The Next Best Path

"Mom," Sophia says, "Can we go now?"

At Home With the Kids

The Iglesias household is at once a chaotic center of tween and teen activity -- continuous drop-offs and pickups to and from ballet and voice lessons -- and a place of great sanctuary from the world. Various versions of the Bible are scattered throughout the house. Each morning Iglesias will sit in a rattan chair off the kitchen from which you can see the mountains and read a chapter from Psalms and Proverbs. Members of the 12,000-member nondenominational Calvary Chapel, the Iglesias family goes to church on Saturday evenings -- David and Cyndy attend the main service, while the kids splinter off to different youth-oriented groups.

He has a lot of time on his hands. At home he sleeps in when he can. He e-mails, talks to former colleagues from the JAG Corps and White House Fellows program. Still a captain in the Navy Reserves, he tries not to think about being deployed to a JAG unit in Iraq or Afghanistan. During the week, he swims or lifts weights at Kirtland Air Force Base. He fields calls from headhunters and juggles job interviews.

With three daughters soon to be in college, he'd planned to leave public life and earn some real money, he says, and the firing only sped up the process.

"What's been a shocker to me is people asking me if I'm planning to run for office, and the only thought that comes to me is, 'What planet are they living on?' " he says. "The local Republican Party would just as soon tar and feather me at this point. The rank and file probably think I'm the greatest traitor since Benedict Arnold. They expected me to remain quiet and not say anything, which would have been the wrong thing to do."

During a couple of days spent around Iglesias, the question of a book contract seems to jab its way into conversations. He's been approached by multiple literary agencies and book editors, and he says he'd base any writing on Colin Powell's "My American Journey."

"If you were me would you write a book?" he asks a reporter while driving one afternoon with his 16-year-old, Claudia, in the back seat.

Then: "If I did it," he says, "would I do it myself or have somebody else do it? Or not do it at all?" And: "I'm really surprised we haven't been contacted by magazines like Vanity Fair or the Atlantic for a larger story. I like them."

One day recently, sitting in his back yard, he leans back in his patio chair and says, "It's been a greatly simplified life. I wouldn't want to do this for another year, but this may be the last chance in my life to do this before I retire."

For the moment he has time and fame and notoriety, a mug from Tim Russert, a travel clock courtesy of Bill Maher. But what one does in the aftermath of that attention is something that can scare the bejesus out of the best of us. This is something he must contemplate as he weaves his way through the foothills above Albuquerque, a lone figure running through the trails, trying not to stumble.