Free The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller

live at the station, or in another National Public Radio studio somewhere, or by phone. Phone was always the last choice, because the sound quality wasn't as good.
    At the afternoon meetings everyone was always relaxed. The show was over and there was a sense of ease and play in the way they tossed ideas around. People brought in newspaper articles, offbeat facts they'd discovered, new books or CDs they'd read or heard or seen reviewed. Burt Hall was the anniversary guy, the birthday guy—he maintained a perpetually updated list of what had happened or who'd been born one hundred years ago tomorrow, or fifty years, or twenty-five—sometimes important anniversaries, sometimes whimsical ones, all of them available to fall back on on a slow day. There was one other person with a job identical to Meri's—Natalie. She'd been there three years, ever since they started the show. She was about Meri's age, small, with wildly frizzing hair. She was patient and generous about explaining things.
    By the time Meri had been at the station for ten days, she'd worked on more than a half dozen of the show's segments. The first one was a piece on shaken-baby syndrome. She'd lined up participants for a roundtable discussion with Jane—a couple of pediatricians, a specialist in medical forensics, and a social worker who counseled parents having difficulty with anger. Meri spoke with them all at length by telephone ahead of time to prepare Jane's questions and suggest approaches for her to take in the discussion. This was called, she learned, the
pre-interview,
designed to make Brian or Jane sound intelligent and knowledgeable about whatever they were discussing.
    She was so busy learning what the steps were as she worked on this piece, so nervous and distracted about how to frame the questions, how to seek out the appropriate people, that she hardly had the time left to think about the issue under consideration, a topic that had been triggered by the local death of a little girl of five months. Her middle-class father, a cocaine addict, had killed her—accidentally, he said.
    As she listened to the program, she was first amazed at how it had come together, at how professional it was; and then she was surprised to find tears welling in her eyes at different points during the discussion. How immediate it was compared to the writing she'd done for the alumni magazine! In this case, how awful: the father's drugged rage, the terrible injuries to the tiny child.
    Still, she couldn't help herself, she was pleased. Hearing her words spoken in Jane's melodious, warm, sympathetic voice made them sound so professional.
    Radio,
she thought, even as she was blowing her nose.
I'm glad I found you.
    Meri was doing research for something else entirely when she found an old photograph of Tom Naughton. He was standing behind the senators on the Watergate committee. He was less conventionally handsome than she had imagined him—tall and skinny—but even in this grainy shot there was a visible kind of relaxation and ease in his carriage that made him attractive. She photocopied the image to take home to Nathan.
    They'd speculated several times about his failure to appear next door even once in the three weeks or so they'd lived there. At first they decided he must be traveling. He'd be back at some point soon.
    As time went on, though, they conjured other possibilities. Maybe they were divorced, Meri suggested.
    But then she had two or three conversations with Delia on the front porch, and Delia didn't indicate anything of the kind. In fact, she always spoke of Tom as her husband; and, as Nathan pointed out to Meri, there was that thing she had said to them the night they moved in—about having them over when Tom was home.
    Maybe it was a commuting marriage, he speculated, and she agreed that this was the likeliest explanation. Delia seemed to have been away at least once for several days—that was probably it.
    But Meri knew Nathan was disappointed that