Still, it’s exciting for Maia to think that she might have one relative on her mother’s side left. She imagines being older, in college or in her twenties, walking into a fancy restaurant in Miami, and coming face to face with her grandfather.
Sadie bends down and gives Maia a hug goodbye. “I bet you didn’t know your family had so many secrets, did you?”
Huck calls from the living room, “Sadie, you ready?”
Sadie disappears with a blown kiss and a wave, leaving Maia in the empty kitchen.
Secrets? Maia thinks. My family? Never! Margaret Quinn
In the four years since Margaret Quinn retired as the anchor of the CBS Evening News, she hasn’t felt a single pang of regret or experienced one moment of FOMO. She has been quite content to get her news like everyone else—online. Gracing her inbox every morning are the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Skimm, the BBC, the Hollywood Reporter, and Refinery 29. She follows New York magazine and People on Instagram. She still has Time and Vogue delivered to the house. She watches the six o’clock news on CBS, but not every night—because she’s busy!
Her daughter, Ava, and Ava’s husband, Potter, and their twins, Maggie and Homer, live in the city, but Ava keeps threatening to move to New Canaan (the lawns! the schools!), so Margaret wants to spend as much time as she can with them while they’re still just across the park. Margaret and her husband, Dr. Drake Carroll, travel to Boston to see Margaret’s son Patrick, his wife, Jennifer, and their three teenage boys, and then often they take the ferry over to Nantucket to visit Margaret’s son Kevin, his wife, Isabelle, and their children, Genevieve, Kelley, and baby Arnaud.
Just this past year, Drake has cut back his surgery schedule at the hospital in anticipation of full-on retirement, so he and Margaret have been able to travel. They took a Viking River cruise down the Rhine and the Rhône; they trekked Milford Sound in New Zealand. It’s been a long time since Margaret has been able to travel for pleasure. While she was working, the network sent her places like Kosovo, Tel Aviv, Fallujah, Medellín, Lagos, Haiti, and, once—a happy lark—to London to cover William and Kate’s wedding.
Margaret sits on the boards of three charities—one hospital, one museum, one homeless shelter. She emcees each of these organization’s major benefits; she plays in celebrity softball games; she has been approached by Dancing with the Stars (she said no); and she’s been toying with teaching at the Columbia School of Journalism.
She’s been asked to write her memoirs but she’s nowhere near ready for that—too much living yet to do.
She’d like to write a book describing the magic of being a grandmother, but Leslie Stahl beat her to it.
When Margaret’s phone rings on the third of September and she sees it’s her former boss Lee Kramer, head of the studio, she thinks he’s calling to make an elaborate excuse for why he and his wife, Ginny (editor in chief of Vogue), can’t attend the hospital benefit three weeks hence. That’s fine, Margaret thinks. There are so many worthy causes in this city and you can’t go to everything, though Margaret plans to hit Lee up for fifty thousand at least.
“Don’t say no.”
This isn’t the greeting Margaret was expecting. “Good morning, Lee. How are you?”
“Please just hear me out.”
“How are Ginny and the kids? How does Evie like Cornell?”
“I’d like you to come back for one assignment.”
“Thanks for calling,” Margaret says. “Bye.”
“You don’t even know what it is.”
“No, but I know how this works. I say yes to one assignment, then another assignment comes along, then Sixty Minutes offers me a ten-segment deal, then you offer me my own half-hour show aimed at baby boomers, and the next thing you know, my grandchildren are seeing me more on TV than they are in person.”
“This is one assignment and it’s your favorite kind of story…”
Margaret’s favorite kind of story is military moms and dads who come back and surprise their children at school. Margaret cries every time. But she knows Lee wouldn’t ask her back for that reason. “What is it, Lee?”
“The weather.”
Ahhh, right. Margaret does love a good weather story.
“Hurricane Inga, down in the Caribbean, is shaping up to be an event. It’s aimed at Antigua and Barbuda right now and will likely hit the Virgin Islands after that. St. Thomas, St. John, Tortola, Virgin Gorda. This is a hundred-year storm, Margaret.”
“Like Katrina?”
“Like Katrina, yes.”
Margaret experiences a surge of excitement so powerful, it’s almost sexual. “What about Dougie? He already fancies himself the next Jim Cantore, and I don’t want to steal his thunder…so to speak. Send Dougie.”
“Dougie won’t go,” Lee says. “His wife is due to have their first baby tomorrow. So he’s going to man the anchor desk on this coverage, and when I asked him who he thought I should send down in his place…”
“He said me?”
“He said you.”
“Even though I retired four years ago.”
“He said you.”
Margaret inhales, exhales, looks at herself in the mirror. They’re sending her into a war zone, essentially, so there won’t be any hair or makeup, which means the entire country will become acutely aware that Margaret is rapidly closing in on sixty-five. It’s flattering; hell, it’s an honor—not only for Margaret but for every woman of a certain age—to be chosen to cover this. Just being asked makes Margaret realize she does miss it.
“When do I leave?” she asks.
“When can you be ready?”
Margaret calls Drake at the hospital from her car service to Teterboro. CBS is sparing no expense—she has her driver, Raoul, back, and she’s flying down on the CBS jet because commercial flights have been canceled.
Drake isn’t happy. “I thought this part of our lives was over.”
“So did I,” Margaret says. She realizes she sounds giddy.
“Please be safe, Margaret,” Drake says. “I need you.”
Four hours later, Margaret lands at the Cyril E. King Airport in St. Thomas. The
