freya could be nursing expectations of an eight-year stint as the country's First Lady if she'd taken my sound advice and married him. God knows I pleaded his case hard enough. She was stubborn, though, and wouldn't listen to reason."

Bonnie's eyes wandered irresistibly to the patio table where Freya still sat, back straight, limbs gracefully disposed, chin held high, every inch the grande dame. "She'd've made a wonderful First Lady."

"No doubt about it. But then, she'd've made a success of anything she turned her mind to. The sky was the limit. I've often thought she should've run for office herself — she'd be one heck of a senator in her own right — but she's preferred all these years to stay in the background, my indispensable right hand and staunchest supporter. To this day, I honestly don't know what it was she saw in me, but I thank my lucky stars she kept at me until I finally gave up trying to save her from herself and accepted that, in defiance of all logic and good sense, she loved me."

Given the Senator's light tone, Bonnie suspected he was exaggerating somewhat for humorous effect, but, as before, she sensed that, at bottom, he was speaking the truth as he knew it. Bonnie was familiar with this particular story, though she hadn't known it was the Senator's, too. "My grandfather Booth felt much the same about my grandmother. It never ceased to amaze him that so extraordinary a woman could love an average joe like him, but it was obvious she did, devotedly. There's no accounting for love, he told me once. The heart wants what it wants."

"That it does." He smiled appreciatively. "You know, I've never heard the sentiment expressed quite that way before. I'm more familiar with Pascal's 'the heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of.' I think, no disrespect to the great French philosopher, I might like your grandfather's way of putting it better."

Bonnie was suddenly reminded of an anecdote her grandmother had shared with her many years before. She had found it puzzling and wholly unsatisfying at the time, but thinking back on it now and in the context of the current conversation, she thought she understood what her Grammy T had been trying to say. "Do you know, Senator, what my grandmother considered the most romantic thing my grandfather ever said to her?"

He looked across his shoulder at her, his eyes bright with curiosity. "No, what?"

"One day, my grandfather challenged her to tell him her top three reasons for loving him, and, put on the spot, she had a little trouble, but, in the end, she came through with three reasons which, by her own admission, were fairly lame. When she turned the tables on him, and demanded he give his top three reasons for loving her, he didn't even hesitate. 'I don't have any reasons,' he told her."

The Senator continued to regard her as if still waiting for the punch line. "Not quite what I was expecting," he admitted at last.

"I know. That was my initial reaction, too. But, it's like Pascal said, the heart isn't swayed by reason. Love isn't something we have to earn, or prove ourselves worthy of. It's a gift, freely given, without any strings. I think she understood him to mean that he loved her unconditionally."

"Without reasons." He appeared to mull this over, then nodded thoughtfully. "Romantic, but not in any conventional way. He's always been an original, your grandfather."

Bonnie could not have agreed more. "One of a kind."

Out on the lake, the Wyndham-Pryce deck boat, recognizable even at a distance by its unusually sleek lines and deep red trim, had reached the farthest point of its circuit, and was beginning its final turn toward home. It would be pulling up to the dock in another half hour at most.

"Bonnie…" The Senator's voice was so tentative, she twisted onto her side for a better look at him. He smiled in his gentle fashion. "I just wanted to say, while I have the chance, that… well, you and Trev have been living in each other's pockets so long, I've come to think of you as part of the family, as my other daughter, so to speak. I've watched you grow from a gangly girl to the stunning woman you are today, and, ridiculous as it may sound, I feel like I've had a hand in raising you myself. It's unpardonably presumptuous of me, I know…"

"Not at all, Senator," Bonnie said, around a lump in her throat. She reached out and laid a hand on his arm. "I'm honored you feel that way."

He patted her hand fondly. "I want you to know, whatever happens between you and Trev, whether or not you marry, I'll always feel the same about you. You're family. Will you remember that?"

Too moved for words, Bonnie could only nod.

He patted her hand again. "All right, then."