There had been a brief moment in November when Matt tried to convince me that we should also go to Hawaii, saying that Jimmy thought he could get Matt a spot on the advance team. “The DCOS owes him a favor and they still need someone to do airport.” (Matt pronounced this “Dee-kos,” and I stared at him for a second, wondering if he was speaking in a different language or if I was having a stroke.)
“The who?” I asked. “The what?”
“The deputy chief of staff. Billy. You’ve met him, right? That’s what everyone calls him. The DCOS.”
“Oh, right,” I said, like this made any sense to me. “But you don’t even do advance.”
Matt looked so hopeful as he said, “But I could.”
It wasn’t that Hawaii didn’t sound great (because obviously it did), but I couldn’t bear the thought of canceling on my parents, of leaving them to celebrate alone. I already felt guilty enough that we had to alternate holidays with the Kellys—it seemed unfair because there were so many more of them and just the two of my parents. So we went to Wisconsin, which was nice and quiet as it always was. Matt didn’t mention Hawaii again (he understood why I couldn’t go), but I could tell that when we were sitting around the table talking with my parents about their cat, Snickers, or their bridge club he was thinking about it. My parents read a lot, watched several light mystery shows, and (if it was nice enough) went for daily walks—and so when we were with them, we did all of the same things, which I found sort of relaxing and was pretty sure that Matt found suffocating.
And Ash’s pictures kept popping up: a plate of French toast with the ocean in the background and a caption, “Breakfast with a view at the Surfrider!”; a picture of turtles about to be released into the ocean; a tower of sushi at Morimoto. I couldn’t mention them to Matt because I was the one who’d insisted we go to Wisconsin. And so I sat and shivered under a blanket in my parents’ house and flipped through Ash’s beach pictures, each one making me slightly crankier than the last.
—
We were back to DC for New Year’s and went to a party with all of the White House people we always saw—minus Ash and Jimmy, who were still in Hawaii, which made the whole night pretty boring. I figured we could leave right after midnight and I counted down the minutes until then. But as the ball dropped on the TV, Matt kissed me and said, “Happy New Year’s to my favorite wife,” and I thought how sweet he was, how he’d been in Wisconsin with me when he really wanted to be in Hawaii. So I smiled and stayed at the party with him until 3:00 a.m.
Ash called me the day they finally returned and I almost squealed on the phone when I heard her voice. “I feel like you guys have been gone forever,” I said.
“I know it,” she said. “It’s good to be back.”
We made plans to meet for dinner at La Tomate, an Italian place at the top of Dupont, and when we walked into the restaurant, Ash and Jimmy were already there, both so absurdly tan that it made me dizzy to look at them straight on. They stood to greet us, all of us embracing like we’d been apart for years. When we finally sat down, I turned to them and said, “So, clearly you spent some time in the sun. How was it?”
Jimmy got a serious look on his face and said, “You know, this was a different kind of trip. Normally we’re advancing the President for meetings with officials, for speeches, for official visits. But this was advancing him for a vacation—figuring out where he’s going to eat dinner and play golf. And usually, we didn’t know what he was going to do until the night before. You know, sometimes he’d want to play golf and then would decide at the last second to do a beach day with the family.”
“Wow,” I said. I was already regretting asking about the trip because Matt was so jealous he was practically shaking.
“I know,” Jimmy said. “It was a whole new spin on what we do on regular trips.”
“That’s crazy,” Matt said. “It must have been hard to adjust to that.”
“It was,” Jimmy said, looking so intense that I wanted to roll my eyes. “I mean, look, don’t get me wrong—we were in paradise, so I’m not complaining. It was just a different kind of job to advance the gym for him each morning. Can you believe he works out every single morning on vacation? His discipline is amazing.”
“Totally,” Matt said, and Ash made a sound of agreement.
“And the Secret Service has a tough job there too,” he went on. “Basically everything is an OTR stop.” (At this point, Matt turned to me and whispered, “Off the record,” so that I could understand the conversation, but Jimmy didn’t even pause.) “He walks down the street to get shave ice and people just go crazy. We tell a restaurant about twenty minutes before he’s going to get there—the reservation is under a different name—and then they have to get in there and start magging people—you know, checking them with the handheld metal detectors. There’s so much work that goes into just one outing.”
The two of them started talking about how the team managed to get reservations for so many people at such great restaurants, and then Ash turned to me. “Have you ever had shave ice?” she asked. “It’s so delicious.”
“It’s like a sno-cone, right?” I asked.