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*
CJ glanced at the caller ID, half expecting Danny to be checking in on her, since she’d been out of his sight for twenty entire minutes. It was not Danny.
“God help me,” she sighed, and pressed the button. “I’m answering against my better judgment, just so you know.”
“Claudia Jean,” Josh said.
“Lord Vader,” she quipped. "Only you could be so bold."
“How’s it going?”
“Depends on why you’re calling me.”
A churro vendor jangled his cart past her on the boardwalk. A flurry of middle school girls whooshed by on skateboards, chattering and laughing and fearless as a pride of would-be lionesses.
“Where are you?”
“At the beach.”
“You’re at the beach? Cliché much?”
“Some of us don’t have the conviction or coloring to pull off your signature undead pallor.”
"Frolicking in the sand…Less than six months was all it took to restore the California girl to her former self."
CJ made a face. "I don't frolic,” she protested.
"Skip, waltz, surf—whatever the hell it is you’re doing out there to pass the time instead of fortifying democracy."
"It's amazing what some sunshine and life free from a security detail can do for the soul, friend.” CJ replied. "Danny banished me from the kitchen so I took myself on a long walk down to the beach, since I'm, at present, verboten from running."
"You're not allowed to run?" He repeated, amused. "Have all your West Coast fitness fads gotten so out of hand we’re suddenly regulating cardio, or did you just break a leg?"
"I did not, in fact, break a leg. Not that you'd know."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means, the only time I ever hear from you is when you're in crisis."
"I'm a professional political operative in Democratic politics; I'm always in crisis."
"You ever think that blithely sweeping your actual trauma under the rug is why you’ve gone prematurely gray?"
"I used to jog. I was a jogger," Josh sighed, ignoring her. "Why’d Danny banish you from the kitchen?"
“I was cooking.”
“And?”
“He disagreed.”
“On what you were making?”
“If it qualified as cooking.”
Josh scoffed. “Yeah, that sounds familiar.”
“I’m shacking up with a chef de cuisine, apparently.”
“Beats take-out.”
"There’s that. I think for a while there in the first term my blood type was basically soy sauce. Hey, it’s late, your time. Are you at the office?”
"Yeah. Had some free time on my calendar."
"Sorry, I think our lines are crossed, because it sounded like you said you had some free time."
"Have a call with the New Zealand PM. The only time we could make work was early afternoon, them. Time zones, so. Late night."
“Wanna hear something profoundly insane? Prepare yourself because, I mean, this is wild —I’m going to be asleep, in my bed, by ten pm tonight. Amazing!”
“Whatever gets you up in the morning, CJ. Or doesn’t, I guess. Actually, I wanted to get some advice, if you have a sec," he asked. “I'm getting stonewalled by the Germans."
“Over?”
“Cobalt. In Kundu.”
"That’s the mineral rights thing?"
"Yeah."
"Is this the Chancellor, or this coming from State?"
“It’s her office. They’re shutting down all our options with the Chinese like they’re playing offensive tackle or something.”
“Well, for starters I’d avoid using any football metaphors in the future, since they play, you know, the other kind.”
"I'm saying, I'm starting to take this personally."
"She's a pragmatist. Appeal to her sense of getting things done, not just preaching about development and crowing about human rights abuses; we do that all the time. Then push ‘em on their domestic economic angle. Everyone wants these minerals. Cell phones, electric cars, lithium batteries…If the Chinese get in there and corner the market, that’s the deciding factor for the next two decades of manufacturing overhead. Suddenly everyone’s mobile addiction just got a lot more expensive to sustain. Germany’s a big market, and everyone wants one of these iPhones. It’s in the interest of the Social Democrats.”
“Greens are gonna fight her on it.”
“Yeah, but they have to, and they should. Meanwhile, if we get some multinationals in there with German and Norwegian and Canadian tech best practices, maybe the environmental costs will come down.”
“Maybe…”
“Back channel it through the British. They’re always good to screw around with the wreckage of empire and gloat about, well, honestly, who could say at this point?”
“It’s a good idea. You're good at this.”
She rolled her eyes and affected her best plucky orphan voice, “Gee, wow, thanks, mister!”
“I’m sayin’, you should still be doing this. You could be.”
“Josh…”
“Is that a note of regret I detect there?”
CJ drew a deep breath of warm, ocean air. She could smell wood burning stoves and the al pastor taco truck down the block and salt on the wind. She let it go.
“Not for one minute. I left it all on the field. Retire my number, and raise it to the rafters. The glory days of professional politics are behind me.”
“C’mon,” he chided. “You miss it.”
“Josh, one day you’re gonna walk free from that magnificent prison and see what else the world has to offer. That joy is possible. That life is more than legislative accomplishment, and that ‘each morning, we are born again.’”
“Quite the fortune cookie there, Gwyneth.”
"It's Buddhist. Or Zen. Something. I'm becoming one with the universe."
Josh snorted. "Why?"
She rolled her eyes, but felt a flutter at the thought. "Danny's big into self-care lately. Self being relative in that sentence.”
“Ho, ho. Someone’s gone the full California roll. Blink if you’re drinking wheatgrass or are being held against your will.”
“Okay, but when I do, bear in mind that we’re on the phone–” she said, as if speaking to a small child. “–and you can’t see me.”
“Just sayin’, there must be a gun to your head to get you reciting affirmations of the heart chakra.”
CJ sighed, looking at the setting sun over the water. The wind lifted her hair. “It’s not so bad, actually.” She thought again of why she was walking, not running, and that she truly loved her hopelessly romantic, live-action teddy bear of an overbearing partner. “It’s kind of nice.”
“Just not sure why you need it. Non-profits don’t usually trump, yanno, nuclear conflict in Central Asia. Slightly different orders of magnitude, as stressors go.”
"Stressor, my love? I don't even know her."
"Okay, I'm sending in the national guard."
“It’s weird. But wonderful. Life is short, Joshua. It is cruel, and hard, and difficult. Take what pleasure you can get from it while you can.”
“This is why we don’t talk more."
"Shut up. You called me."
“Hey, you never answered my question."
"Which one, I can hardly keep up."
"Why aren’t you running?”
"It’s a…doctor thing.”
His voice shifted to a serious register. “Something going on?”
“It's…”
"CJ?"
No time like the present, and they’d be getting ready to tell folks sooner or later anyway.
“Well, basically, because...I am pregnant. And—No!—before you say anything, yes: I know, I know, I KNOW—I’m a million years old, and this was not exactly planned, and yet somehow, here I am, actually, impossibly, ridiculously pregnant. And it's high risk and scary and all of that, but mostly it's fine and good and we’re obscenely happy, and if you crack even one single joke about it I’m hanging up, okay?”
Silence.
“...Josh?”
"You're having a baby!?" he shouted.
"Yes."
“That’s amazing!”
“Thank you!”
"Like a...a human, baby, right?"
"No, it’s a capybara, Josh. Yes, an actual human baby. And shut up."
"With Danny. That’s kind of blowing my mind.”
“Yes, with Danny. My…” She struggled to find a word she didn’t hate.
“Boyfriend?”
“I’m not calling him that.”
“You aren’t?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s not. I am forty-four years old. He’s forty-six. At our age, you don’t have boyfriends. You have–”
“Baby daddies?” Josh suggested.
Honest to god. She stabbed her tongue at her cheek and bit out. “He’s not my boyfriend. I don’t do boyfriends anymore.”
“You’re doing someone.”
“You know–!” she all but shrieked.
“Claudia Jean, listen and be silent. I am thrilled for both of you. There’s nothing a guy wants more than his surrogate big sister to get knocked up by his college roommate.”
“You and I are the same age, you little nightmare,” she pointed out.
"Okay, well, that’s definitely not something an older sister would say, so..."
“You weren’t roommates. I’m his roommate.”
“And I’m sure he just loves when you call him that instead of your boyfriend.”
“Shut up. You shared a roof, not a duvet.”
“Fine. We lived in the same house in Inman Square. Be pedantic about it.”
“I will always be pedantic about it.”
She kicked a leafy dwarf palm frond off the boardwalk and turned toward the long, east-reaching stretch of California Ave.
"So, the self-care and the relaxing mantras..."
"Mandated by the dictatorial baby-daddy,” she huffed. “Emphasis on dick.”
“Yeah, I got it,” Josh sighed.
"If he thinks bed rest is enough to get me to meditate, he’s got another thing coming. He thinks he's so clever, disguising all his little micromanaging as love and affection..."
"What an asshole," Josh snarked.
"Infuriating.”
“I gotta call him. He’s gotta be out of his mind excited.”
“Oh, he’s over the moon, as you’d expect. He’s got plans to paint the nursery. Wants to build a tree house. Mind you, we don’t have a tree, so that’s gonna be interesting. He’s full-on nesting.”
Josh laughed. “I’ll bet. Wow. And I thought you had the reins before. He must be at your beck and call.”
“I wish. Every time we fight over, whatever–” She waved a hand in the air. “–names and color schemes and parenting styles, he makes annoyingly well-argued points. Compromise is overrated."
"Man does know his way around a source."
"Among other things."
Josh exhaled slowly. “CJ, I really cannot emphasize enough how little I want to hear about what you two–”
"Oh, well, then you shouldn’t have made a joke about it, should you?”
“Regrettably true.”
“Little joke, hahaha. Don’t invoke the sexytimes if you can’t handle it, sweet pea.”
He changed the subject. “You know if you’re having a…?”
“It’s a boy,” CJ smiled.
Josh laughed in astonishment. “Wow. Your son. God. I’m picturing a righteous, feminist carrot-top.”
“Yeah.”
“A towering, righteous, feminist carrot-top.”
CJ bit her lip, so annoyed by all these hormones. “Probably.”
"When are you due?"
"January."
"Well you didn’t waste any time."
“Nine years, I dunno. Feels a bit like I wasted something.”
“I get it," he said, quietly. She supposed he really did. "Hey, know what I was thinking about?”
"What?"
“The other day, I was talking to Donna–”
“Donna! I wanna talk to Donna!”
“–well, she’s in Chicago with the First Lady, so, you know, not now. But, I was talking to her about, I dunno, something about you all. And she reminded me that the first thing Danny ever said to you was marry me.”
CJ shook her head. “What?”
“No, I know. But I was thinking about it, and I’m pretty sure she’s right.”
“She usually is.”
“I know. It’s annoying.”
“The absolute worst.” CJ reached into her memory. “That, was, what, Manchester?”
“That was…I think you were ticked at me about something.”
“Well, you’ll have to be more specific.”
“You came into my office shouting. Danny’d come up as a favor. Start sussing out a piece.”
CJ shook her head. The details mostly escaped, but she remembered the beats. How the guy from the Post was Josh’s buddy from college—some irritating hack who had the audacity to be right and cheeky and cute all at the same time.
She remembered the feelings that had started to creep in between them, after that.
How he’d gone toe to toe with her everywhere from Seattle to Sarasota. How he still was. After everyone else had moved on and left her to carry the weight and the world and the legacy of everything they started and no one else stuck around to finish. After it all, Danny was still there. He was making dinner right now.
“Yeah. I sorta remember,” she said, openly crying.
“You should do something about that. Make an honest man outta that baby-daddy of yours. CJ?”
“It’s fine.” She wiped at her eyes. “I’m not myself. My natural cool and aloofness has been hijacked by this stupid, ginger parasite I’m knocked up with.”
“Hate to break it to you, babe,” Josh said tenderly. “You’ve never been cool.”
“I was, once," she sniffled.
“Keep telling yourself that.”
A comfortable silence stretched out between them, across thousands of miles and moments and memories.
“You’re gonna be a great mom.”
She touched her belly, feeling a flutter she hadn’t quite gotten used to. “One lives in hope.”
“You've trained for it. All those events and briefings. Every day, for years, you’ve been ordering a bunch of self-interested, attention-seeking, crazy-making, megalomaniacs around.”
“Don't forget the White House press corps.”
Josh laughed. “You tell the president?”
“Next month. Going to New Hampshire.”
“Fourth of July?”
“Yeah. You gonna be there?”
“Be nice, but see what the schedule holds.”
“Yeah.” It made her a little sad, not knowing when they’d all be together again. She looked down at her bare hands and figured there was something she could do about that.
“Hey. Claudia Jean.”
“Hey, Joshua.”
“Ah, I miss you.”
“Yeah. I miss you, too, lovey.”
“Sure you’re not bored out of your mind? I’m happy to sub you in, just say the word.”
“I say this with love and respect but, never again, not even for one marvelous and soul-shaking second. I did my time.”
“Just checking.”
“Thank you, though.”
"I'm happy for you. Just don’t go overboard."
“Okay.” She opened the gate and ducked through the arbor.
“If I hear you’re out there doing reiki or something–”
"Get out of my sight,” she laughed at him.
She could hear him do that little intake of breath he always did when he'd thought of something clever to say and wanted to get it out in a rush.
"I would," Josh parroted sweetly. "Except, here's the thing: We're on the phone, and you can't see me.”
CJ hung up on him.
Idiot, she thought, and with great affection.
She gave her phone a gentle squeeze, the shape and weight like a hand right there in her own, though it was not.
A light just up the walkway blinked on. CJ touched her belly.
Anyway, she was home.
*