Election by Tom Perrotta

Jim. That's where the magic happens.”
    He slapped a ten-dollar bill on the bar and told me he had to run.
    “Peg's got me on a short leash these days.” He blew another kiss to the lady across the bar, then gave a sad laugh. “You know how it is.”
    Walt's departure had a strangely sobering effect on me. As soon as he was gone, I understood it was time for me to go home too. Diane was waiting, probably starting to worry. I felt tenderly toward her, as if my relationship with her were completely independent of my affair with Sherry.
    Twilight had set in by the time I pulled into the driveway. I wasn't really paying attention to the world around me, just trying to screw up my courage for the moment when I walked through the door, back into the life that suddenly seemed bleak and inadequate, a half-decade mistake. If I'd noticed the old Corolla parked in front of our next-door neighbor's house, I might not have been so shocked to see Sherry sitting on my living room couch with a box of Kleenex in her lap, and Diane sitting right next to her with the baby in her arms. All three of them were crying, and my arrival didn't seem to comfort anyone.

TAMMY WARREN
     
    I WAS WATCHING my yoga program when Mom got home from work. She shot me a dirty look, then stormed into the kitchen. It was hard for me to imagine my heart as an unfolding flower with her slamming cabinets, banging pots, and heaving those bottomless sighs of exasperation.
    She opted for the silent treatment when we sat down to eat. Paul was dining elsewhere, so the meal was quiet as a chess match, two grand masters puzzling over a chicken casserole. After a while I got tired of listening to myself masticate.
    “I didn't do it,” I told her.
    She stabbed angrily at a little green brain of broccoli.
    “Mr. Hendricks said you admitted it.”
    “I lied.”
    Confusion softened her features.
    “Were you covering for someone?”
    “Nope.”
    “Then why would you lie?”
    “Because I felt like getting suspended.”
    I'd underestimated my power to shock my mother. I thought she'd be happy to know I hadn't destroyed images of her son's face.
    “But why?” Her question was barely audible, her eyes big and pleading.
    A strange pressure gathered in my throat. I shut my eyes and searched for the unfolding flower, but all I came up with was that weird illustration in my Biology textbook, the one that makes the human heart look like a cleanly plucked chicken.
    “Because,” I told her.
    That was the best I could do.

MR. M.
     
    SHERRY NEVER CAME HOME that night. I know this for a fact because I spent something like seven hours in her driveway, waiting like a dog for a glimpse of her.
    No words had passed during our brief encounterin the living room. I stared at Sherry and Diane for a couple of seconds and they stared back, puffy-eyed and hostile. Then I turned around and walked back out to my car.
    Desolation gave way to numbness as I drove, and the numbness began to feel oddly like optimism. I headed south on the Parkway for about an hour, stopped at a diner, than turned around and headed back. It's hard to imagine at this remove, but by the time I pulled into Sherry's driveway around ten o'clock, I was fairly certain we'd end up spending the night together. She'd have to come home at some point, I reasoned, and when she did, she'd have to let me in.
    How could she not? We were lovers now; the thing that had happened to us was too real, too powerful to deny. It was the kind of miracle you could build a life around, or so it seemed to me then, perched on the ledge of what looked like a new beginning, but turned out to be a long way down.

PAUL WARREN
     
    TAMMY KNOCKED on my door around midnight.
    “You up?” she whispered.
    “Yeah.”
    I couldn't see much of her as she moved towardthe foot of my bed, just a white nightgown floating on grainy blackness.
    “Did Mom tell you?”
    “Tell me what?”
    “I got suspended. Five days. I'm out of the election.”
    “What