Page 36 of The Holiday

"Was Rodney the only love of your life?"

Molly set down her cup as a waitress approached with two steaming bowls of ramen. We waited as she set them down, bowed slightly, and retreated.

"I loved again," she said, picking up a spoon and a pair of chopsticks. "It's impossible to be a loving person and to not share that love with others."

We ate our first bites in amiable silence, and I decided to bide my time until Molly spoke again.

"There was Adi on Rotuma. He showed me that love was possible again after Rodney, but our lives only intersected briefly."

I nodded. "Do you mind me asking about Bev Byer?" I was referring to Bev, the salty old pirate of a man who'd owned and run The Frog's Grog until he died of a heart attack at eighty-two. There had always been rumors and indications that maybe Molly and Bev kept company behind closed doors, but no one dared to ask outright.

Molly huffed loudly, looking around us as if the other diners might both speak English, and might personally know the cast of characters who'd inhabited Shipwreck Key nearly twenty years prior.

"Bev Byer," she said, frowning at me in disbelief. "Do you really think I loved that man?"

I thought about this and then gave a single nod. "Yes. I do. Or I wouldn't have asked."

Molly stirred her ramen around so that the red sauce blended in, turning the broth into a light russet liquid. She watched her spoon trail through the noodles for a moment and then looked right at me. "Okay, I'll bite. It doesn't matter now, anyway." Molly set her spoon down and steepled her hands over the bowl of ramen, elbows resting on the table, eyes on my face. "Bev and I fought like cats and dogs both in and out of the bedroom."

This was more than I'd bargained for, but I had asked, so I kept a poker face. "Sounds like a mutually enjoyable scenario," I said, for lack of a better response.

Now Molly laughed--loudly and heartily. "Dexter North," she said. "You look like a young boy who just walked in on his parents wrestling beneath the bedsheets."

My face went hot, and I can assure you, at nearly fifty-five, I was not prone to blushing over many things. "I'm happy for you, Mol," I said, busying myself with my chopsticks.

"You should be. And you should be happy for yourself, too, because love is still out there, Dexter. You may choose to find it again, or you may choose to ignore that it exists, but love and passion and joy are still possible after great loss." Molly took another drink of her tea as she watched my face. "But you do things on your own time, and you make the choices that fill your own heart, do you hear me?"

I let her words percolate as we chatted about surface things, like Phyllis Stein and Joe Youngblood finally marrying just two years before Joe died of leukemia. And the way Ella of Doubloons and Full Moons had predicted her own death down to the weekend it would happen and the manner (I'd long been a skeptic of psychics and the metaphysical, but Ella was as charming and convincing as any fortune teller I ever met, and when she did, in fact, die of sepsis one Memorial Day weekend, I was forced to admit that maybe she'd known a thing or two about life and death). It might sound to you like all we did was talk about the grimness of loss and death over ramen, but I assure you, it brought comfort to us both to hear the names of our friends and loved ones bandied about as if they were still walking amongst us. There was no sadness, only reminiscing there.

And it might seem odd to you that I mention all these people by name, as if they were your friends and neighbors, but I do that intentionally, as these are people I only wish you'd known. Hilarious, wise, feisty characters who would have brought as much joy to your life as they did to ours. I talk about them now not out of disrespect for their privacy, but because they lived, and that mattered.

Indeed, that's the purpose of this whole book anyway, is it not? Ruby Hudson lived, and she mattered.

But more about Molly Kimble-Kobayashi now, because I fear that by leaving out any of the rich details of her life, I'd be cheating you out of a bit more of Ruby's background. My wife held Molly in the highest esteem, and as Ruby struggled to hang on at the very end, Molly was one of the last people to call her on the telephone and talk to her as I held the phone to her ear to afford them their privacy. Whatever Molly said to Ruby in those last hours of Ruby's life, I will never know, and I wouldn't have dreamed of asking.

But this trip to Tokyo was a selfish one, in some ways. I wanted to talk about Ruby and to hear more about my beloved wife, of course, but I also wanted to soak up some of the wisdom that always seemed to seep from Molly's very pores.

She took me to Tokyo's Old Quarter, on a bus ride to Mt. Fuji, and to a Zen meditation led by a Buddhist monk. We ate sushi and drank sake one night amongst the locals, with Molly bantering in Japanese like a native speaker (at least to my untrained ears). I was never less than fully impressed by the way a woman who anyone might rightfully consider "elderly" took a city by storm and made it her very own. I had a hunch that this was how Molly had lived her entire life, even before Rodney died.

But letting life pass her by was never Molly's style, and she taught me more in the four days we spent together than I'd learned in decades--that is no exaggeration.

Let me summarize for you here the nuggets and gems that I took away with me after that trip: Rodney's Aunt Kumi, a hugely influential force in Molly's life, had schooled her well in the art of finding and embracing joy, and Molly's daily goal was to find something to laugh about, no matter what it was. Sometimes it was a television show, other times a toddler in the park splashing through puddles. Occasionally it was a dirty joke, other times a line in a book that tickled her funny bone. Molly swore that laughter kept her young.

She showed me through her actions in just four days that there are no unscalable mountains. If a person wants to do something, they just need to decidehowto do it. If you want to swim the Tsugaru Strait in your eighties, do you just jump in the water and start paddling to see if you can, or do you start small, bring reinforcements, and allow yourself some setbacks? If you want to sell your coffee shop on an island in your sixties and move to Tokyo, do you just sell it and show up in a foreign country with all your belongings, or do you visit, find a place to live, and slowly migrate? (To be fair, Molly had done it the first way--that's just the kind of woman she was).

Molly wanted me to see that life doesn't stop at a certain age--say, retirement, or a milestone birthday--and then just trickle on to the end. It's big and it's bold every single day that you wake up still breathing, and you get to live it full-on until the end, if you want to. So she drank the sake and slept it off the next day; she jumped into the open water and gave her arms a run for their money as she paddled and kicked; and she never stopped loving and being open to love.

I want those things for myself. I want all of them. And I hope you do, too.

During our time together, we talked about Ruby a lot. There were evenings we laughed until we cried, and morning walks where we just simply cried. But my favorite story about Ruby that Molly shared with me during our time in Tokyo was about Ruby's first days on Shipwreck Key. Most of the locals were excited to have a First Lady living amongst them, and some were apprehensive about her coming with a Secret Service detail, but Molly reserved judgment until they got to know one another.

"She rolled onto the island and bought a big house on the water," Molly said as we stood on a bridge, looking out at the buds of the cherry blossoms about to bloom. "And I thought maybe she'd be living in a different stratosphere than the rest of us. But then one day, shortly after she arrived, this gorgeous, sweaty creature threw open the door of The Scuttlebutt, stood there with all the heat of summer clinging to her, and gave me the biggest grin I'd ever seen." Molly smiled at the memory. "She said, 'I'm Ruby. I just bought the shop that's empty, and I'm turning it into a bookstore. Want to join my book club?' I laughed out loud, Dexter. Here's the First Lady of this country standing in my coffee shop in a sweaty t-shirt and a ponytail, introducing herself like I don't know who she is, and asking me to join her book club like we're in the seventh grade. She won my heart."

So, while we spent four days together and many tales were told, this one is my favorite of Molly's stories about Ruby, and I think it sweetly encapsulates just who Ruby Hudson was to so many of us. The first time I met her, it was much the same--I felt fully cognizant of the fact that I was interviewing and talking to the woman who'd lived in the White House, but she was just so down-to-earth. So real. So Ruby.

Now, before I leave Molly and talk about other people and things, I need to tell you the postscript to this story: Molly died peacefully in her sleep three months after our action-packed, adventurous visit in Tokyo. I heard that she was found in her bed with a smile on her face and with a fresh tattoo of a wishbone on her left shoulder.

I never knew that Ruby had told her the significance of the wishbone.

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