“So what if Hillary wins?” Marcus Chen asked, showing no hint of preference.

“Then the elite will still own Washington,” Sam Reese explained earnestly.

“Unlike what happens if Trump wins,” Deborah Sawyer-Chen remarked and passed the ketchup.

Carrie took the ketchup and made a show of splotching her roasted chicken in red. “ Can we please not talk politics?”

Sam Reese feigned innocence without a shred of conviction. “ What else is there to talk about? Life is politics!”

That statement elicited some snorts, mostly from Deborah, but Sam wouldn’t give up. 

It was like he was drawn to the fight like an old pitbull that didn’t know what else to do when it saw an enemy.

And everyone was the enemy in this case.

“I honestly think,” Sam continued, “not engaging enough in politics is the reason this country is in the trash can.”

The dilapidated garden of Carrie and Jonathan Reese’s personal slice of Arizona’s suburbia seemed to shimmer in the ruthless sunlight.

Marcus Chen leaned back on the hard bench. Even in the sun, he still seemed pale. His thin gray hair was combed tightly back, but not covering much. “In China, when my family lived there, our leaders had a saying, ‘It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it can catch mice.’”

Sam Reese looked squarely at Marcus.

Marcus paid it no attention and sipped his tea thoughtfully . “It’s a metaphor. China was trying to implement capitalism in some cities while maintaining communism. A lot of people were getting nervous. They feared that capitalism would take over the whole house once it started in a tiny corner.”

“Of course.” Sam appeared strained in concentration.

“I know,” Marcus said, “but it was necessary to improve life for many people and boost the economy. That’s what the metaphor was trying to convey.”

He glanced at the ketchup bottle, then flinched as it was snatched adroitly by small hands.

“—I’ll have more ketchup now!” Emma cried joyously, pouring ketchup over her sausages.

“Careful, honey!” Her father admonished from behind the barbecue, but Emma Reese was also good at pretending not to hear certain things. 

Marcus glanced at his step-granddaughter and for a moment a shadow of a smile passed his lips.

“And I want a cat, too!” Emma grinned at her mother as if she had known all along. Carrie was watching her daughter’s daredevil handling of the ketchup with a slight frown.

“I think the communists made a grave error,” Sam said. “I have no love for them, that’s for sure. But once you let capitalism in…”

“Have you considered moving?“

Sam looked at the other man again, seemingly weighing whether the question was serious or deliberately designed to tick him off.

“What do you mean, ‘moving’?”

“What I said,” Marcus looked at him blankly. “You always complain about the system. Maybe you need another system? In another country?”

“Like China?”

Marcus chuckled softly. “I think the U.S is best.”

“Easy for a man to say who’s made it big in the system as it is.” Sam Reese looked at the other man smugly, as if he had found a weak spot everyone else didn’t know about. Carrie shook her head in the background. 

“I think maybe we should all have ice cream now,” Deborah suggested.

“What do you say? You kids like ice cream?” Emma responded with another joyous outcry, and even Michael seemed to wake up and repeat, “Ice cream!”

“Isn’t it too early?” Jon said. “We haven’t finished here.” He deftly moved a steak on the barbecue closer to the heat in the middle.

“Look,” Marcus said, “I mean it. I know capitalism isn’t perfect, and, like you said, it doesn’t matter who runs it—Hillary or Donald—you’ll still have the same capitalist system.”

“Yes,” Sam said. “I will, and it’s a damn shame. That’s the real problem with this country.”

He put his fists on the table, knotted. “But if you can see it so clearly, why don’t you think it’s a problem as well?”

“I do,” Marcus said. “I do.”

“Well,” Sam said, waiting as if Marcus was supposed to kneel before him.

Marcus was unfazed. “I prefer to try to find out how to live in the system that is and then look at how you can change things in the long run.”

“Well, I’m thinking about the future too,” Sam said. “And I’m not just going into some church every Sunday praying for change that will never come or that I don’t do anything more about.”

“And you’re saying that my church is like that?” Marcus looked at him directly. “You’re saying it doesn’t matter that we focus on the spiritual part of change?”

“You know what I think about spiritual things,” Sam said. “Is there more of that steak, Jonathan? Or wait, maybe not. I think I’ve lost my appetite.” He stood up.

Even Ellen, Jon’s mother, looked at him now, having been in her own world for some time, not really noticing anything except her grandson Michael playing with a plastic fork and spoon, biting them instead of actually using them. 

Nobody had said anything about that yet.

“Mark my words,” Sam said. “You’re going to get what’s coming to you if Trump wins. God forbid, he’s going to ruin everything.”

“He’s just an idiot,” Marcus said. “The system will go on just as it always has, just as it would if Hillary wins. There won’t be much change except what we do here and now—ordinary people.”

Sam smiled grimly. “Well, different people, I guess. Oh yeah, Marcus,” he continued, “what have you done recently to change things? I haven’t heard much about that except, of course, your little church project.”

“That’s what I do,” Marcus said. “It’s important that people have somewhere to go if they want to develop spiritually.”

“Oh, come on now!” Sam cried. “This is just like it’s always been. The people who run the show try to distract us with everything from religion to bad television.”

“I’m not running things,” Marcus said.

“Okay,” Deborah interjected. “I think we need that ice cream now. You two are never going to agree, and that’s how it is. We’ll just have to see who wins the election and what happens, just as we have to see with everything else in our lives and then make the best of it.”

She put on her best face. 

“Like you say, Deb. Like you say.” Sam Reese picked up a baseball that was lying in the short, withered grass, held it up to look closely at it.

There were smudges on it, like dusty continental shapes on a small globe. 

Sam threw the ball over the fence. They never found it again.

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SAM REESE & MARCUS CHEN, Carrie and Jon’s garden, summer of 2016

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Cover photo by Karina Vorozheeva on Unsplash

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