Work Text:
Josh waits to write his memoirs until he’s sixty-eight.
It all stems from the theory he tells Donna about one day while she walks back and forth from their bedroom to the bathroom, getting ready for work. “No one should write their memoirs until they’re eligible for Medicare,” he says earnestly, feeling around with one hand for his tablet. “It just shows they’re self-centered. I mean, we all knew Hoynes was an asshole, but that, like, really cemented it, you know?”
“Uh-huh,” Donna says as she does some intricate thing with her hair, makes a face at herself in the mirror, and lets it fall down again.
“No one,” Josh repeats emphatically, letting out a triumphant aha! as he finds the tablet and opens up the front page of The New York Times. A small headline on the front page leaps out at him: KNOPF TO PUBLISH MEMOIRS OF MATTHEW SANTOS.
Donna hums from the bathroom; she’s putting the last of her makeup on. “What’s above the fold? That thing with Azerbaijan?”
“Yeah. Also, presidents should be exempt from that thing I said, about the memoirs,” he says, trying to sound casual about it.
“So you saw Helen’s email, then,” Donna says, and she’s not looking at him, he can’t even see her reflection, but he can just tell that she’s biting her lip so not to smirk at him.
He ignores the bit about the email; there are well over a thousand he needs to get through, and it drives Donna nuts. “Wait, you knew? And you just let me ramble on like that?”
He catches the scent of her conditioner as she walks over, leans in as they kiss, then nods. “Hey, don’t forget that Hannah’s got to take that diorama to school, the thing’s due today.”
“But—Donna!”
“Love you!” she calls, and he can hear her tell Caleb to go see Daddy, she’ll see him later, and the thunk of his head against the headboard times perfectly with the front door closing behind her.
.
Truthfully, all those years ago when he said he was going to wait until he was senior-citizen-discount-aged to write his memoirs, Josh wasn’t even sure he would make it to sixty-five. His father died at just a few years older, and he’s got a history of cardiac hypertension, high cholesterol, and that thing when he was shot in the chest.
But now he’s three years past that and in surprisingly decent health. His daughter is a senior in college, and his son is nearly seventeen, which means Josh has finally ceased being a chauffeur to his children. Donna’s still hard at work at the LWV. Sure, he has the consulting, but it turns out that these Gen Z kids running for office don’t want to hear the opinions of some washed-up has-been who last worked in government when they were in middle school. (Josh can’t blame them: he felt the same way at their age.)
So: memoirs.
He starts with an outline. Donna helps him start it, which is why he ends up with 723 color-coded index cards.
“Green for domestic policy, blue for foreign, yellow for humor, orange for details of how the White House is run, red for material you need to check if it’s still classified, and purple for your personal life,” Donna explains as they sit in the middle of the living room with index cards spread around them.
“Dad doesn’t have a personal life!” Caleb yells from the kitchen.
Josh ignores him. “Do we need a whole category for humor? It’ll be funny already. I’m very humorous. And how did we even get purple? Do they make purple?”
“I made them myself,” Donna says primly, and stands up without moving any of the index cards—a feat Josh has yet to manage. “And you definitely need a category for humor.”
“My funny doesn’t fit into a category!” he says as she walks away.
.
It doesn’t take as long to write the manuscript as he thought it would; turns out that all the extemporaneous detail Leo used to ask him not to include in policy memos is actually useful here. Putting the outline together was semi-excruciating, but the writing comes easily to him.
“I should have been a speechwriter,” he says wistfully to Sam over Zoom. He’s only had one beer, but it doesn’t take much to make him tipsy these days.
“You’re too mean to be a speechwriter,” Sam says. “How far along are you?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. 2002, 2003?”
Sam cackles. “You have so much more to go.”
Despite being mocked relentlessly (“I’m a writer!” “Hon, you are not a writer. Remember when you said you were an outdoorsman? You’re neither.”), he finishes the manuscript in less than a year. He writes and writes and writes and writes, at home and at the consulting offices and on a bench on the Mall; on a plane to go see his daughter graduate from Stanford and a train to New York to attend Molly Wyatt-Ziegler’s wedding.
He finishes the manuscript on the small patio of a hotel room on the Maine coast, where he and Donna are staying for Labor Day weekend. Hannah has just started law school at Harvard, and Caleb has gone with friends to tour one last school before college applications start. There’s just a legal pad and pen, the salty air, the sand dunes, and beyond that—the Atlantic Ocean.
And Donna, who walks up from the beach and plops into the seat next to him. “Did you finish?”
“Is it too tacky if I finish it with ‘the end’?”
She pops a grape into her mouth. “It’s your handwritten draft, no one’s going to see it.”
“Hey, you never know—this could go to the National Archives.”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re not as important as you think you are, hon.”
“Or,” he says, gathering steam, “maybe the libraries will fight over it. Does that dumbass Neil still work at President Bartlet’s library? He and the guy at President Santos’ library, the one who Annabeth had a crush on, they could have some kind of bidding war on it. It’ll make news! Well, not the Wall Street Journal, but someone’s bound to print that kind of thing—”
Even after almost a quarter century of marriage, Josh thinks, being kissed by Donna is still the best way to shut him up.
.
After it’s finished, he finds an agent.
“President Santos was very complimentary about your writing,” she says when they meet at her office in New York. If he cranes his neck a bit, he can see Bryant Park from her window. “I can see why. You have an excellent voice.”
“Um. Thank you?”
“There are some structural changes I can work with you on, rearranging some chapters so the chronology is more evident,” she continues, and he’s starting to understand why the president said she was a bulldozer. “A lot of this has been recently declassified, which is good, but we’ll probably still have to give copies to all the agencies that need clearance. And you’ll definitely have to rewrite some sections—you don’t want to get sued for libel.”
He makes a face.
“But I can sell this easily, not a problem. It’s compelling, it’s got some humor, it’s more readable that the average senator who writes about how they couldn’t get anything done because of gridlock. And the romance aspect—if we get this to one of the HarperCollins imprints, they’ll play that up.”
Josh blinks. “I’m sorry, what romance?”
“With you and your wife? It’s very sweet. Of course, if there are things that you decide are too personal, we can certainly put that on the cutting board.”
Honestly, he’s still not sure what this woman is talking about. Sure, there are a couple lines in the book about how he and Donna got together around the start of the Santos administration and then when they got married, and there’s a couple paragraphs about Hannah’s birth. But romance? That’s for firmly inside the walls of his house, thank you very much.
“Uh, I guess, sure,” he says.
“Well, we’ll take a look at that when the time comes. Now here’s what I’m thinking in terms of percentages and subsidiary rights…”
.
October 21, 2033 3:19 PM
From: Josh Lyman < [email protected] >
To: Sam < [email protected] >; CJ < [email protected] >; Toby < [email protected] >; Charlie < [email protected] >
Cc: Donna < [email protected] >
Subject: [no subject]
finally finished the damn thing, my agent says i should have people i trust read it and since i don’t have any of those aside from my wife (and my kids on a good day) figured I would send it to you goons. let me know what you think i’m remembering wrong.
Attachment: MEMOIR_UNNAMED.docx
October 21, 2033 4:02 PM
From: Toby Ziegler < [email protected] >
To: Josh < [email protected] >
Subject: Re:
You’ve misrepresented the entirety of that early policy conversation with President Bartlet, Leo, and Ralph Chase.
Also, as someone who has edited a few speeches in his time, this is far too long and the first thing I would cut is the story of how you met Donna.
TZ
October 21, 2033 4:11 PM
From: Josh Lyman < [email protected] >
To: Toby < [email protected] >
Subject: Re: re:
you’re already there? do you have nothing better to do with your time?
October 21, 2033 4:13 PM
From: Toby Ziegler < [email protected] >
To: Josh < [email protected] >
Subject: Re: re: re:
I do not. Do you?
TZ
.
“Mi amiga!” CJ crows when he picks up her call a few days later. Whenever she calls, he pictures her poolside with a margarita in one hand. “I read the whole thing.”
“You liked it, then?” Josh says, kicking his feet up on the desk.
“I mean, sure,” she says, “but mostly I had to race to finish it because Danny wants to get his hands on it.”
He groans as CJ laughs her full, throaty laugh. Danny has become known in their circle for trying to get his hands on whatever secret information he shouldn’t have—whether that’s an unpublished manuscript, political gossip, or a secret one of their kids is trying to hide—and threatening to tell a reporter (or the relevant parent) unless provided with whatever interesting information he’s looking for. CJ says he got bored too easily at Annenberg and resorted to petty blackmail as a hobby. Josh has informed him several times that cruel and unusual punishment is prohibited in the Eighth Amendment, but Danny usually just smiles, claps him on the shoulder, and asks how his secret plan to fight inflation is going.
“So what did you think?”
She sighs. “It needs work, but it’s good. Actually good, not like that crap Baker put out a couple years ago.”
Josh shudders. Eric Baker was a decent politician, but a writer, he is not. “Who the hell told him he didn’t need a ghostwriter? And then let him publish it?”
“Yeah, still don’t know. I don’t have time to go over everything with you right now, but I can send you my notes and we can go over them later. But overall, I liked it, and I’m glad you’re doing this.”
“Thanks, CJ. Me, too.”
“And hey, listen,” she says, and something about the tone of her voice sends Josh right back to CJ yelling at him about the whackadoodle people on the internet, “just in case no one had said anything, there are, uh – there’s a lot of Donna in there, compadre. I know you love her and all—”
“Eh, she’s all right.”
“—but half of those stories are not integral to telling your political memoirs,” she says. “And I’m telling her you said that.”
“She’d find it funny!” He pauses. “I think.”
“Okay. Well, just think it over, okay?”
Josh sits up. “My agent said something similar. But Donna’s integral to the story, all right? I mean, I’ll take a look at them, but hell, she saved Social Security and figured out how to get Lang on the court! I can’t cut those!”
“Yes, we get it, your wife is Superwoman,” CJ says drily, and hangs up on him.
.
Josh and Sam started the consulting business fifteen years ago, after Tad Wickley became president and the world literally went to hell in a handbasket. (“Not literally, Josh. It’s a metaphor.” “Sam, you haven’t been a speechwriter in thirty years, shut up.”) For a while they were just trying to pull the Democrats out of drowning mode, and then they were trying to get on their asses to pass actual policies instead of wavering at the slightest indication of disagreement. Now, they specialize in running outsider candidates, younger kids who want to change Washington for the better.
Sam’s out in California—it turns out Ainsley’s quite fond of the idea of no seasons—and Josh will die in DC, as his daughter tells him affectionately. Thanks to the miracle of technology, they have twice-weekly video calls to catch up on business.
And everything else.
“Wait, so that’s why you wanted to name the business Red Lights Consulting?” Sam says, outraged. It’s completely unfair that he looks this good in his mid-sixties. “You said it was an inside joke you and Donna had about loyalty!”
“Well, it is,” Josh says.
“No, it’s a story about how the two of you were saying I love you without actually saying I love you – six years before you actually got together!”
“That, too.”
There’s a knock at a door and Josh turns his head, but it’s on Sam’s side, and pretty soon Ainsley comes into the picture. “Hello, Josh,” she says.
“Hi, Ainsley,” he says, and he’s never entirely gotten over her conservatism, but she opposed Wickley with all her might and actually voted for Baker in 2018, so he’s a little more tolerant of her politics now.
“I read your book,” she says, and Josh rolls his eyes, because do all his friends have to pass it on to their spouses? “Well, such as it is, still being in manuscript form. It’s quite good. Who did you work with?”
“I didn’t!” he says, and Sam laughs at him. “I wrote it myself!”
“Ah,” Ainsley says, “well then, that would neatly explain the many and varied references to Donna sprinkled throughout the text. You may want to consider removing the entire page on the incident from which the consulting group’s name is derived. It is, in my opinion, inconsequential to the relevant political details of that time period.”
Sam is still laughing hysterically; this time, it’s Josh’s turn to hang up on his friend.
.
Every few months, Josh, Donna, Charlie, and Zoey manage to pull their lives together to have dinner together. Of all the old Bartlet gang, they’re the only ones who still live in DC.
“This is good wine,” Josh says as they sit around the table after dinner. “Charlie, isn’t this good wine?”
“Damn good wine,” Charlie agrees, and while Josh has never been able to handle his alcohol, it seems age might finally be catching up with the more tolerant of the two.
Donna shakes her head fondly. “You two,” she says. “It’s like six-dollar wine from that place up the street. It’s not that great.”
“Hey,” Zoey says, “Josh, I read your book. It’s great.”
“You gave it to her? Traitor!” Josh says, pointing his spoon at Charlie, and yes, the wine has definitely gone to his head a little bit.
“She was going to read it anyway.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Zoey says, and brightens up. “And besides, as the primary representative of the Bartlet family on the Jed Bartlet Foundation—”
Charlie puts his head in his hands.
“—I have to give you permission to use, like, half the material you want to quote.”
“You already said yes!”
“Well, this is me giving my official yes,” Zoey says primly, but she’s smiling. “And hey, I liked it! It’s cute! You two are adorable.”
Donna blinks at her. “Um, thanks?”
“Yeah, it reads like a romance, man. May not want to let on that you’re so whipped,” Charlie says, and then as Zoey slaps his shoulder, “Ow! Whatever, I know it’s not cool to say that, Josh knows I’m chill.”
“You’re drunk is what you are,” Zoey says, but she’s smiling nonetheless. “But he’s right. It’s super romantic. I didn’t know half of that stuff!”
“You’re not the first to say that,” Josh mumbles, thinking of an irritated email from his editor that he’s put off reading for a week.
Donna leans in a little. “Okay, I haven’t actually read the thing. Cue me in a little?”
“You haven’t read it?” Zoey asks, flabbergasted, and as Donna gives her ten-minute spiel about the many-colored index cards and the torturous process of piecing together an outline for a memoir meant to span sixteen years, Josh thinks about what she said. Romantic. His agent said the same thing. As did Sam. And CJ. And Toby, kind of, if “cut this” indicates romance.
“So is it?”
He jolts back to the conversation. “Um. Yes?”
They all laugh at him, and he pouts.
“Pay better attention next time,” his wife says, and pats his cheek condescendingly.
That night, as Josh is doomscrolling through all the social media feeds he swears he’s going to delete and Donna is on stage four of what he has affectionately termed “Donna’s End-of-Day-Don’t-Interrupt-Or-Else” routine, she asks him, “Do you want me to read it?”
“Huh?” he says, because about five minutes ago they were talking about Rachel Maddow’s new book. “We just talked about this, I thought you finished it.”
She sighs in a way that he has learned means keep up . “Your book, Josh. Do you want me to read it?”
“Oh.” He pauses. “I didn’t think you wanted to.”
“I wasn’t going to until it was published, but. . . Zoey got me thinking—”
“That’s never good.”
She ignores that. “Was what she was saying true?”
“I don’t know,” he says, feeling a little like Donna is his confessional. But then, he’s always felt that way: she’s the only person who can drill down into the deepest parts of him with a well-placed look. “I didn’t think so, but she’s not the first person who’s said something like that. And you’re a big part of my story, hon.”
She smiles. “That’s very sweet, but not politically, I’m not.”
“Yes, politically! You really think I would have gone out and found President Santos if you hadn’t just left the White House? Not to mention all the little things over the years in both administrations that added up, like that time you caught that one typo—”
She laughs at that. “Yes, because saying that President Santos and the prime minister of Kazakhstan were about to scold peace talks instead of hold peace talks really would have been the end of the world.”
“It would’ve made everyone’s lives a little bit more difficult, which is the big part.” He grabs her hand as she walks by, tugging her a little closer. “Honestly, that’s what it is. You just. . . you make everything so much easier.”
He can feel her melting. “Josh.”
“So what if it’s got a few more stories about you that I had planned in the outline? I think they’re important to tell the whole story of both administrations, and I know they’re important to me. After all, it’s my memoirs, so it’s supposed to be my perspective on things, right? And even when my whole focus was on Big Tobacco, or something in the Sit Room, you always came first. The story isn’t complete without you—it’s not even a story at all.”
She leans over and kisses him, her lips moving against his in a way that makes him more than a little dizzy, and she smiles as she pulls back. “Do you want me to read it?”
“No,” he admits quietly. “Just—not yet.”
“Okay,” she says, still smiling, and leans her forehead against his. “I can wait.”
.
Josh makes his third trip in six months to New York (which, as he tells everyone who will listen and many who don’t, is three trips too many) to have what his editor calls a “working lunch.” He figures out pretty quickly that he’s a high-profile author for the imprint, so this means they have some fairly bland catering on a side table in one of the small conference rooms.
“Okay, now here,” his editor says, “you’ve done a good job tightening up this chapter, but there’s a whole deviation about your wife—this whole thing about her being one of the starting points to uncovering Vice President Hoynes’ leaking classified info, and then you get into the nitty-gritty details, I don’t know how much of that is necessary—”
“It’s necessary!” he says for what seems like the hundredth time in this meeting, and all his friends may have a point about Donna. “Look, I know she’s in here a lot—”
“Understatement of the year,” his editor mutters.
“—but she’s honestly vital to all of these. She was my assistant because she’s good at what she does, always has been.” He takes a sigh. “And I kind of want to shove it to all those assholes who assumed that we, um, that we were together all through President Bartlet’s presidency.”
She looks at him with some pity. “That’s very nice of you, but my job isn’t to—actually. We could…do you have any more stories about your wife? During either administration?”
He blinks. “Probably?”
“Okay.” She scribbles down some stuff on a notepad, rips it off, and hands it to him. Ch. 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 . “Those are the chapters I was considering combining with other chapters, because the material is good but there’s just not enough content to keep without it being flimsy. That was what I was trying to tighten up. But I think we can cut some material from President Santos’ first campaign, there are places where it’s a little dry, and I’d like you to add some stories there. Look through your chronology, see if you have anything about the interpersonal relationships in the White House. Add those in. I think it could be good.”
Donna’s voice drily saying Danger, Will Robinson goes off in Josh’s head, but he can’t figure out what the alarm bell is for. “That seems good. We could take out some of the stuff about the month or so leading up to the convention. It was pretty frustrating to live through. Wouldn’t probably be that great to read.”
“Excellent,” his editor says, smiling, and Josh takes a bite of his sandwich.
.
The publicist, thankfully, does not require him to come to New York.
“God, no,” she had said when he asked. “You’d just muck up my job. Besides, I’ve got advances sitting on every free surface of my office, including my chair, so not sure where you’d sit.”
He likes her a lot more than his editor and agent.
“So,” she says on the phone call as he tries to munch quietly on a bag of shitty microwave popcorn. “I’m assuming that the team already told you some of what we want to do for this campaign.”
(He can’t help it: he snorts. That may be their lingo, but this isn’t a campaign, not by a long shot.)
“Yep,” he says. “The usual rounds. MSNBC, NPR, whoever that shmuck is who replaced Mark Gottfried when he kicked it.”
The publicist lets out a short bark of laughter. “Dan Ruiz,” she reminds him. “We’ve got some reviews in the pipeline, the Post might do a special thing, and I’m working on a couple of podcasts you could do. One of the guys at Audio D.C. says he knows you from the Santos administration?”
Josh grimaces. Of course she’d manage to get in touch with that group of Comms kids. “Yeah, Otto Bautista, he used to work for me.”
“Great, we’ll add that to the list. Now, it’s a bit of an odd angle, but I’d also like to get you on a couple Modern Love-ish podcasts, talk up the personal relationships of it all, the romance storyline, friendships, yada yada yada, you good with that?”
He blinks. “Um. I’m sorry?”
“You know, all the stuff with your wife. She seems personable. Would she be willing to do a couple of these things with you?”
“No!” he says before he even realizes he’s shouting, and lowers his voice. “No, I don’t think so. She’s got a full-time job, it’s technically nonpartisan, I don’t want to jeopardize her work with all this.”
“Okay,” the publicist says, clearly unfazed. Josh still feels like someone threw him into the Mariana Trench without a lifejacket. “But you can still do that alone. Editorial did mention that you hadn’t been super receptive to the romance part of it all, now that I think of it. It’s gotta be done, though. It’s a super boost to sales.”
Quite frankly, Josh doesn’t really care about the sales, but he halfheartedly agrees to do a couple extra podcasts mostly to get her to shut up. It reminds him a little of going to bat with Lou Thornton, and he smiles as he hangs up the phone.
.
An excerpt from The New York Times Book Review :
But perhaps the most surprising twists take place in nearly every chapter, when Mr. Lyman mentions his now-wife, Donna Moss. Ms. Moss is currently the CEO of the League of Women Voters, but to hear Mr. Lyman tell it, she started out on the Bartlet for America campaign with only a 1988 Ford Taurus to her name. More than almost any other lines in the book, each anecdote and story about her jumps off the page. According to Mr. Lyman, Ms. Moss was not merely his assistant, or a right-hand woman (he refers to her more than once as the “deputy deputy chief of staff” in the Bartlet administration), but a strategist in her own right, catching the reasoning behind a mind-boggling filibuster in 2001 and keeping tabs on issues that were punted soon after President Bartlet took office in 1999 in favor of more urgent matters.
There are enough of these anecdotes, and plenty more from President Santos’s administration, to make the reader wonder how many rounds Mr. Lyman went with his editor, or whether these literary sketches were added after an editor had gone over the rest of the manuscript with a fine-tooth comb. However, it is not a lack of editorial work or wanting to extend the page count of an already hefty memoir. At its core, the political career of Mr. Lyman is a love story, to his work, to the Democratic Party, to his country — and, most of all, to his wife.
.
The book comes out exactly one week after the 2034 presidential election, in which the (horrifically moderate conservative) president wins re-election. The outcome was as expected, but Josh has spent the next week cycling through the various stages of depression before he has to start doing press.
The idea of doing press, coupled with the predicted Pennsylvania Avenue loss, may contribute to exactly what happens on Capital Beat.
“Three minutes forty-five seconds to commercial!” the director yells, and Josh finds himself being hustled out of his chair and deliberately in the opposite direction from Rep. Tyler Legrand straight into the glare of his wife.
“No,” she says as he opens his mouth to say something. He shuts it obediently. “You took the bait here. You did not have to rise to that guy’s accusations. I do not need my honor defended on national TV!”
“Hon—”
“No, no, no, no. He went low, but you went in goddamn circles. You did exactly what he wanted you to do, which is to get offended and flustered and make the conversation about something trivial. You want to complain about how we just lost the election? It’s because the dumbass minds of the Democratic Party can’t think straight! You were here to do two things, talk about gerrymandering and promote your book. You didn’t do either of those!”
He winces. That publicist is going to have his head tomorrow morning.
“Instead, you just end up talking about something that wasn’t even a scandal when it happened because we — didn’t — make — it — a — scandal!” She prods him in the chest with her index finger. “You know that, and you still took the bait!”
“Well—he called you a slut. I couldn’t just walk away from that!”
“Josh, I love you, but you need to stop being the white knight on the charger every once in a while.”
.
He sleeps fitfully that night, still recovering from a whiplash press experience and being thoroughly scolded by Donna, something he has never relished. He finally gets up at 5 to have his first cup of coffee and his phone rings.
“’Lo?”
“Oh good, you’re up,” the publicist says. “Listen, any chance you can hustle into the satellite studio for the Today Show in the next hour? They want you on at the top of the nine o’clock hour, even willing to push some cooking segment for you.”
“Um.” He’s still waiting for the coffee to hit. “Why?”
“The clip from last night. Jesus, are you hungover? You do remember your segment, yes?”
“Yeah? But, um. It didn’t go that great. Why does the Today Show want me?”
She breathes heavily into the phone. “You didn’t see my email, did you?”
He did not, so he hangs up and finds it.
Turns out, there's a video of his appearance last night. (Of course there is: welcome to the 21st century.) Not particularly well-recorded video, either. It’s been posted onto YouTube with the title “Chivalry’s Not Dead (ex-chief of staff josh lyman on capital beat 11-14-2034).” Josh clicks on it and immediately mutes the sound before he sees, underneath the title, the views:
1,728,638.
“One million?” he screeches into the phone when he calls her back. He can see Donna in the doorway, rubbing her eyes.
“One point seven,” the publicist says smugly. “You’ve gone viral, good sir. This is better than any publicity we could have drummed up for you. Online sales numbers haven’t hit my desk yet but I’m betting you’ve gone through the roof with women aged 35 to 44. Good Morning America made an offer, but Today’s got better numbers, so if you can get yourself into something presentable and act nicely to Nicole Holloway, you’ve got yourself a bestseller.”
“Holy shit,” he mumbles, and the publicist laughs. “Yeah, uh, I can do Today.”
The Today Show? Donna mouths from across the room. He nods.
“Great,” the publicist says. “God, I love working with people who have handled a media circus before. Just be nice and bashful and brag about your wife a little bit, you’ll be fine. And for fuck’s sake, plug the goddamn book this time.”
This time, he wonders if she’s actually related to Lou, but she’s hung up.
“Um.” Donna crosses the room to the coffeemaker. “What was that?”
“So…that thing you got mad at me for last night? Defending you?” Donna raises her eyebrows. “Unprovoked, I know that! But, well, it kind of went viral.”
He hands her his phone and watches as her eyes go wide. “It got this many views overnight?”
“Well, uh, I guess the UK’s awake, right? They like this political drama. I think. Otherwise they’d kick all the royals out.”
“They’ve tried,” Donna says absentmindedly, before looking up. “Wow. That’s—unbelievable.”
“I know,” he says, and broaches a half-smile. “So. Um. Are we okay? From last night?”
She softens and leans forward to kiss him once, twice, three times in the dim light of their kitchen, bare feet cold on the tiled floor, just the two of them alone in the unbearably still calm before dawn. “Yes, we’re okay,” she says. “Just don’t pull any more of that. And don’t get any ideas that just because you got one million views, it makes it okay that you said that.”
“One point seven,” he says before he can help himself.
Thankfully, Donna laughs.
.
A week later, Josh is standing at National Airport waiting to pick up both his children on the 4:46 from Logan. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which means Donna is panicking about how to cook a turkey, like she does every year. He’s just happy to have an excuse to escape the house.
He’s doing some stretches against a pillar—as it turns out, physical therapists do know what they’re talking about and aren’t just out to torture you—when two young women approach him.
“Are you Josh Lyman?” one of the girls says. She looks to be about his daughter’s age, unfathomably young and eager.
“Yeah, that’s me,” he says, smiling. This isn’t the first time this has happened this week. “You saw the interview on Capital Beat?”
They don’t squeal, thank god, but both of them beam at him and nod vigorously. It turns out one of them just bought a copy of his book from Hudson News, and as he’s signing the cover page, he can hear two very familiar voices floating towards him.
“Ugh, no, you can’t pay me to do it.”
“Well, don’t look at me, you’re not the one who had to deal with him writing the fucking book.”
“I’m sorry, who do you think Mom called every week to rant while he was writing it?”
Josh smiles at the two girls, snapping the book shut and handing it back to them. “I’m sorry, seems my kids are here. Happy Thanksgiving.”
After they wish him a happy holiday and walk off, chattering, Josh stretches the kinks in his back and walks towards Hannah and Caleb with his arms outstretched.
“Progeny!” he says. “Welcome back to the land of political engagement!”
“Ugh,” Caleb says, ducking his arms, but he gets Hannah in for a big hug.
“How did you cope with 2L again?” she says into his coat, and he laughs.
“Lots of coffee and frequent reminders from Nana to eat something nutritious,” he says, and lets her go. She does look thinner, although it’s hard to tell: Hannah has his hair and smile, but she’s tall and willowy like her mother. “Something I imagine your mom is going to have a lot to say about.”
“She’s basically Mom already,” Caleb grumbles from behind him, and he ropes his son into a hug, too. “Ugh, stop it, you’re embarrassing enough as is.”
“And exactly what is it about my personable self that embarrasses you?”
“You went viral,” Hannah says. “Do you know how many of my friends saw it? And they’re gushing over how romantic my dad is? Honestly, gross.”
“I thought the fact that I’m still in love with my wife after so many years would be a point in my favor.”
“It’s not.” Caleb rolls his eyes. “I mean, my girlfriend went out and bought a copy. Like, I’m sorry, I do not need my senior citizen dad vying for her attention over mine.”
“Aw, Caleb has a girlfriend,” Hannah teases him, and the two of them get into a shoving match until Josh physically stands between them. They may be twenty-four and eighteen, but they still act like toddlers half the time.
“Listen,” he tells them both as sternly as he can muster. “Your mom is not happy with me for how I reacted in that interview, so please don’t bring it up too much. I had no idea it was going to go viral.”
“I’m just happy you know what that means,” Hannah says.
He would like to think he’s above sticking his tongue out at his child, and yet.
“Twenty bucks?” Caleb says from his other side.
“If I bring it up to Mom first? Absolutely,” Hannah says, and if children aren’t put on this earth to make their parents’ lives more difficult, he’s not entirely sure what their purpose is.
.
It’s late on Thanksgiving when Josh looks up from his book (Shea Stadium: The Mets, the Jets, and Everything Else, 1964–2009 by Stephen Weaver) and realizes that Donna has yet to come to bed. The house is relatively quiet—presumably, Hannah has buried herself in another case study and Caleb is playing some video game that Josh does not understand—and he pads through the house looking for her, coming up empty until:
“The basement?” he says, going down the steps. “It’s freezing down here.”
Donna is curled up in one of the corner armchairs with several blankets piled on top of her, and a winter cap pulled down around her eyes. “Yeah, but it’s so quiet.”
He laughs. They’ve been enjoying their time as empty-nesters, without the kids’ schedules to manage and their time never their own. He hasn’t said anything yet, but he’s thinking that maybe they’ll take a week and go to Italy next year like she’s been talking about for ages. “What’re you reading?”
She holds up the book and he realizes with a start that it’s his book. She’s finally reading it. Or maybe not finally: from the look of it, she’s almost done, has maybe fifty pages left, and if there’s anything he knows about Donna, it’s that she reads several times faster than him, and is also several times smarter than him.
“Oh,” he says, for once stunned into silence.
“Yes,” she says, and tugs his hand so he sits on the ottoman across from her. “You know, I always knew you were a closet romantic.”
“I’m not a. . . that’s ludicrous,” he huffs, and she laughs.
“Yes, you are. It’s sweet! Aside from the fact that you published it in your bestselling memoirs and now the whole world knows, so it’s not that closeted anymore.”
“I’ve never exactly been good at hiding it,” he says, looking down at their intertwined hands and their rings, dulled and a little tarnished with age, clinking against each other.
“Well, neither have I,” she says. “You think every person who worked with us in the West Wing didn’t already know that I was head over heels for you? Think again, hon.”
“You didn’t write about it in your memoir that for reasons we shall not mention, has become a bestseller,” Josh argues.
“No, but I don’t mind,” she says, and he finally looks up. “Oh, Josh. Did you really think I cared?”
He shrugs. “Everyone else cared. A lot. Toby, CJ, Sam, my agent and editor. You heard Charlie and Zoey; it’s a romance that overstepped its boundaries.”
“Sure, it’s a little over-the-top, but that’s you. And it is flattering to me. I know how much you love me, but this—this is proof. They’re your memoirs, Josh, but it’s my love letter.”
“I do love you,” he says. “So much more than you can know.”
“I think I have a clue,” she says, and kisses him before adding, “I love you, too.”
.
(Donna finally crawls in at 1:30 in the morning, lulling Josh out of a light sleep. She settles behind him, reaching for his hands.
“Hamilton?” she whispers against his shoulder blade. “Really?”
“Alexander Hamilton was very well-spoken,” he mumbles. “And besides, it’s true.”
He can feel her smile as they fall asleep.)
.
An excerpt from The Time of American Heroes: An Inside Perspective of the Bartlet and Santos White House Administrations by Josh Lyman:
Acknowledgments
No book is written on its own, and this one is the product of hundreds of people. The entire staff at both the Josiah Bartlet and Matthew Santos Presidential Libraries must be the first to be acknowledged, for their breadth of knowledge and enormous kindness.
[. . .] A special thanks goes to the children and grandchildren of President and Dr. Bartlet: Elizabeth Bartlet Westin, Ellie Bartlet, Zoey Bartlet Young, Annie Westin Lachland, and Gus Westin. At Zoey’s urging, all of them made time to reunite and tell stories about the Bartlet presidency, often filling in the gaps for each other. I am in your debt, and am well aware that you won’t forget it.
Mallory Carson is the daughter of Leo McGarry, who this book is dedicated to. Mal, we’ve known each other for over half a century now, so I hope you know what you mean to me after all this time. Thank you.
The Bartlet administration had what some in the press referred to as the “inner circle;” I feel incredibly lucky to call them my closest friends. Sam Seaborn, CJ Cregg, Toby Ziegler, and Charlie Young all read the first draft and many subsequent drafts of this book, provided me with so many details of their own, put up with un-punctuated emails and late-night video calls, and yelled at me to stop being a monomaniacal elitist. To quote Sam in one of his more sentimental moments, we have left indelible handprints on each other’s lives, and I’m grateful.
Jed Bartlet and his wife Abbey have been gone for a few years now, but there rarely passes a day where I don’t hear one or the other of their voices in my head. Working for President Bartlet was one of the greatest honors of my life and the best thing that ever could have happened to me.
Matt and Helen Santos are two of the most decent, honorable, generous, and compassionate people on this earth. Working for you and with you has been another of the great honors of my life.
To my children, Hannah and Caleb: You’re my reason for it all. I love you guys. Also, please respond to my texts every once in a while.
Donnatella, best of wives and best of women, being your husband is the greatest honor of all. I love you beyond words, and thank you for keeping me alive in so many ways.
Josh
March 2034