First Lady Read Online Free PDF Page B

stories on old Remington typewriters. Men as rough around the edges as he was. There had been nothing flashy about his work when he was writing for the Chicago Standard . He’d used short words and simple sentences to describe the people he met and what they cared about. Readers had known they could count on him to shoot straight. Now he was on a quest to prove that was true again.
    Quest . The word had an archaic quality to it. A quest was the province of a holy knight, not a steeltown roughneck who’d let himself forget what was important in life.
    His old boss at the Standard had said Mat could return to his former job, but the offer had been begrudging, and Mat refused to go back with his hat in his hands. Now he was driving around the country searching for something to take with him. Wherever he stopped—big town or small—he picked up a paper, talked to people, and nosed around. Even though he hadn’t found it, he knew exactly what he was looking for—the seeds of a story big enough to give him back his reputation.
    He’d just finished his calls when the door swung open and Winona climbed into the motor home with the baby, who was barefoot and dressed in a yellow romper with lambs on it. She had a peace sign tattooed on one chubby ankle.
    “Sandy had her baby tattooed?”
    Winona gave him a look that said he was too dumb to live. “It’s a rub-on. Don’t you know anything?”
    His sisters were grown up by the time the tattoo craze had started, thank God. “I knew it was a rub-on,” he lied. “I just don’t think you should put something like that on a baby.”
    “She likes it. She thinks it makes her look cool.” Winona carefully placed the baby in the car seat, fastened the straps, then plopped down in the seat next to him.
    After a couple of tries, the engine sputtered to life. He shook his head in disgust. “This thing is a piece of crap.”
    “No shit.” She propped her feet, which were clad in thick-soled sandals, onto the dash.
    He glanced into Mabel’s side mirror and backed out. “You know, don’t you, that I’m not really your father.”
    “Like I’d want you.”
    So much for the worry he’d been harboring that she might have built up some kind of sentimental fantasy about him. As he made his way down the street, he realized he didn’t know either her real name or the baby’s. He’d seen copies of their birth certificates but hadn’t looked any farther than the lines that had his own name written on them. She probably wouldn’t appreciate it if he called her Winona. “What’s your name?”
    There was a long pause while she thought about it. “Natasha.”
    He almost laughed. For three months his sister Sharon had tried to make everybody call her Silver. “Yeah, right.”
    “That’s what I want to be called,” she snapped.
    “I didn’t ask what you wanted to be called. I asked what your name is.”
    “It’s Lucy, all right? And I hate it.”
    “Nothing wrong with Lucy.” He consulted the directions he’d gotten from the receptionist at the lab and made his way back to the highway. “Exactly how old are you?”
    “Eighteen.”
    He shot her his street fighter look.
    “Okay, sixteen.”
    “You’re fourteen, and you talk like you’re thirty.”
    “If you know, why’d you ask? And I lived with Sandy. What did you expect?”
    He felt a pang of sympathy at the husky note in her voice. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry about that. Your mother was . . .” Sandy had been fun, sexy, smart without having any sense, and completely irresponsible. “She was unique,” he finished lamely.
    Lucy snorted. “She was a drunk.”
    In the back the baby started to whimper.
    “She has to eat soon, and we’ve run out of stuff.”
    Great. This was just what he needed. “What’s she eating now?”
    “Formula and crap in jars.”
    “We’ll stop for something after we’re done at the lab.” The sounds coming from the back were growing increasingly unhappy. “What’s her