The Governor's Wife by Mark Gimenez Read Free Book Online Page A

do trust?"
    "Yes. There is such a person."
    "Who?"
    "The doctor."

FOUR
     " ' "Is your mama a llama?" I asked my friend Jane.
     "No, she is not," Jane politely explained. "She grazes on grass, and she likes to say 'Moo!' I don't think that is what a llama would do."
     "Oh," I said. "I understand now, I think that your mama must be a … Cow!" ' "
    Bode Bonner felt about as goddamn stupid as a grown man could possibly feel, reading Is Your Mama a Llama? by Deborah Guarino, a story about a little llama named Lloyd looking for its mama llama. He hated these events, but reading to elementary school kids had become a ritual for politicians these days—a ritual usually performed by this politician's wife. But she had bailed for the border that day. So the governor of Texas found himself facing twenty-four kindergartners.
    He'd rather be facing twenty-four Democrats.
    He flipped the book around so the kids could see the picture. A collective "Aah!" went up, and one boy said, " Vaca ," which Bode knew from his experience working cattle on the ranch with the vaqueros meant "cow." The kids started chattering in Spanish, which made him wonder if they even understood the words he was reading. Tacked to the wall were colorful posters with numbers and colors and shapes and explanations printed in English and Spanish, just like the state's official documents: uno /one … dos /two … tres /three… blanco /white… rojo /red … azul /blue … círculo /circle… rectángulo /rectangle … cuadrado /square. He wondered how many of these kids had just come up from Mexico with their parents for spring harvest. Back when Bode was growing up in the Hill Country, Mexicans worked the ranches and farms, but their children did not attend public school. They couldn't. He didn't think about such things back then; that's just the way it was. But he thought about such things now.
    Because he was the governor.
    And the most difficult job for the governor of Texas—for any of the fifty governors, all of whom faced massive budget deficits in this Great Recession—was figuring out how to pay for public schools. Which is to say, how to pay to educate the state's poorest children. During his tenure in office, at his wife's relentless urging, he had doubled the K-12 budget to $50 billion— $10,000 per student —but SAT and achievement test scores still hovered near the bottom among the fifty states, just ahead of Mississippi, not exactly a bragging point at the annual governors' conference. Most politicians blamed the teachers for the failure of public education—the first rule for politicians being, Blame someone else before the voters blame you —but the statistics made the job seem utterly hopeless: five million students in Texas schools speaking a hundred different languages but almost two million unable to read, write, or speak English; the highest teenage pregnancy and dropout rates in the nation; the lowest literacy and graduation rates; and the fourth highest poverty rate. And fully one-half of the nation's child population growth over the last decade had occurred in Texas. All poor children.
    How the hell was the State of Texas supposed to educate so many poor, pregnant, non-English-speaking kids?
    But the law required the state try, so Texas schools didn't just employ 330,000 teachers; they also employed 330,000 cops, social workers, nurses, counselors, ESL (English as a second language) facilitators, tutors, administrators, school bus drivers, janitors, and cooks. Schools now served free breakfast, lunch, and dinner, administered achievement tests and flu shots, supplied textbooks and toothbrushes, offered classes in math and parenting, and provided pregnancy counseling and childcare. Public schools had become social agencies sucking billions from the state budget. But the education activists—including his wife—wanted even more money. "Educate or incarcerate," she always said, and he knew in his heart that she was