3. Ruby
Seattle is cold. It”s gray. It”s rainy. It”s everything that Ruby has always believed it to be, though she”s visited the city on numerous occasions and during every season. As a young girl, she and her mother made the trip at least twice a year to visit Patty”s parents, Eugene and Margaret, both die-hard Seattleites with a love of clean air, strong coffee, and the outdoors.
Before leaving Santa Barbara, Ruby made an appointment with Patty”s accountant, but before getting even more embroiled in her mother”s finances she needs to find out more about this property in Seattle.
”This is it, ma”am,” the Uber driver says, pulling up in front of a beautiful duplex and idling at the curb. As he does, the windshield wipers streak the light rain across the glass, and jazz music hums quietly from the speakers.
Ruby looks out the window of the backseat at the house in the Montlake neighborhood of the city; it’s within spitting distance of the University of Washington, and most of the houses look like the type that you see in movies set in Seattle: picturesque with peaked roofs, front porches, emerald green lawns, and moneyed exteriors.
Ruby glances at the address on her phone screen one more time and then back at the house, which is decidedly not a condo.
”Thank you,” she says, sliding out of the car and putting the sole of one leather boot on the cold, wet pavement. Rain immediately starts to speckle the shoulders of her coat.
The door closes with a heavy thump and the driver leaves her there, standing at the foot of a short driveway as she looks up at the house. One street over, traffic rushes by on a busy street, but this home is tucked into a protected enclave of expensive homes, hugged by tall trees and lined with parked cars, basketball hoops, and all the trappings of the upper middle class.
“Ruby.” A woman opens the front door. She stands there, arms wrapped around her body as she watches Ruby walk up the driveway and to the house. “Welcome.”
“Ellen?” Ruby pauses for one brief moment to confirm, though she knows this must be the woman who had written her mother that letter—that one and so many others, all lined up in the boxes in Patty’s office. Ruby had read most of them, more and more certain with every missive that she’d stumbled onto the great love affair of her mother’s life. “It’s so nice to meet you.”
Ruby is prepared to offer a hand, but Ellen steps out onto the porch and throws her arms open wide. “I can’t believe you’re here,” Ellen says in a hoarse whisper, pulling her close for a hug. “Your mom…I’m so sorry, honey.”
They stand there like that for a moment. Ellen smells like clean, powdery perfume, and the open house behind her beckons with the scent of freshly brewed coffee.
Finally, Ellen releases her and wipes the tears from her own eyes. She takes Ruby’s hand, and leads her inside.
They quickly dispense with Ruby’s coat, purse, and boots, and end up in the middle of a warm kitchen with many windows and a collection of copper pots that hang over an island.
Ellen pours them each a cup of coffee and brings cream from the refrigerator as Ruby looks around.
“Sit, sit,” Ellen says, waving at the table. Ruby sits. “I know why you’re here.”
Ruby doesn’t even know why she’s here. She accepts the coffee and waits for Ellen to join her. When she does, Ruby taps a nail against the side of her ceramic mug, trying to formulate her thoughts. No matter how much time she spent on the airplane imagining this moment and this conversation, she still couldn’t have truly envisioned herself asking a strange woman to tell her the circumstances of her love affair with Patty.
When Ruby doesn’t speak, Ellen does: “You want to sell the house and I completely understand. I’ve lived here forever nearly rent-free, and it’s time for me to move on and let you settle your mom’s estate.”
In truth, those thoughts had been part of Ruby’s mental meanderings, but she hasn’t made any such decision formally. Sure, this house is probably worth a fair amount of money, but there’s so much more that Ruby needs to know.
“Actually, I have no idea yet,” Ruby finally says, lifting her coffee mug just to feel the warmth against her cold hands. “This is all new to me, and I’m really just getting my ducks in a row. I don’t have any siblings, as you know, so it’s just me trying to figure this out.” She dips her head and pauses before going on. “I understand that you and my mother were close, I just don’t know how close, or how you two maintained a friendship all these years.”
At this, Ellen bursts out laughing. The unexpected mirth jolts Ruby and she looks up from her coffee mug in surprise.
“Sometimes it’s not about maintaining a friendship, Ruby,” Ellen says. She’s looking at Ruby from the other end of a kitchen table that’s covered by a yellow and white tablecloth. “It’s about a shared past that bonds you together with ties that are unbreakable.”
Ruby decides that being forthright is her best option, given that she’s only spending twenty-four hours in Seattle. “I read some of your letters.”
Not even a flicker of shock registers on Ellen’s face; she appears totally unsurprised. “I wrote many,” she says carefully.
“You did.” Ruby nods, still clutching the mug with both hands. “I loved the one about you two sneaking out to see the Beatles.”
This makes Ellen laugh again, and this time her head tips back and her eyes close. The lines on her face look like etchings from years and decades of joy, and suddenly the woman she’d imagined up here in Seattle, pining away for Patty, becomes someone different, someone happy.
“We were a couple of hooligans, that’s what we were,” Ellen says, swiping at a tear that’s escaped during her laughing fit. “Our mothers never knew about that little escapade. I’m sure you’ve had a few yourself that you never told Patty about.”
“Oh, probably,” Ruby says, smiling nervously. “But my mom and I have always been pretty close.” Her smile fades. “I mean, we were close.”
Ellen clucks sympathetically. “Oh, Ruby,” she says. “It’ll take time.”
Ruby gives a nod. “I know. And it’s fresh. She came to Florida and stayed with me until the end.” The words nearly choke her as she says them, trying hard not to remember the frail, pained woman who had taken the place of lively, vivacious, funny Patty.
But even in her pain, there had been humor; Patty hadn’t faded altogether until her very last hours. In fact, there had been a day on Shipwreck Key—maybe two weeks into Patty being there—that Ruby had paused in the middle of the kitchen, copper pot in one hand and dishrag in the other, and listened to the silence.
The house, empty save for her and Patty after Harlow and Athena had left the island again, had fallen into a soothing sort of routine. The women woke up, had coffee, Ruby cared for her mother and got her all the medications that she started her day with, and then they’d sit together at the table and talk about everything under the sun.
Before noon, Ruby would get Patty set up on a couch comfortably, a cup of tea on the coffee table, and all of her stationary sets and pens were set up close by. Patty would write notes to mail to her friends until sleep overwhelmed her, then she’d doze until late afternoon, sleeping right through lunch.
One afternoon, things got terribly quiet much earlier than usual, and Ruby stopped what she was doing, holding that pan in one hand and listening for the sound of Patty picking up and setting down the mug of tea, or dropping a pen and calling for Ruby to help her retrieve it. But that day, there was nothing. The house had gotten so quiet that Ruby could hear the clock on the wall ticking.
Her first urge was to call out for her mother, but instead, she’d set the copper pot on the island, holding the dish towel in hand as she tiptoed into the front room. There, on the couch, Patty’s head had lolled back, and her eyes were closed. Her mouth hung slack. The pen she’d been writing with rested in her right hand, and the paper had slipped off her lap and landed on the rug beneath the coffee table.
“Oh, no,” Ruby had whispered to herself. In fact, the words came out so quietly that she might not have said them aloud at all.
She took cautious steps towards her mother, her heart rate picking up in anxious anticipation.
When Patty didn’t stir, Ruby leaned forward, putting her face as close to her mother’s as she could bear, hoping that she’d feel the exhalation of breath from either Patty’s mouth or nostrils.
Ruby stood there, cheek next to her mother’s mouth.
“I’m not dead yet,” Patty had said in a regular, if somewhat raspy, voice.
Ruby shrieked and jumped back, putting both hands to her chest. “Jesus, Mom!” she’d shouted, feeling her eyes well with tears. “I thought you stopped breathing.”
Patty chuckled and reached out one shaky hand towards her daughter. “I’m sorry, Bibi, I couldn’t resist. You just looked so serious. I had to lighten the mood.”
The tears fell freely down Ruby’s cheeks as she broke into a smile; even she could laugh at the ridiculousness of thinking her mother had died without a final joke or a few words for Ruby.
“Mom,” Ruby had said, pulling the sleeve of her lightweight sweatshirt down over one hand and using it to wipe her eyes and her nose. “Don’t die, okay?”
Patty’s face softened as she watched her adult daughter standing there, vulnerable as a little girl in the face of her mother’s impending demise.
“Bibi, I will hang on as long as I possibly can, if only to give you a few more nuggets of wisdom before I go.”
Ruby had laughed at that too; they both knew that Ruby had enough nuggets of her own wisdom at that point.
“We spoke while she was staying with you,” Ellen says now as they sit there in her kitchen in Seattle. “And she sent me letters from Shipwreck Key.”
“I guess I just want to know more about your relationship with her. Whatever you can tell me. Whatever you’re willing to share,” Ruby adds quickly, understanding that women of their generation may not be completely open about their sexuality with people they’ve just met.
A soft, knowing smile crosses Ellen’s face, and she looks out the window at the rain that’s falling on the trees outside. She is lost in thought. Ruby waits.
“Your mother…” Ellen begins. She stops, holds up one hand, clears her throat, and then goes on. “Patricia was one-of-a-kind. We became friends in elementary school, and we were thick as thieves from that point on. It wasn’t until high school that I realized how I really felt.”
Ruby braces herself, knotting her hands together in her lap as the rain begins to pelt the windows in earnest. “About my mom?” she asks gravely.
Ellen tips her head to one side, watching Ruby’s face. “About her sister.”
“My aunt Olivia?” Ruby frowns.
Ellen nods. “Mmm, yes. Olivia. She was a year older than us, and like something out of a 1940s movie. Thick, wavy hair, glossy red nails and lips, and eyebrows penciled in so that she always looked amused. Smart as a whip, too.” Ellen turns her head to watch the rain streaming down the glass, and then she looks back at Ruby and leans forward, resting her elbows on the table. “Olivia and I fell in love. It wasn’t acceptable at that time, and we never told a soul, but your mother knew.”
Ruby is puzzled by this. The letters had definitely felt to her as though Ellen had been in love with her mother, and there had been no mention whatsoever of Aunt Olivia.
“But…Aunt Olivia was married to my Uncle Jim.”
Ellen shrugs and then wraps her hands around her coffee mug again. “What can I say? There are many, many people our age in marriages that were meant to cover up the fact that we were in love with someone of our own gender. I myself never married, but I respect what Olivia felt she needed to do.”
“So,” Ruby says, shaking her head as she tries to come to terms with this revelation. “You two were in love?”
“We were.” Ellen nods. “And then your mother and I were in an accident, and it changed everything.”
“Wait. You got into an accident? I don’t know anything about this.”
Ellen takes a long, deep breath and then starts to talk. “One rainy night in November 1966, your mom and I went out driving around town, as young women did when they were looking for trouble.” She laughs here, giving a single, disbelieving shake of her head as she recalls that night. Her eyes are faraway, and she taps her short fingernails against her ceramic mug. “We were in the Capitol Hill area, and we’d been drinking. Your mom was driving.”
Ruby is on the edge of her seat here; for her entire life, Patty had hounded her ceaselessly about never drinking and driving, and about never getting into the car with anyone who had. She has a feeling that this story is at the heart of Patty’s obsession with drunk drivers.
“Anyhow, she was driving and the rain was coming down in sheets, and somehow we missed a stop sign. Ran right through it. The next thing I knew we were facing the wrong way on that street, and headlights were coming at us. I don’t know why, but I told your mother to get out and go for help. I could feel that something was wrong with my leg, and I knew that if your mom left me there, I could slide over behind the wheel, which is exactly what I did.”
“You got in the driver’s seat?”
“I did. I dragged myself over there, and when the ambulance and the cops came, I acted like I’d been driving. Your mother came back and she saw me there, but we didn’t discuss it.”
“But why did you do that? Didn’t you worry you’d get in trouble?”
“I didn’t think at all, I just knew that something was really wrong with my leg, and that if your mother was behind the wheel after drinking more than I’d drunk, that she’d get in trouble for the accident. I didn’t want that.”
Ruby listened, imagining the scene: a young Patty, running through the rainy night and sobering up quickly as she got back to the scene of the accident and realized that her best friend had slid behind the wheel to cover for her.
“I lost my right leg below the knee, Ruby,” Ellen says gently, leaning away from the table and extending her leg. She tugs at the leg of her pants, pulling it up so that Ruby can see the titanium lower leg of her artificial limb. The foot is encased in a shoe that matches the one on her other foot. “And because everyone thought I was driving, it was just deemed an ‘unfortunate accident.’ I wasn’t even drunk enough to make the cops question my sobriety.”
“So you two got away with it? That doesn’t sound like my mom,” Ruby argues, still not able to fully envision that this had happened, and that Patty would have agreed to go along with it. “Why did she stay quiet?”
“I told her that if she let it play out that way, it would be better for both of us. That she could leave and go to college, and that we wouldn’t get into trouble that way. And I only asked one thing of her in return.”
“What was that?”
“I asked her to tell Olivia that I didn’t love her anymore.”
Ruby waits, thinking that there might be more. When nothing else comes, she takes a sip of her coffee and then sets the mug on the table again. “Was it true?”
“It most definitely was not true.” Ellen avoids Ruby’s gaze. “I told your mother to make sure Olivia believed I’d moved on, and that she should do the same. I wanted her to marry, to have children, to have a life. I knew that—in those days—being with me would mean that she’d never truly be happy. We would never truly be happy.”
“Even if you were together?”
“As what? Roommates? That was common in those days: two spinster women, shacking up together to ‘save money’ by being roommates. Most people’s families either believed it wholeheartedly, or went along with it because they wanted it to be true. But that’s not how I wanted to live with your aunt Olivia. I wanted to hold her hand as we walked through bookstores together, to kiss her on street corners. I wanted us to adopt a little boy and name him Shane?—“
“Shane?”
“I know, silly and girlish of me to name our children, wasn’t it?”
Ruby blinks, caught by surprise at this touching detail. “No, I…it’s sweet. I love that you felt this way about my aunt. I guess I never really got to know her well enough to understand her life, or to have any concept of a path not taken. I feel—I don’t know.” Ruby blinks a few times. “Pleasantly surprised I guess, just to find out that Olivia had a great love in her life.”
Ellen is clearly steeling herself as she asks, but she manages to get the words out anyway: “And you don’t think your uncle Jim was her great love?”
Ruby thinks about this. “They seemed happy enough. Don’t you think it’s rare to know people who are so fully in love that you can’t imagine them with anyone else? Uncle Jim could have been anyone, but it just so happened that he was a decent guy who owned a hardware store in Olympia, and he and my aunt got along. But wild, passionate love? I don’t know for certain, but I don’t think so.”
This seems to satisfy Ellen, and she watches the rain for a long time, saying nothing.
“I’m glad she had that life,” Ellen finally says. Her voice is low, and her words are measured. “When she died, I was able to say goodbye.”
“You were?”
“Of course. Your mother told me she had breast cancer, and I called your uncle and explained that I was an old friend and wanted to visit her at the hospital. I went on a Saturday, and she died the next day.”
Ruby feels a chill run through her body. “Did you tell her the truth—that you never stopped loving her?”
Ellen’s eyes are glossy with unshed tears. “I don’t think I had to. I just sat next to her and held her hand, and we listened to the sound of the machinery that was keeping her alive. At one point, we both cried and I got up to find Kleenex so that I could wipe her tears. I truly believe that she understood. I think she was happy with the way things turned out. Or maybe I just want to believe that.” Ellen pats the table here and stands, walking over to the sink where she tears a paper towel off a roll and dabs at her eyes with it. This time, as she moves, Ruby can see the slight limp to her walk.
When she sits down again, Ruby reaches over and takes Ellen’s hand in hers, squeezing it firmly. “I think you’re safe believing that,” she says, looking Ellen in the eye. “And thank you for telling me all of this. I think it’s beautiful how much you two loved one another, and beyond generous that you let her go so that she could have the life she did.”
Ellen stares at the tablecloth beneath their coffee mugs. “I don’t know about generous, but I loved her enough to let her go, which is the kindest thing you can do sometimes.”
Ruby looks around the kitchen, still holding tightly to Ellen’s hand. “So that’s why my mom bought this place and it’s why you’ve lived here all these years.”
Ellen dips her chin, then gives Ruby’s hand a squeeze back and lets it go. “She very kindly offered to let me stay here for free, so long as she could use the guest room any time she came to Seattle. But I insisted on paying her—I’m no freeloader.”
“Oh, I would never think that of you,” Ruby reassures her. “I don’t need to know or understand the reasons for your arrangement with my mom, because now I understand your history together. She wanted you to live here, and I wouldn’t do anything to change that.”
“I’d like to buy the house, Ruby,” Ellen says, meeting her eye. “I’d like to pay you market value for it, and own it outright. I would have done it before Patty died, but she always insisted that the house was mine for as long as I wanted to stay, and that if I ever ran into financial trouble, she’d let me stay anyway. So now I want to buy it and make sure that you’re never in a place where you have to put up an old lady out of some sense of duty or obligation to your mother.”
“Ellen, it’s not like that.” Ruby laces her fingers together and places her hands on the table. “My mom wanted you to live here, and you’ll continue to live here. I haven’t met with her attorney yet, but let’s see what provisions she put in her will for this house, because, knowing my mom, she had plans for it.”
Ellen takes a breath and nods. “Okay,” she says. “Fair enough. But just know that I’m prepared to pay whatever I have to pay. Your mom came here so many times, and we laughed and cried in this house.” She glances around at the walls and the windows. “For me, this is home, and it always will be.”
The women finish their coffee as the rain lets up, and when it’s time for Ruby to leave, she hugs Ellen at the door and then releases her, stepping onto the porch with a hat pulled down over her forehead, and a scarf wound around her neck. Her blonde hair is tucked beneath the hat in a bun at the nape of her neck.
“I’ll be in touch,” Ruby says, waving to the Uber driver, who is idling at the curb with his headlights on. “Soon.”
Ellen stands in the doorway as Ruby climbs into the car, and then she waves as the Lexus rounds the corner.
Ruby glances through the back window of the car; the scene is rain-soaked and suburban. She misses the warmth of Shipwreck Key, her own bed, and her friends.
“Headed to the Hilton, ma’am?” the driver asks.
Ruby realizes for a moment that she’s out in the world completely without Secret Service, her only shield against recognition an oversized hat and a bulky neck scarf. A thrill runs through her at this little bit of freedom.
“Yes, to the Hilton, please.”
Ruby leans back against the seat for the rest of the ride and watches the rain slick the streets, the buildings, and the cars around them.