Page 18 of The Light Year (Stardust Beach #6)

barbie

. . .

The Senatorial campaign kicks into high gear in early November, with Election Day coming up on Tuesday the eighth.

Barbie is sitting at the kitchen table, flipping through the pages of the newspaper as her cold coffee sits next to her.

Tight Race Between Candidates says one headline.

Upcoming Vote Expected to Change Course of House says another.

Barbie’s eyes skim the pages and pause on a black-and-white photo at the bottom of page ten.

Two men are shaking hands on the front steps of a stately building.

The younger one is beaming directly at the camera.

“Theodore Mackey, son of Senator George Mackey, prepares to take the helm as he goes into the family business,” reads the caption. Barbie looks back and forth between the image of her father and brother and the words beneath the photo. Take the helm , she thinks. Family business.

The short column that goes with the photo is a quick read, and details her father’s years of service in the Senate, his stance on the Vietnam war (in favor), his passion for the Space Race, and the fact that he’d been married to Marion Mackey and produced two children—an unnamed daughter, and the son he’s pinned all his hopes on, young Theodore.

Barbie closes the paper and slaps the front cover of it violently, causing her coffee to slosh around in its cup. Huck’s worried face appears in the doorway to the kitchen, a firetruck clutched in his hand as he looks at his mother.

“Oh, honey,” Barbie says, noticing him. “Mommy is fine. Go play.”

With one more glance at his mother, Huck vanishes back to the tangle of trucks and cars he’s been sorting through in the front room.

Barbie stands and walks over to the phone on the wall, unclipping her earring as she picks up the receiver. Carrie answers on the third ring.

“Hi,” Barbie says without preamble. “I was wondering what you thought about me establishing a foundation.”

“A foundation for what?” There is laughter in Carrie’s voice. “You building a house, Barb?”

Barbie doesn’t even crack a smile; she’s all business. “No. I want to establish a foundation that meets needs.”

Carrie’s frown is almost audible over the phone line. “Okay,” she says, clearly trying to puzzle out what her friend is saying. “I’m listening.”

“I’m turning thirty in two weeks,” Barbie says seriously. “And I’ve always known that, when I turn thirty, I have access to a trust fund that my mother left for me.”

Carrie’s laugh is one of disbelief. “You have a trust fund?”

Barbie has forgotten for a moment that she’s not in Connecticut anymore; her friends here don’t come from families with trust funds and houses at the shore and family trees that they can trace directly back to the Mayflower.

To Carrie, a trust fund undoubtedly sounds ridiculous. Spoiled. Out of touch.

Barbie forges ahead. “I do. My mother had set one up for me and another for my brother, and when she died, she’d already set the terms. Ted is three years older than me, so he’s already gotten his, but now it’s my turn.

I have no idea how much is in the fund, but I want to use it for something good. ”

Carrie hums softly as they sit on the line. “Okay,” she says. “A foundation.”

“Yep.”

“Well, I think it’s worth talking to Todd about, if you haven’t already.

Because, not to be nosy, but most of us could use an inheritance to pay for our houses or to put away for our kids’ futures, you know?

He might not want you to sink all of it into a foundation or to give it away, even for a great cause. ”

Barbie stands next to the phone, slipping her foot in and out of her shoe as she thinks about this. The sound of Huck making vroom-vroom noises on the living room rug is in the background.

“It’s my money,” Barbie decides. In her heart, she knows Todd will agree with her about this. They’ve been together for nearly half their lives, and if she knows anyone, she knows him. “Todd will support my decision.”

Carrie gives a low whistle. “Well, then I think you know what you’re going to do, and hey—it’s pretty exciting. Not everyone would take a chunk of money and spend it on starting a foundation, Barbie. That’s very generous.”

Barbie shrugs this away, though Carrie can’t see her. “I never really thought of it as mine anyway,” she admits. “And even though my mom would have adored my boys and would have wanted to spoil them like crazy, she would also have loved seeing me do something for others. I know that.”

“Your mom sounds like she was a really wonderful lady, Barb.”

The surprise wash of tears that sneak up on her when she thinks and talks about her mother is there again, and Barbie smiles against the urge to cry as she turns to face the sliding door to her backyard. “She was,” Barbie says simply. “She absolutely was.”

Her next phone call hadn’t gone quite as smoothly, but Barbie never really expected it to.

“You want to do what ?” Senator George Mackey’s voice had boomed over the phone line.

So excited was Barbie that she hadn’t even bothered to worry about the long-distance telephone charges, nor had she considered whether her father would be free to talk.

In the run-up to the election, he’d been fairly busy steering Ted towards the Senate seat, but Barbie knew if she called his office, his secretary would put her through.

“I want to use my inheritance to start a foundation to serve my new community.”

“That’s insane,” Senator Mackey said. “I will not allow it.”

“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 people who 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, real world, 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 have some upsides--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 a package 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.