Page 33 of The Holiday

“We are. The best of friends.” Athena put her head back on the chair and turned to look at me, a soft smile on her face. “And I think I ended up just dating and not settling down because my mom made it all look so easy, and I wasn’t finding it to be easy at all.”

I frowned. “So, you never married and you never had kids because of Ruby?”

“That sounds wrong,” Athena said, squinting as she pondered this. “More like, I knew I couldn’t do it as well as she did, so I didn’t want to try. My parents might have had some hard times, but she was the consummate wife. I mean, truly,” Athena said, tucking her hair behind one ear as she sipped her wine. “The woman made a life of being a professional public wife. And she was damn good at it. And her happiness with you was something I didn’t think I could ever touch in a relationship—at least not in any that I’d known up to that point.”

“Every relationship is so different, Theen,” I said, watching the slight lines around her eyes crinkle up as she smiled thoughtfully. “And you’re only forty-two.”

“Turning forty-three next month,” she reminded me.

“Still. Forty-three is not old.”

“For having kids it is.”

“Is that something you still want?”

She pressed her lips together tightly and gave a firm shake of her head. “No. Not really. Again, I think my mom made it seem so easy that I knew instinctively I’d never be able to match her.”

“No one expects you to,” I argued. “And she would certainly have wanted you to be your own kind of woman, your own kind of mother.”

Athena looked at her red-painted toes on the railing as she soaked this in. “Heard and understood,” she said, still not looking in my direction. “And for the record, I haven’t given up on true love, I just haven’t found it yet.”

I hoped she wasn’t just telling me what she thought I wanted to hear. Athena was a wonderful and accomplished woman, and I really did feel that she deserved happiness in every corner of her life—not just success in her career, which she’d found in spades.

After a stint at the Library of Congress, Athena had side-stepped into cybersecurity, founding her own firm and contracting with major government organizations to identify threats and to fend off cyberattacks. It all got a bit technical for me, but she loved it, and her projects had taken her around the world, filling her life with travel and adventure.

Harlow, on the other hand, had put her marketing and public relations skills to good use when she decided that she wanted to write and publish her own romance novels (this had come as totally unexpected to both her mother and to everyone else), and she used her talents to propel herself and her grassroots business to the top of the charts. By the time she turned thirty-five, she was writing under four pen names, cranking out fantasy tales with dragons and spells, historical romance, rom-com stories, and stuff that she said was a bit “spicier” and that she forbade me to read. I obeyed that order.

In their own ways, both girls became raging successes, but it was almost like their personalities crossed at some point in adulthood, and they ended up trading paths altogether. I never would have imagined Harlow sitting at a keyboard all day, crafting romance stories while her little munchkins played Legos underfoot, just like I never would have pictured that Athena would be living a life of solitude and dealing with the dark underbelly of the cyber world as a profession. But Ruby was endlessly proud of both of them, and it was abundantly clear that she’d left her mark on each of her girls, and that they—in their own ways—had been made in her image.

“What do you think she would have been like at eighty? At ninety?” I asked suddenly. “For the book.” I desperately wanted to talk more about Ruby, but knew that just rambling about her would make me seem like a sad widower. However, posing book-related questions gave us all the opportunity to think about her and share stories like it was no big deal.

Athena thought about this. “I think she would have been the same as she was at fifty, sixty, and almost seventy.” She swirled the dregs of her wine around in the bottom of her glass before swigging it. “Mom was becoming more like her own mother all the time, so I could see her being like Grandma Patty as she got older.” Athena’s gaze went faraway for a minute.

“Grandma Patty was a big influence on everyone’s lives,” I said, prompting her.

Athena nodded. “Oh, definitely. She lived big. I come from a family of strong women, don’t I?” She looked at me, a pleased smile on her face. “No one just fades into the background in our world. But my mom at eighty or ninety…” She narrowed her eyes and pinched her eyebrows together. “I think by then she would have done it and seen it all, right? She already seemed so at peace. So relaxed into herself. She survived the White House, my dad’s death, finding out about Etienne and Julien…she got by, you know? And she did it all with her own thoughts and feelings tucked away behind a smile.”

“Do you think that was hard for her? Or even healthy?”

“I think it was easy for her because that was her nature. Grandma Patty was a take-no-prisoners kind of woman, and she handled her own business. She taught my mother to do the same, and in turn, Mom taught us. So that wasn’t hard, it was just her. But was it healthy? Actually, yeah. I think so. She talked to us. She shared her emotions. She had friends. I would imagine that Sunday knew far more than we did sometimes, which is as it should be. She had someone to lean on. But the reason I think it’s healthy,” Athena went on, “is because she didn’t rely on the public’s image of her as her mirror. Do you know what I’m saying?”

I nodded. I did know. “Absolutely. She never needed to see herself reflected back by anyone. Not in the news, not on social media, not when she met someone in person. Ruby was Ruby, and she knew exactly who she was.” I sat quietly. “So you’re right: at eighty and ninety, she would have just been herself, without fanfare, without needing anyone to applaud her for it.”

Just then, Patrick came running back out onto the porch. “The storm is gone!” he shouted. “Papa, no more thunder!” He pointed at the sky over the water, which was opening to reveal an evening sunset, yellow tearing through gray to reveal the warmth of the sun. “Can we go catch the ball by the water?” he asked hopefully. There was a hint of spaghetti sauce ringing his mouth, and his blonde hair was messy.

“You want to take your brother down there, too? We can catch a football.” I pushed myself up from the wooden chair, smiling down at Athena. “Want to come?”

“Sorry, Aunt Athena,” Patrick said seriously. “No girls.”

Athena laughed. She hadn’t yet made a move to get up. “How about if I just take pictures and videos from here?” she offered mildly.

I reached out and ruffled her brown hair like she was a kid, which was funny, because I never knew her as anything but an adult. Still, she occupied a kid-like place in my heart, as did her sister, and despite the gap in age between me and their mother, it brought me pleasure knowing that they’d taken me seriously in the role of Ruby’s husband, and that they now saw me as the boys’ Papa. I was sure they’d never refer to me as their “stepfather,” but that was fine—I didn’t need that. I was happy to be Dexter to them for the rest of my life. And I was honored that Ruby and the women in her life had welcomed me in the first place, and just let me be around them.

“Okay, bub,” I said to Patrick. “Let’s go throw a ball around.”

Inside the kitchen, I could see Harlow cleaning up the wreckage of a spaghetti dinner; she looked tired, but happy.

I stepped down onto the sand holding the soft Nerf football that Byron had brought out from who knows where. The boys’ whoops and shouts echoed down the beach as they raced for the water’s edge.

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