loved it, and Nick went to the London School of Economics the following year and said he was happy there, but his mother didn’t believe him, until he met Sophie Taylor in his second year there and everything changed. She was a sculptress, and her father was a carpenter, and she taught Nick to make beautiful furniture. He dropped out of school, moved to the Cotswolds with Sophie, and opened a business with her. Ruby loved visiting them, and was proud of what he was doing. Zack constantly criticized him, and Nick stopped talking to his father entirely. He thought his father was toxic. Ruby didn’t say it, but she thought so too. More than anything, Zack was selfish. Everything in life was about him and what he wanted. Kendall was somewhat that way too. Kendall sided with her father about Nick and told him what a loser he was to be making furniture when he could be working for their father when he graduated.
The greatest blow of all, especially for Ruby, happened the summer before Nick left for college in London. His great-grandmother Eleanor was in fine form and had died peacefully in her sleep at ninety-one. It was a tremendous loss for all of them. But Eleanor had led a rich life and was a happy woman. She missed Alex once he was gone, but they had shared a lifetime. They buried her in Tahoe, beside Alex. Ruby couldn’t believe she was gone. Her grandparents had been such a vital part of her history and had saved her.
Before she had died, Eleanor told Ruby that Kendall reminded her of Ruby’s mother, Camille. There was a fire and an anger in her that nothing would quench. She was on the wrong path, and blazing a trail. She wanted to be like her father and was following him blindly, the way Camille had followed Flash to her own destruction. But Eleanor was at peace about her life when she died.
When the kids left for college, Ruby was still married to Zack, though they barely saw or spoke to each other. He carried on his affairs, though less and less discreetly. Kendall blamed her mother for her father’s loneliness which drove him into the arms of other women. She didn’t see the pain he had caused her mother or the soul-deadening abuse of his constant infidelities. Nick had accidentally seen him with other women on several occasions and hated him for it. It was exactly what Zack had felt about his own father. Kendall was willing to do anything to win her father’s approval, including blame her mother for her parents’ bad marriage. She no longer remembered the times she had seen her crying during her childhood.
Nick hated the fact that his mother stayed and didn’t have the courage to leave his father. Once both her children were in college, she no longer had the excuse that it was for her children. She was forty-one when Nick left for school in London, and she had been miserable with Zack for the last fifteen years. Eventually she didn’t even know she was. She was just numb. Her grandmother had seen it for many years, and reminded her that she needed a life too, not just a father for her children. Once they were gone, what excuse would she use? Her grandmother hadn’t lived long enough to see her free of him.
Ruby spent more and more time in Tahoe maintaining her grandmother’s gardens, in memory of her and for her own peace of mind. She had no reason to go back to the city, to the house where her grandmother and her own children had grown up. It felt hollow now, with no love in it. She was more at home in the simple cottage in Tahoe. Her grandmother’s house in Tahoe stood empty now.
Zack traveled extensively, and had apartments in New York and London, and still had the boat. Ruby disappeared to Tahoe when he came back to San Francisco, so they didn’t have to be in the house together. It was an unspoken agreement, and she came back from Tahoe when he left.
They both attended Kendall’s graduation from UCLA, and left separately immediately afterward. Zack had flown in from London and Ruby had successfully avoided him for six months before that, although officially they still lived at the same address. And the rare times they saw each other, the house was large enough that they could avoid each other.