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MY GUESTBOOK
I worked late that night, not because I had to but because I would be taking some time off before Inauguration and I didn�t want to come back to two weeks of twenty hour days trying to find the top of my desk. I knew Josh didn�t have an experienced speechwriting staff and Toby couldn�t write something as huge as an Inaugural Address without spending some serious quality time with the President Elect and so I wasn�t terribly surprised when, fifteen minutes after he�d left my office, he called and asked if I would still be willing to help with the Inaugural Address while I thought about the Deputy Chief of Staff position. I had already blocked out three weeks with my assistant and my department head who had been reluctant to let me�he was a staunch Republican and was still smarting from the fact that his old friend, Arnold Vinick, hadn�t pulled off the win that had seemed like a foregone conclusion four months ago when the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination was �Bingo� Bob Russell.
When I got home Sara was putting cartons of Chinese in the fridge, having changed out of her work suit when she got home, as she always did, and opting for a pair of shorts and one of my Princeton tee shirts, her dark hair held in a messy knot with a yellow number two pencil.
�You missed dinner,� she pouted as she began pulling things back out and setting them on the counter. �Big case?�
�No,� I said, pulling a beer from the fridge. �I had� it was a weird day,� I said after taking a long draw from the bottle.
�Weird how?� Sara frowned as she hopped up on the counter next to the array of food.
I handed her the bottle and she took a sip from it. She never had her own bottle of beer, but if I opened one for myself she would always take at least half. It was one of her quirks. �Josh came to see me today.�
�Josh Lyman?�
�Yeah,� I nodded.
�He want you to help with the Inaugural?� Sara asked. We had discussed the fact that I knew Josh would contact me somewhere along the line and she had been the one to encourage me to accept if he wanted me to help with what was arguably one of the biggest speech Santos would give in his life.
�Yeah, but that�s not why he came to see me,� I said as I started fixing myself a plate. I�d had a stale doughnut at the office a few hours earlier but that was hardly enough to sustain me.