Page 35 of The Holiday

Instead of responding to any of the unspoken questions, I walked over to her and reached out for the baby. "Show me how to do the whole diapers and pajamas business?" I asked hesitantly. "I want to be a good grandpa. I want to do it right."

Rather than saying anything, she settled Patrick in my arms and I could hear her sniffle almost imperceptibly.

Ruby stepped around the inflatable bed and opened a drawer, taking out a tiny pair of pajamas with little feet and covers for the hands. "So he doesn't scratch his face with his nails while he sleeps," she said, holding up one little arm of the pajamas.

We stood side-by-side at the changing table as she kept him swaddled for as long as possible, but then she deftly diapered him, swiping a bit of cream on his tiny bottom, fastening the diaper, and sliding his limbs into the pajamas before snapping them closed.

"Here we are!" she said, lifting the baby and gently placing him in my arms. She nodded at the rocking chair next to the moon lamp. "Why don't you rock him a bit? Have a little grandpa time?" she offered, turning back to the changing table to pick up the damp towel and straighten all the baby accoutrements.

I sat down slowly, carefully, positioning myself so that Patrick's head was in the crook of my arm. He looked up at me with big, curious eyes, watching my face as I watched his.A baby, I thought.A tiny person to teach us things we don’t know. What a blessing.

And he has been. Patrick, his brother Byron, and soon, the new baby girl Harlow is carrying, will all bless my life in ways I couldn’t have even hoped for.

We’re an unconventional family, but wearea family—and it’s all thanks to Ruby.

The Friends We Make; The Friends We Keep

Part of my work to make this book happen has included seeing people I haven’t seen in years. Finding time, places, and ways to meet up has been challenging, but also good for the soul. It’s given shape to a post-Ruby life and helped me to find a way forward with writing about a subject I knew so intimately—and I’ve learned things, if you can believe that. I’ve discovered that most (if not all) of us find out at some point that we’ve been married to someone whose entirety is still somewhat of a mystery to us. And that’s a good thing; it gives us new facets of them to discover, and ways to still get to know them after they’re gone.

I traveled to Tokyo twice in the year after Ruby died, once to sit on a panel of writers and talk about the art of the biography, and a second time to meet with Molly Kimble-Kobayashi.

Just so you understand her importance in our lives on Shipwreck Key, Molly owned a coffee shop on the main drag that was called The Scuttlebutt. We had a bar and a restaurant there as well (still do, for that matter), but as with many small towns, the coffee shop came to be the central gathering place. We all needed our caffeine fix, and Molly’s shop became our first stop of the day.

But let me back up just a bit.

When I met Ruby, she had recently moved to Shipwreck Key after a traumatic exit from the White House (surely you remember the scandal surrounding the president’s untimely death, and the discovery of his mistress and son in France). She was ready to move on from that and start a new chapter of her life, and Shipwreck Key was the perfect place to do that.

Without any previous experience in retail, Ruby bought a storefront just a few doors down from The Scuttlebutt, painted the front door pink, filled the shop with shelves and books, and hung out her shingle. Voila, Marooned with a Book was born. Now, Ruby had the luxury of not really needing to turn a massive profit to survive, and we all know that the novelty of a former First Lady running a cute little shop on an island brought in some of her business, but it didn’t take long for people to realize the value of having easy access to the newest releases, and also to have another gathering spot that wasn’t a bar (no offense to my old pal who ran The Frog’s Grog right across the street from her bookstore; many a happy hour was passed with a mug of grog in hand and a smile on my face during my time on the island). But Ruby herself was looking for community at that point in her life, and because she’d just moved to a new place, she decided to build her own community, and so her book club was born.

Now, as a lover of and writer of books, I have to admit that I’ve never belonged to an official book club, but I would imagine that many of them look a lot like Ruby’s did: women who love to gather, enjoy a good book, share some food and drink, and kick around the latest stories and gossip. Or, to put it in simple terms: they want to commune. To share. To find friendship and common ground. And that’s exactly what the women in Ruby’s book club did.

Molly Kimble-Kobayashi was the eldest member of the book club by about fifteen years, and if I could set the scene for you, I would describe her this way: salt of the earth. Unaffected. Witty. Loyal. Strong. Unfashionable, but in a way that told the world she did not care to keep up with such things. Brash, on occasion, but only when it was called for. In her twenties, Molly lost her husband in a boating accident, and rather than remarry or slide away into the melancholy of loss, Molly did what she and her husband had been planning to do together—she got on a boat, and sailed the world. Alone. And then she settled on Shipwreck Key and ran her own business for more than thirty years. So I think you can see what I’m saying here: Molly was a badass.

I arrived in Tokyo dragging the smallest suitcase I could manage behind me, my computer strapped across my chest. The crowd around me was short, dark-haired, mostly Japanese. I stood head-and-shoulders above them, my (admittedly thinning) dark blonde hair and salt-and-peppered goatee pegging me as a foreigner on sight.

I followed the English translations on the signs and made my way to the front of the airport, where I got a car into the heart of the city. I was feeling jittery from too much caffeine on the airplane, and exhausted because I’d stayed awake for the entirety of the fourteen-hour flight from JFK, working on this book on my laptop until the battery died.

My plans to meet Molly were firm. I would get to my hotel, take a few hours to rest, and then call her. So that’s precisely what I did.

We met in a ground floor-level ramen shop in Hiroo, the neighborhood where Molly had settled. The streets were lined with trees, and the sidewalks filled with families, professional-looking people, and expats. It felt international and welcoming, and it honestly brought me some comfort to know that our old friend had settled in a neighborhood full of shops, restaurants, cafes, and parks.In her mid-eighties, Molly was still incredibly spry, and if I’m being perfectly honest, which I always aim to be in my writing—I do not write fiction, after all—she looked exactly like she had at sixty-five, only with a few more wrinkles and a lot more wisdom in her eyes.

“How are you?” I asked her. I had a million questions for Molly, but wanted first to know that she was doing as well as she appeared to be.

"I'm training to swim across the Tsugaru Strait," she said without preamble. "A seventy-three-year-old holds the record as the oldest person to do it, but I can beat that."

"If anyone can, it's you."

We sat down at a table that was polished to a high shine. The windows looked out onto the orderly street, with small cars parked nose to end along the sidewalk. It was March and raining, with temperatures hovering in the low 50s.

After ordering two bowls of ramen loaded with freshly-made noodles, pork, green onions, and spicy red sauce, Molly lifted her small cup of tea and held it up to me in a toast.

"You're on the other side now," she said, bumping her mug against mine lightly. Her hands were surprisingly steady for a woman her age, her gaze steely. "You love, you lose, you figure out how to go on."

I took a sip of my own hot green tea. "Indeed. There is no other way." I'd always found with Molly that practicality and forthrightness won out over any need for couching facts in fluff. "But of course there are days when you wish it wasn't necessary to wake up and do it all again without them."

"Mmmm," she said, nodding in agreement, her blue eyes sparking and burning with memories.

Her husband Rodney's death had been sudden and tragic and at a painfully young age. On Shipwreck Key, I'd known her to carry on a private life that she did not speak of, and I still had no clue whether she'd found love again after Rodney, beyond what she'd shared with the book club about her travels, so I figured it was time to find out.

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