Madam President (6 page)

“That sounds like good advice.”

“I guess.”

“Call him again if you’re still anxious.”

“He has better things to do than talk me off the ledge.”

“I doubt that.”

Charlotte reached for the phone and asked the White House operator to try Warren’s cell. When he didn’t pick up, she hung up and refused the operator’s offer to keep trying.

“I’m sure he’ll call you back,” Peter assured her.

Charlotte nodded and lifted the speech closer to her face.

“Did Brooke and Mark schedule their visit for this week in hopes of landing cameos in your ‘Day in the Life’?” Peter asked.

At this, Charlotte laughed. She’d sent Brooke and Mark off to the Kennedy Center to see a Sondheim play so they wouldn’t bother her. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.”

“Thank you for sparing me from participating in your big production.”

“You have Dale to thank for that. I didn’t even see a request for any filming of us together.”

Peter raised an eyebrow and smiled at his wife of twenty years. “That was nice of her.”

“I suppose.”

“What else does a day in the life of the most powerful woman in the world entail?”

“You mean my made-for-television day?”

“Yes, your perfectly presidential made-for-television day.”

“There’s this speech, which I’ll deliver at the Women’s Museum.”

“That’s what the protest is about out front?”

“Yes.” Charlotte sighed. “Warren warned me that it will cost me any remnant of support I had with the base, but I can’t expect Maureen to go along with my agenda without doing these sorts of things.”

“Look on the bright side, Char. You might even turn your daughter into a supporter. You know, she wanted to march on the mall with NARAL last year on the anniversary of
Roe
. I convinced her that she’d hurt her cause by overshadowing the march with coverage of her participation.”

“You never told me that.”

“It was the middle of the Tara fiasco, and you had your hands full.”

“I still want to feel like a part of this family.”

Peter nodded and looked down at his papers.

Over the years, Charlotte had ceded much of the parenting to Peter. She hadn’t had a choice. Her career path hadn’t left her much flexibility, but that didn’t make it any easier when she thought about everything she’d missed. There would never be another chance to be there for soccer games and field hockey matches, the colds and flus, the breakups and dates, or the family dinners and family vacations that she’d either skipped or ruined by being on the phone the entire time. She didn’t care what anyone said. Working and being a good mother were mutually exclusive in certain lines of work. Being president was one of them.

Peter had taken it upon himself to be twice the father most men were, and the kids rewarded him with affection and loyalty. She knew the twins had always felt loved, but that didn’t make it any less painful when she felt the distance between herself and their children, especially Penelope.

“Honey, please call Penny and tell her not to post anything outrageous on her Facebook page tomorrow.”

“She wouldn’t do that,” he promised.

“Have you seen her Facebook page lately?”

“Not lately, but I happen to know that you aren’t one of her Facebook friends, so how would you know what was on it?”

“I get a printout once a week. Are
you
one of her Facebook friends?”

“Of course. She’d be thrilled to know that you’re spying on her. Maybe that’s part of the problem.”

Charlotte wanted to protest that there wasn’t a problem with her relationship with her daughter, but she knew he was right. She decided to do what she always did. “If she ends up in the news tomorrow, I’m going to hold you responsible.”

Peter was so accustomed to Charlotte’s defense mechanisms that he didn’t even look up. “I know.”

Charlotte sighed loudly. Only Cammie looked at her with concern. “This dog loves me more than my children do,” she added.

“The dogs love you a lot,” Peter agreed.

“The last point on the Facebook page, Peter, seriously, and I know you agree with this. If she thinks she’ll make me squirm, she’ll post something provocative tomorrow, just to show me that she isn’t under my thumb, and it might be a good strategy for you to gently suggest that she not do that.”

Peter finally put down his paperwork and turned to face her. “How about looking at it this way? If she wants to say something about an issue that’s very important to her, she may take to Facebook like everyone else her age and write something about your historic speech. Your daughter might act like a socially aware college freshman who cares about issues like abortion rights. That sounds like someone Charlotte Kramer would be proud of. Actually, that sounds like someone I know. Someone I fell in love with more than twenty years ago.”

His voice was patient, as always, but his words felt like a reprimand. She scrunched up her face and turned back to her speech, taking out her frustration on the draft in front of her by slashing several pages with large black lines. “You always defend her,” she charged.

“Someone has to,” he said quietly.

Charlotte decided to let that be the last word on the topic, but she was extremely unsettled by their conversation. She had a strong feeling that she was correct about the likelihood of Penny saying
something publicly about the speech, and Peter was correct, too. It was precisely what she would have done.

It was clear where the fault lines had developed in their family when she and Peter had carved out separate lives for themselves years earlier. Going public about his affair with Dale had been the flash point, but Charlotte had always seen it as an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of her long and willful neglect of their marriage during her first run for the White House. Now she was terrified about giving their relationship a second chance, but she also felt hopeful that they were both finally committed to building bridges back to each other. She was more concerned about whether or not she could revive her relationship with Penny.

Since she and Peter had been back together, Penny acted as though she resented Charlotte for diverting Peter’s attention away from her. While he was close to both of their kids, he and Penny had a special bond. After Charlotte was first elected president nearly six years earlier, it was Penny who’d asked if they were going to move to D.C. with Charlotte or stay in California with their father. Charlotte and Peter had never even discussed separating the family, but Penny apparently thought that it should be on the table that the kids could stay in school with their friends and their dad would take care of them while their mom went off to D.C. When Charlotte had affirmed that the family would be relocating to Washington, it was Penny who’d argued that it wasn’t fair to make Peter move. He’d ultimately convinced the twins that moving to Washington would be a great adventure. But he returned Penny’s protectiveness and was not the least bit intimidated by her stubborn streak. He’d had plenty of training in dealing with strong-willed women.

Charlotte, on the other hand, was constantly thrown off by how fiercely independent her daughter had grown after just one year at college. Charlotte saw in Penny the same seriousness that she’d possessed as an eighteen-year-old and fretted that her daughter was growing up too fast. She also suspected that her displays of toughness were a defense mechanism designed to project more maturity than she felt. But Charlotte was running out of time to correct the mistakes that she secretly feared she was making each time she acquiesced to
Penny’s requests for more space and independence. She was beginning to think she should be hopping on a plane and planting herself in Penny’s dorm until she talked to her about whatever it was that she was so angry about.

Harry, on the other hand, never played games with Charlotte. He was open and affectionate when Charlotte came to visit, and while he seemed to have formed a closer family unit with his new fraternity brothers at college than with his own family, Charlotte was grateful that he had created such a tight-knit support group during his first year. But between Penny’s increasingly sarcastic e-mails and comments in their recent calls and Harry’s laid-back approach to everything, Charlotte worried all the time that she’d messed up her kids by abandoning them during the years when she actually could have made a difference. Now they were college students and would never live at home again, and she was terrified that she’d screwed them up by never being around.

Charlotte felt a familiar tightening in her stomach and gently pushed Cammie off her legs and stood up to take the dogs out for a final walk.

“I’ll come with you,” Peter offered.

“Nah, watch your game. I’ll be right back. I need the air.”

Cammie walked to the elevator and stood outside it, but the two younger dogs had charged down the stairs. Charlotte had to lure Cammie down the stairs with the rest of her sandwich. Charlotte bent down and kissed the dog’s soft white nose.

“You’re the only one who understands,” she whispered.

Cammie licked Charlotte’s face and reluctantly followed her down the stairs and out to the South Lawn. Charlotte breathed in the warm air and tipped her head back to look at the sky. Her surroundings were perfectly soothing, but she was on edge. She’d been questioning herself at every turn lately. Charlotte missed her fearless, self-assured self. She also missed having a chief of staff like Melanie, who anticipated her every move and knew when to step in and when to back off. Charlotte threw a couple of balls for the dogs and watched a car approach the security gate. The large metal bolts that protected the street in front of the White House from car traffic disappeared into the ground, and the SUV rolled through the checkpoint.

As it neared the South Lawn, Charlotte noticed that her friend Mark was hanging out the back window, waving enthusiastically in her direction.

“I always forget how dead this town is at night. Do you know where I can get a drink around here?” He stepped out of the Navigator and rushed to give Charlotte a warm embrace.

Around her, Brooke and Mark acted largely unchanged from their days as the social ringleaders in college, but she had figured out a long time ago that their over-the-top antics were designed to distract and entertain Charlotte. In their real lives, they were pillars of their wealthy community. Mark was a venture capitalist who’d funded a handful of Stanford college students with brilliant technological innovations. He’d turned a couple of them into billionaires. Brooke was the most sought-after interior designer in Northern California. Their son, Griffin, was a senior at UCLA, and their daughter, Finley, was a junior at Berkeley. They were the kind of parents that Charlotte liked to think she would have been if she hadn’t chosen a career—a life—in politics. Their children actually talked to them. Finley and Griffin had always been like older siblings to the twins. Charlotte hoped that they’d continue to grow closer now that they were all in California. Neither she nor Peter had much extended family the twins had bonded with over the years, so Brooke and Mark served as the closest thing to an aunt and uncle.

“How was the show?” Charlotte asked.

“Boring as hell,” he said. “But the seats were awesome.”

“It was fabulous,” Brooke said, as she teetered in her four-inch Christian Louboutin stilettos on the uneven pavement. She was wearing a leather dress that would have looked ridiculous on anyone else, but with Brooke’s Pilates-sculpted body, she managed to pull it off.

“Charlotte, I’m sorry that my wife looks like a hooker. The good news is that I get to go to bed with her, but the bad news is that we sat with your secretary of labor or education or something like that, and I’m sure he thought we were that couple who crashed your state dinner a few years back. I’m surprised that you didn’t get a call during intermission.”

“Excuse me. This is a four-thousand-dollar Prada dress that I’ve
been waiting for the right occasion to wear. Unfortunately, the right occasion hasn’t presented itself in more than a year, so I decided to wear it tonight.” Brooke giggled.

“Did I mention that she’s drunk?” Mark added.

Charlotte laughed again and let Brooke take her hand. Brooke and Mark were the only people in her life who refused to see her as anyone different from who she’d been when they were all college students at Berkeley. They had been by her side through every personal and professional milestone, and at this point, they enjoyed the fruits of her political success far more than she did. As far as Charlotte was concerned, the very best part of being president these days was being in the company of the few friends she had who got a kick out of the trappings of the presidency. It wasn’t as if the kids were around to enjoy riding on Air Force One or spending weekends at Camp David. But Brooke and Mark were thrilled by all of it—weekends at Camp David, state dinners, the White House Correspondents Dinner, the Gridiron Dinner. Nothing made Charlotte happier than watching her friends enjoy themselves at these events that, to her, were only one step above torture.

“Char-Char, thank you for the tickets. We sat with your secretary of education—not the secretary of labor, as my idiotic husband just said. There’s a possibility that he will resign after meeting us.”

“Is Peter still awake?” Mark asked.

“I think he may have nodded off during the baseball game,” Charlotte said.

“Good. We can have girl talk,” Brooke said.

“What about me?”

“You can serve us drinks and pretend that you’re invisible,” Brooke snapped playfully.

Mark feigned offense and led the dogs inside.

“Speaking of girl talk, how’s it going with Peter?” Brooke wanted to know.

“Mostly fine,” Charlotte said, as they settled into a sofa in the yellow Oval Office on the second floor at the residence.

Brooke leaned in and started whispering in a voice that was louder than Charlotte’s speaking voice. “Are you guys getting along? Are you having fun? Are you having sex?”

“Everything is fine.”

“You seem tense.”

“I have to give a speech tomorrow that’s going to create a big political storm, and I’m dreading it.”