Eighteen Acres: A Novel (22 page)

Penelope didn’t look convinced.

“Maybe we could go to school in D.C.,” Harry said. “Then you wouldn’t be at the White House by yourself.”

Penelope looked panicked.

“Is that what you want?” Charlotte asked Harry.

“Sure,” Harry said.

“I’ve got one rule. One thing you need to promise me you’ll do for me. Will you promise me you’ll do this one thing every day?” Charlotte asked.

“What?” Penelope asked.

“You need to swear you’ll do it,” Charlotte said.

“What is it?” Penelope said.

“I swear,” Harry said.

Charlotte looked at them and wondered how she had given birth to such decent children.

“I need you to promise me you’ll tell the truth—to me, to each other, to Dad, to your friends, to Gammy and Gramps.”

“I don’t want to go to school in D.C.,” Penelope said.

“I know, sweetie.” Charlotte laughed, putting her arm around Penelope.

They finished the loop, and Harry went inside to work on homework while Charlotte and Penelope shared a pot of tea and some chocolate-chip cookies.

“You sure you’re OK with all this?” Charlotte asked Penelope.

“Mom, it’s not like we didn’t know.”

“Right,” Charlotte said, wondering what exactly Penelope was referring to. She was afraid to ask.

Charlotte wondered if the topic of her troubled marriage was something Penelope would want to discuss in detail. While Charlotte was practicing answers to questions such as “Do you still love Dad?” Penelope received a text from a friend and excused herself.

Charlotte pushed away her tea and looked around for an open bottle of wine. With Brooke and Mark in residence, one couldn’t be far away.

“Am I disturbing you?” Mark asked, appearing in the doorway.

“No, no, come in,” Charlotte said. “Thanks for being here this weekend.”

“Where else were we going to be, Char?”

Charlotte smiled.

“How are you holding up?” Mark asked.

“My strategy is to keep plowing forward,” she said.

“That makes sense, for now,” Mark agreed.

“I’m curious. Did you guys know?” Charlotte asked.

“About Dale?”

“About Peter. Did you know?” she asked.

Mark looked at her for a few seconds before he spoke. “I figured it out,” he said. “But I didn’t know who, and he never said anything to us. I swear.”

“Then how did you know?” Charlotte asked.

“During the campaign, he’d call every night and ask us how you were doing. He’d complain about leaving you out on the trail by yourself to be home with the twins, but when he was on the trail with you, he’d torture himself about leaving the twins home alone. At some point, during that first year, he stopped asking us how you were doing. It was as if he’d given up or run out of energy or something.”

Charlotte felt her chest tighten a bit, and she nodded. “Oh, well. Everything is out in the open now,” she said, forcing a smile.

“Charlotte, I’m so sorry. What can we do?”

“You’re already doing it,” she said, standing. “I’m going to lie down for a few minutes before dinner. Don’t let my dad drink too many cocktails.”

Mark gave her a hug before she left the room.

Charlotte went into her bedroom and closed the door. She sat on the bed and willed herself not to do the one thing she’d wanted to do more than anything else for the past several days. She’d thought of a dozen different ways to start the conversation:
Roger, what you did was inexcusable, but we have to find a way through it
, or
Roger, I need to ask you to resign permanently from DOD, but I want to find a way to keep you as my friend
, or
Roger, what the hell were you thinking? You ruined everything.
She put her head in her hands and forced herself not to pick up the phone and ask the operator to connect her to Roger, as she had done hundreds of times before. Losing Roger made her feel more alone than losing Peter to Dale.

After a dinner of salad, crab cakes, and baked potatoes, Charlotte asked everyone to move into the family room. As they arranged
themselves on the comfortable sofas and chairs, she tapped her wine glass and cleared her throat.

“I want to thank all of you for being here this weekend,” Charlotte said. “Obviously, it’s been a difficult week, and not one day went by that I didn’t draw on all of you for strength. I’d like to raise a glass to my wonderful children, Penelope and Harry, to Mom and Dad, and to the ever-present Auntie Brooke and Uncle Mark.”

“Here’s to the bravest woman in America,” Mark added, raising his wine glass.

“That’s one word for it,” Charlotte’s father said.

They all laughed and drank and talked with the dogs sprawled across their laps. Charlotte stood to refill the plate of cookies, and Brooke followed her into the kitchen. When the door closed behind them, Brooke turned to her friend.

“In the end, Peter was too weak for you, Char. Too needy.”

“I suppose,” Charlotte said.

“You’re better off. I swear to God, you’ll be fine. It’s the public aspect of it that has you off your game,” Brooke said.

Charlotte nodded. “I know. I’m worried about the kids, but I know it’s better this way with Peter,” she said.

“Did you and Peter talk?” Brooke asked.

“We didn’t exactly have time for a heart-to-heart. And I’m fairly certain that this is not how he’d have wanted to go public with his affair, but I didn’t see any other way for them to be together, and obviously, they should be together right now.”

“I don’t know at what point you’ll cross into martyrdom, Char, but it is remarkable that you’re always fretting about everyone else.”

“We both know that’s not true. It’s my fault that my family is in this situation. I didn’t even try to make Peter a part of any of this.”

“It’s not as if you had a lot of people to turn to for tips on how to make it work,” Brooke scoffed.

“And now I get to add ‘first president to be divorced in office’ to my bio. Not the kind of history I wanted to make.”

Brooke looked at her without a scrap of judgment on her face. “He took the easy way out, Char,” Brooke said. “It’s not your fault.”

“I should be mortified, but I can’t even get to it yet. I feel sick about Roger and sad for my children and angry at myself for letting my marriage disintegrate before my eyes. I should be humiliated, but I don’t have the bandwidth.”

Brooke put her arm around Charlotte’s shoulder. “We can both boss Mark around for now, and you have to know that you’ll find someone else. You’re forty-seven years old and hotter than you were in college. We’ll find you some dot-com gazillionaire or something when this is all over.”

“I thought they all went broke,” Charlotte said, smiling at her friend.

“We’ll find one who stuffed money in his mattress during the roaring nineties.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without you guys,” Charlotte said.

“I don’t think you’ll ever find out. Mark is ready to move to D.C. to head the morale committee. He e-mailed Melanie to find out if he can travel on all the campaign trips.”

“Oh, God, the campaign,” Charlotte said, her face falling.

“What’s wrong?” Brooke asked.

“Nothing. Do me a favor, and tell the kids and my folks I’ll be back in five minutes. I need to call Melanie about something.” Charlotte slipped out of the kitchen and into her study.

Melanie

Nothing solidifies Washington’s status as the center of the universe like a presidential crisis. The restaurants on Pennsylvania Avenue buzzed with lobbyists, lawmakers, and reporters swapping the latest gossip about what would happen to Charlotte Kramer in the aftermath of her Bagram Blockbuster. In admitting that her husband was sleeping with a White House reporter and accepting the temporary resignation of her defense secretary, Charlotte was in uncharted waters.

On top of that, Melanie was unable to convince the editors of the
Dispatch
to kill their story about an alleged affair between Charlotte and Roger. She’d exploited their reservations about the source, which everyone knew was Stephanie Taylor, but no one would acknowledge it publicly because of the long-held Washington tradition of protecting an anonymous source above all other considerations. And Melanie managed to poke enough holes in the veracity of Stephanie’s account by acknowledging that Charlotte and Roger were extremely close but never intimate. Three weeks after Charlotte returned from Afghanistan, a series of grainy photos of her and Roger hiking at Camp David accompanied a one-page story about “rumors of romance” buried deep inside the magazine. Bloggers and some of the seedier cable news programs devoured
the sordid details, but most people in Washington were on scandal overload by that point. Besides, the affair between Charlotte’s handsome husband and the rising star at one of the networks made for far better television.

Everyone in D.C. was glued to their BlackBerrys and cable news channels, and even the cab drivers were apprised of each new development in the crash investigation. Melanie was photographed and followed each time she ventured outside the gates of the White House complex. She started referring to the frenzy as the new normal and warned everyone on the White House staff to keep their heads down and mouths shut. She enacted a zero-tolerance policy on leaks and blackballed reporters from the White House briefing room who cobbled together hit pieces with unnamed sources. Melanie was determined to keep the White House complex a placid place, even in the midst of Charlotte’s political Armageddon.

Some senior staffers chafed at Melanie’s strict new rules, but in the wake of the accident, Melanie was invigorated by a new sense of purpose. She was the only one on the White House staff who spoke with Charlotte’s full authority, and that made her more indispensable than usual. Lines of authority that had become blurred by three years of familiarity were sharpened by the shrinking of Charlotte’s inner circle. With Roger out of the picture, Charlotte turned to Melanie for everything.

Charlotte and Melanie were spending so many extra hours together during the week that Melanie turned down Charlotte’s invitation to travel to Camp David for Easter weekend. Brooke and Mark would be there again, so Charlotte would be entertained and distracted, which meant that Melanie could get some work done.

She was catching up on paperwork when she saw Brian’s number flash on the caller ID for her main line. She let Annie pick it up. They’d swapped e-mails and voice-mails a few times since she’d been back from Afghanistan, but he hadn’t asked her on another date.

“Brian’s on the line,” Annie said, sticking her head in and smiling.

Melanie reached for the phone.

“No, don’t pick up!” Annie practically shouted.

“Why?”

“Wait a couple of minutes. You don’t want to appear too eager,” Annie said.

Annie was well versed in all of the books about dating rules, and the results spoke for themselves. Annie usually juggled several suitors on the weekends, and there was always a different clean-cut male staffer loitering in Melanie’s lobby to talk to Annie.

“Count to sixty,” Annie ordered.

Melanie waited a full sixty seconds and then picked up. “Hi there,” she said.

Annie smiled and left her office, closing Melanie’s door on her way out.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Good. I mean, considering,” she said, looking around her desk at the stacks of speeches, documents, and policy briefs awaiting her review.

“Considering the world has gone to hell in a handbasket since I last saw you?”

“Yes, that’s about right,” Melanie said, standing up to pace slowly in the space behind her desk, her eyes wandering among the framed pictures of herself with the various presidents she’d worked for.

“How have you been?” Brian asked.

Melanie contemplated saying something about how he would know if he had tried harder to find out, but she was the one who had ignored his last two e-mails. “I’ve been fine. Busy but good. How about you?” she said, smacking her head with her fist for her unpithy response.

“Everything is good. Listen, I’m sure you’re working all weekend, but I wanted to see if I could buy you a drink tonight. I have to do the Sunday show tomorrow, and I have some work to do tonight, but I thought maybe around eight or nine, we could meet somewhere. What do you think?”

Melanie contemplated blowing him off for not calling sooner, but she wanted to see him. She examined the upholstery on the sofa and matching armchairs in her office and noticed some fraying at the bottom.

She heard Brian clear his throat.

“That sounds good,” Melanie said, smiling and sitting back down behind her desk.

“Should I pick you up at the White House? Or will you have made it home by then?”

“I should be home by then. If for some reason I’m still here, I’ll shoot you an e-mail.”

“How romantic,” he joked.

“Would you rather I texted?”

“How about an instant message? It just feels more intimate, don’t you think?” he said.

Melanie laughed. “If you’re not careful, I’ll have Walter and Sherry retrieve you. There’s no telling what they’d do to you to verify that your intentions are pure,” she said, e-mailing Annie as she talked.

“Meeting B tonight,” she wrote. “When does my NSC meeting end?”

“YAY!” Annie wrote back. “NSC meeting goes for hours. I told them you could only stay until six.”

“I like the idea of being fetched by your security detail,” Brian said.

“Really?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah,” he said.

She laughed again. “I’ll meet you at my place at eight o clock,” she said.

“Good. I hope we can pick up where we left off.”

Melanie blushed and was glad he couldn’t see her. “Uh, yes, we do have some catching up to do.”

“You’re funny when you’re flustered,” he said, laughing.

“I’m not flustered,” she protested.

“Yes, you are,” Brian said.

“I’m not flustered. I’m busy.”

“Flustered is more sexy than busy,” he said.

She blushed again. “I will see you tonight,” she said.

“I’m looking forward to it.”

She hung up before he could make her make her blush again. She looked at her watch and calculated how much time she had between the National Security Council meeting that she was now five minutes late for and Brian’s arrival for some personal maintenance. She picked up the phone and made an appointment to get her legs waxed.