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"My one rule," she says, standing up and taking a few of their plates over to the sink. "Is that we don't take any of these diaries with us to bed to read--that's our space. Nothing interferes there."
Dexter chuckles. "Leave your husband out of our bed? Agreed," he says, his deep voice rumbling. "And speaking of bed, what do you say we head that way?"
Ruby smiles as he comes up behind her and sets more dishes on the counter, then wraps his arms around her waist and nuzzles his face into her neck.
She lifts her eyebrows and smiles as his unshaven cheek tickles the soft skin beneath her ear. "I say yes," she says. "Yes, yes, yes."
Ruby
“Book club!” Sunday Bond shouts happily, holding two cans of Diet Coke in the air as she winds her way through the chairs that Ruby has haphazardly arranged in the bookstore. Sunday hands one frosty can to Ruby. “I’m ready to hear everything.”
“Me too,” Molly Kimble seconds, lifting up the mug of hot tea she's brought with her from The Scuttlebutt.
“I think we all are.” Heather Charleton-Bicks sits between Molly and Marigold, clutching her own cup of coffee. “Dexter is on the island again, and we want details.”
Ruby is harried, and she knows that she looks it. Her ash blonde hair is pulled back in a claw clip, and she’s wearing a pair of white shorts and a striped t-shirt. The soft pink polish on her fingernails has started to chip, and she needs to spend a couple of hours soaking in her bathtub while she does a deep hair conditioning treatment and a face mask. Having Dexter there and poring over Jack’s diaries has been all-consuming, and while she’s honestly enjoying the process of losing herself in Jack’s writings, she’s also inadvertently dug up some difficult emotions, and she tells the women exactly that as they all sit down for a meeting on a Sunday evening.
“Honey, if you go digging, you have to expect that you might find gold, or that you might unearth a whole graveyard of skeletons,” Molly says sagely as she sips her tea.
Ruby blows a loose strand of hair from her face. “It’s not that I’m digging for skeletons, per se, but I guess I kind of stumbled onto a few,” she says, wiggling a hand in front of her chest as she searches for the words. “I’m kind of stirring up things that I’d put aside these past couple of years.”
Sunday is sitting next to Ruby, as usual, and she reaches over and laces her fingers through her best friend's hand, squeezing gently as she does. “It’s got to be hard,” Sunday says sympathetically. “If I found a journal of Peter’s after his passing, I’m sure it would blow my hair back to read what he’d been doing or thinking.” She pauses, making a face in response to her own words. She shakes her head, having changed her mind. “Actually, it would probably just confirm what I thought he was up to all along.”
The other women make supportive little sounds. It’s common knowledge at this point that Peter Bond, the former Vice President and Sunday’s ex-husband, had been carrying on with half the men in Washington D.C. long before their marriage even started, and a little detail like having a wife, two adopted daughters, and a public office in the glare of the spotlight didn’t stop Peter from continuing to cavort and canoodle to his heart’s content.
“So what’s the overarching theme of the diaries so far, if it’s okay to ask?” Sunday crosses her legs and turns her body towards her friend.
Ruby runs a hand over the edge of her shorts absentmindedly, frowning at the way the hem is curled up. She never leaves the house in un-ironed clothes, chipped nail polish, and sloppy hair, so she feels completely unkempt and unpresentable at the moment.
“I think so far it’s just been…discovery,” Ruby says, glancing out the window at the patch of gray sky that's visible. The daily afternoon summer storm has passed, taking with it the thunder and lightning, and leaving behind an angry sky and the smell of rain. “I’ve been discovering a young Jack through his early writing, and then of course I’m reading the more recent things, and that’s hard. Enlightening,” she adds quickly, “but hard.”
“And how are things with Dexter?” Sunday prods. She wiggles her eyebrows at the other women suggestively.
This brings a relaxed smile to Ruby’s face. “Honestly, great. I was going to do this completely on my own, and I think that some of it might be better to read alone, but as soon as I realized the breadth and depth of the writing, I really thought it might be in the best interest of the book to have Dexter here to go through it all with me.”
“Do you think you’ll print any of the entries?” Marigold frowns. “I’d be conflicted about that if I were in your shoes.”
Ruby shakes her head. “I don’t know. I shared his final letter to me with the entire world,” she says, calling up a memory of the day she’d auctioned seats at her press conference to the highest television network bidders in order to raise money for charity, and then read Jack’s final letter out loud for everyone to hear. “There’s a certain part of a president's life that Idothink belongs to everyone. The American people voted him into office, put their faith in him—in us—and therefore there should be some transparency. But,” she says, tipping her head to one side, “I also think that the man deserves some privacy, as do I. I might not want to share with the world all of the intimate things he says about me, our girls, or about Etienne.” She swallows hard here. “Or Julien.”
The women all fall silent as they watch her. Over the past year, they’ve grown to love one another like sisters and cousins; they’re a family, and the fact that Ruby had been the First Ladyof their country doesn’t usually enter into the equation anymore. But there are moments when they’re all reminded that the woman who runs their little island bookshop once lived in the White House, that she had the ear of--and shared a bed with--the most powerful man in the free world.
But then Ruby begins to pick mindlessly at her chipping nail polish and they all remember that she’s one of them now: a real, flesh-and-blood woman with children she loves, feelings that get hurt, and memories of a marriage and its untimely end.
“Well, Rubes,” Sunday says. “I know you’ll do what needs to be done, and also what you feel is right. You have the most flawless judgment of any woman I know.”
Ruby makes a disbelieving noise and her shoulders slump slightly. “I don’t know if that’s true,” she says. Ruby looks around at the other women. “I managed to judge Jack all wrong. I never thought he was the type of man who’d have a mistress and a child in another country.”
“Hogwash,” Molly says. “Plenty of women are married to men who are, in actuality, total strangers to them. That has nothing to do with your judgment—it has to do with his.”
“Do you think if Rodney had lived that you’d be strangers by now?” Vanessa asks, her eyes round with disappointment. As usual, Ruby’s young bookshop assistant is the most romantic, hopeful, and gaga about love of them all.
Molly thinks about this. “If my Rodney had lived,” she finally says, “I think we would each have a fair amount of life that we’d tucked away and not shared with one another, sure. That’s only right. But would we be strangers? No. We would have spent our years together in a tiny house, or traveling around in a small boat. There’s no way to get that kind of distance when you’re living like sardines in a can. Now, if we’d eaten dinner at the opposite ends of a giant dining room table in the White House? Flown around the world in separate cabins of Air Force One?Each had our own assistants and schedules?” Molly turns one palm up to the sky and shrugs; with her other hand she’s resting her mug of tea against the knee of her jeans. “Who knows.”
Vanessa turns to Ruby, eyes still just as wide. “Is that what life is really like in the White House? With the giant dining room table, and the flying in different cabins and stuff?”
Ruby exhales through her nose. “I mean…yes. And no. It depends.” She frowns, unsure about how to paint an accurate picture of her life as the First Lady. “If we were alone, we usually ate in the kitchen of our private residence together. But a lot of nights I ate alone. On Air Force One, Jack was usually engaged in interviews or meetings, so it just made sense for me to fly in my own part of the plane and nap or read. And as for our schedules and secretaries, on occasion they did have to meet up to compare notes on our days and our trips to see where we overlapped. It was not a ‘normal’ marriage by anyone’s measure.”
“Do you think you’ll marry Dexter?” Heather asks. She's their resident expert on marriage, having done it five times already herself. She’s eyeing Potential Husband Number Six at the moment.
