"Okay, Jed!" Abbey called out from the shower. "Aislinn's done, come and get her." Jed opened the door to the bathroom just as Abbey stepped out of the shower wrapping a towel around herself. He held a towel open for Aislinn and watched with surprise as she raced past he and the towel to run wet and naked down the hall.

"Aislinn Faith Bartlet, you little streaker, I'm going to get you," Jed laughed and began to chase the giggling little girl, who, at the end of the hall, ran smack dab into her shocked Uncle Leo.

"Leo," Jed exhaled with surprise.

"Jed, did you catch her?" Abbey asked, stepping out of the bathroom.

Leo looked up from the naked little girl at his feet to where Abbey stood wrapped in just a towel, her hair wet and hanging to her bare shoulders.

"Leo!" she gasped and stepped back. Jed immediately moved to stand in front of her and shield her from Leo's gaze.

"Leo, what in the hell are you doing up here?" Jed's eyes were filled with the same look of icy rage they'd had when he had first confronted him about the picture. It was obvious to Leo in that moment that things were definitely a long way from being settled between the three of them.

"I…I'm sorry," Leo stuttered.

"We're all half naked here." Jed stated the obvious, as he picked up a wet and whining Aislinn. The little girl began to kick and do her very best to squirm out of her father's arms as he turned to make his way toward Abbey. As he got closer to her mother and the towel Abbey was holding open, Aislinn's whines turned to all out fussing and she straightened her body out in a desperate need to slip from her father's grasp. The sudden movement and the fact that she was wet and slippery almost caused Jed to drop her.

"Aislinn, STOP IT! You're going to hurt yourself." Jed's voice was stern, a voice he rarely used with her and her lower lip began to quiver.

Leo averted his eyes as Jed handed the baby to the scantily toweled Abbey. Abbey ducked quickly behind the bedroom door, feeling a little ridiculous. Leo had seen her in less than this before, but never had she been so keenly aware of how he felt about her as she did standing there completely naked under that towel.

"The girls told me you were putting the twins down for a nap," Leo said, when Jed's attention had turned back to him. "I just wanted to let you know that Jordan and I were here. I had no idea…If I had known…I'm sorry…" He turned to leave.

Jed turned to pad barefoot back to the bedroom. Abbey stood in the doorway her hand on one hip.

"Jed, go talk to him," she hissed. He gave her a "do I have to" look and she simply pointed down the hall to where Leo had disappeared. Then, looking like a boy being sent to the principal's office, Jed headed off to find his friend.

"Leo!" he caught the man just as he was reaching the bottom of the stairs.

"Jed, if I had known that you guys were in the shower…" His face reddened with embarrassment.

"Leo, it's okay. I'm the one who's sorry. I overreacted a bit back there." Both of them knew what Jed left unsaid. If this had happened last year all three of them would have laughed it off and thought nothing of it. But this year Leo had been embarrassed, Abbey had been self-conscious and disconcerted and Jed had been ready to rip Leo a new one just for looking at her. What a tangled mess this was.

"It looks like we still have a long way to go before things are normal between all of us again," Leo sighed.

"Looks that way," Jed agreed. He was however, beginning to wonder if he would ever react normally around Leo again.

****

The first day of the staff's arrival to Windy Point, dawned gray, rainy, and foggy. Abbey stood staring out the kitchen window in her jeans and a heavy fisherman's sweater, watching the wind pelt the rain against the house.

"Hey, Mom," Ellie said, entering the kitchen. She was dressed much the same as Abbey. "Did you have all the old chests brought here from the farm?"

"Yes, they had already arrived by the time I got here."

"Today will be the perfect day to go through them all and look for some old clothes to use for the karoake party."

"I wish you wouldn't refer to them as "old", Eleanor," Abbey said. "They were clothes that your father and I wore when we were in college, not the dark ages."

"There's more than that. Some of those trunks had stuff like your old school uniforms from "Immaculate Heart of Mary".

"You still have those?" Jed set down his cup of coffee, his interest piqued. Knowing her husband as well as she did, Abbey could see a night of playing Catholic schoolgirl looming somewhere ahead in her future.

"Yes, I do. So, what are you going to do today while we rummage through old trunks?"

"I guess I'll go over to the guest house and see if the guys want to play some poker."

Abbey knew that there were more than just the guys in that house. This year Leo had brought Jordan and Josh had brought Amy. "Tell CJ, Amy, and Jordan they can come over and go through the clothes with us if they don't feel like playing poker. I'm absolutely dying to meet Jordan."

****

Walking up the stairs to the Bartlet cottage, Jordan could hear a voice muttering.

"Oh, Nicholas, where did you put the damn thing." The voice sounded as if it was coming from the end of the porch and, squinting through the fog, Jordan could see the movement of someone crawling on the floor.

"Hello?" She called out tentatively. Within seconds a woman materialized through the mist to stand right in front of her. With her auburn hair curly from the damp air, her wide hazel eyes, and the light smattering of freckles across her nose she looked as if she had stepped straight out of the Irish countryside. She was smaller than she looked on TV, several inches shorter than Jordan's own 5'7 and that gave her an aura of vulnerability. It was First Lady, Abigail Bartlet, and she was already nothing like what Jordan had expected.

"Hello." Abbey held out her hand then pulled it back when she realized she was still holding a plastic train. "Sorry, my son has several dozen toys but right now he is adamant that the only one that will do is his choo choo. You must be Jordan. I'm Abigail Bartlet."

"Nice to meet you, ma'am" Jordan shook her hand.

"Please, no ma'am stuff here, it's just, Abbey. Come on inside. I have to get this up to the nursery before a tantrum explodes."

Jordan smiled and followed the First Lady up the stairs. Something told her that despite her earlier misgivings she was going to like Abbey very much. ****

"Well, I can't think of a better way to spend a rainy day than by spanking my friends out of a little hard earned cash." Jed gleefully pulled the money from the poker pot his way, a cigar clenched between his teeth. He'd prefer a cigarette but Abbey had gone through his suitcase, found his hidden stash, and flushed them down the toilet. So, he'd had to rely on Toby for his nicotine fix. He dipped a tortilla chip in salsa and surveyed the table with its bottles of beer, ashtrays, several different variations of chips and not a vegetable in sight. Oh yes, life was good, life was very good indeed. So, feeling the way that he did he couldn't understand why Josh had been moping through the entire game. Finally the sighs and the little lost boy looks were just too much and Jed turned to him.

"At the risk of you bringing my good humor down for the day, would you mind telling me why you're acting like you just lost your best friend. I haven't heard that many sighs out of one person since Annie asked me for the new M&M and I brought her a bag of candy. Evidently there is a singer of the same name and it was a CD that she wanted."

"You got M&M's and Eminem mixed up?" Sam nearly spit his beer over the table with laughter.

"An honest mistake," Jed glared at him over his eyeglasses. "I mean who names themselves after little bites of chocolate?"

"Have you ever listened to the lyrics of his music?" Toby was surprised the Bartlet's would allow someone Annie's age to own one of those CD's.

"No, can't say as I've had the pleasure. I've heard it blaring in Annie's and Zoey's rooms but it was Abbey who listened to the lyrics and decided the only way Annie was getting that it was in an edited form. I have a feeling she listens to Zoey's though."

"Hey, can we get back to me?" Josh whined.

"Oh, yeah, what is your issue?" Jed gave him a puzzled look. "Here we are, sun, sea, sand, good food, good company, hell, you even brought a girl this year..."

"Bingo!" Sam grinned and Josh gave him a malevolent stare. "This vacation has not turned out as he expected it too. Amy has her own bedroom."

"Have you…you know…" Jed wiggled his eyebrows.

"Barbecued?" Josh asked, a twinkle of good humor returning to his eyes. "Yes we've barbecued plenty, only now she's changing the rules on me. I invited her up here for a romantic long weekend and she grabs a separate bedroom."

"Ah ha, that's where you made the mistake, my boy." Jed leaned back and puffed on his cigar. What does romance mean to you?"

"I dunno…I guess it would be…" Josh trailed off.

"Sex," Jed said. "Romance to you means sex just as it does for every other male on this planet and that's where things get screwy. Men and women are just programmed differently, we think about sex all the time, they don't. I mean I'll be walking along the beach with Abbey and she's going on and on about some new dress that she bought and asking me if I think her sapphire earrings will go with it or if she should wear the amethysts. Well, I could care less what damn earrings she wears with the dress because all I'll be thinking about is how fast I can get her out of it, but do I say that? Of course not. I tell her the sapphire earrings bring out the blue in her eyes and that she is beautiful no matter what she wears, and guess what? When we get home I get the male version of romance and lots of it. So we're both happy."

Josh pondered that for a minute. He knew just how much barbecuing the President got in with the First Lady so he didn't take the advice given lightly. "So, you're saying, walk with her on the beach, tell her the moonlight shines in her eyes and things will come around my way?"

"Well, I hope you'll be sincere. I really do mean the things that I say to Abbey. That's what makes it seduction and not just some sleazy guy with a come on trying to get a woman into bed."

"Are we going to play here or spend the day discussing the ways of seducing a woman?" Leo asked with irritation, making everyone aware that their discussion had hit a nerve.

"Let's play." Toby quickly began to deal. The last thing any of them wanted was for the tension to rise again between the President and his chief of staff.

****

"Other than a musty old used bookstore there is no better place to be on a rainy day than going through old things in an attic," Abbey pronounced.

"I can't believe all this stuff you guys have." CJ was seated in front of an old chest. She had placed large ivory turn of the century hat, decorated with big purple flowers, on her head and was in the process of sliding matching elbow length gloves up her arms. " All of these trunks were really up in your attic in New Hampshire?"

"Mmm…"Abbey murmured, pulling out a deep emerald green flapper dress that had belonged to Jed's grandmother, Eleanor. None of these outfits were new to her; she and the girls had spent many hours on rainy days playing dress up back home in the attic. She had even occasionally used the garments as costumes for Halloween. "The Bartlet's are truly a family of packrats, they never throw anything out."

"I guess they didn't." Jordan sighed with awe, as she opened a trunk that contained beautiful bright silk shawls and hand painted fans from the orient.

"Actually, those come from my own attic back home in Salem. Jed's ancestors stayed home, tended the land and built a nation but mine roamed the sea. My family made their money in shipping and trade with the orient, then later in whaling. We still have some exquisite things that they brought home from their travels."

"It must be fascinating to know so much about your own family history," CJ said.

"My grandmother was working on some family genealogy before she died, but she didn't get very far back."

"Look at this." Ellie pulled out an old battered blue suit of the Union army. "This belonged to our great, great, great---did I remember all the great's?--- grandfather, Ethan Bartlett. He was a captain in the Union army and was shot in the leg in the Battle of Gettysburg. The hole is right here." She lifted the gray pants to show the torn bullet hole just above the knee. "He ended up getting gangrene and had to have the leg amputated."

"Did you ever think about putting any of this stuff in a museum?" Amy asked.

"Oh, God, no" Abbey exclaimed with mock horror. "Jed's mother would have a coronary if we even suggested doing that. We must save things for posterity, Abigail." She mimicked Emily Bartlet's stiff formal speech. " Although, I suppose once Jed has a presidential library we might put some of this stuff in there. It will certainly be preserved better." She sneezed from the dust as she pulled out a gorgeous long white Edwardian dress.

"I still can't believe that women wore these as everyday dresses," Zoey said. "Remember when you used to put your hair up and put on that dress and we would put on these?" She showed the rest of the women some of the taffeta and lace childhood dresses that had been neatly folded in a trunk.

"And we'd play music on that old Victrola and have tea parties," Ellie enthused. "I always felt so grown up and ladylike wearing these dresses. Remember how daddy used to come up and pretend he'd been caught in a time warp."

"He'd call us his Victorian ladies," Zoey laughed. "And he'd ask us where his tomboys went."

"It was the only time you girls didn't fight me about putting your hair up or making you get all dressed up." Abbey smiled at the memory of sitting with her three lovely daughters all dressed up in clothes their ancestors had worn in a completely different century.

"That must have been fun," Jordan sighed, wistfully. Never having had children, she had never realized just how much fun it could have been. She had always thought about the work part of it and never really thought about the fun. Now she was seeing just how nice it would be to have someone to sit here with reminiscing about all the shared good times of the past, children who shared a history with you.

"What are these?" CJ asked, while she began unwrapping the delicate material that had been so lovingly stored away.

Abbey turned to see the once white, and now yellowing, old gowns and her face softened with recognition. "Those are christening gowns. My great, great grandmother on my father's side brought the one that you're holding over from Ireland when she emigrated here during the famine. She did all the handstitching and embroidery herself, isn't it amazing? I was christened in it as were my mother and my grandmother and all of my daughters, including Aislinn, remember? Even Annie was baptized in it."

"What did Nicholas wear?" Jordan asked.

"He wore Jed's, it's the one over there."

"AH HA, this is the trunk I've been looking for!" Annie exclaimed. "This is the one with all Grams and Gramps old hippie clothes.

"I was not a HIPPIE," Abbey protested.

"Mom, you protested the war, you wore colored sunglasses, hip huggers, halter tops and love beads. Face it, you were a hippie." Ellie grinned at her.

Zoey pulled out a pair of pale blue, hip hugger bell-bottoms with puffy white clouds. "I LOVE these!" she exclaimed.

Jordan looked at the dimensions of the pants and gave CJ a rueful smile. CJ knew exactly what Jordan was thinking.

"My God, Abbey, what were you, like, a size 2?" CJ asked.

"No," Abbey thrust her chin out. "I was NOT a size 2."

"Let's see," Zoey pulled at the tag. "She was a size 3."

"See…" Abbey stuck her tongue out at CJ. "I was bigger than you thought."

"Ooooh a WHOPPING size THREE."

"Give me a break, I'm small boned."

"Look what I found over here…" Ellie dangled an ivory card.

"What is that?" Amy asked. "It looks like an invitation."

"It is." Ellie began to read from the card. "Dr. and Mrs. Michael O' Neill request the honour of you presence at the marriage of their daughter Abigail Anne to Mr. Josiah Daniel Bartlet, son of Prof. and Mrs. John Bartlet…I found the wedding trunk!"

"You have one of those framed with a picture from your wedding in your bedroom at the farm," Annie said, glancing down at the familiar script while everyone began crowding around the trunk to see what treasures would be found.

"We actually brought it with us to the White House," Abbey corrected her.

The first thing Ellie pulled out of the trunk was a lovely sheath in the palest of dusty rose.

"You didn't wear white at your wedding, Abbey?" Amy asked. "That was daring back then."

"Of course I wore white at my wedding." Abbey flashed a warning glance at Annie. Now was not the time for any of the teenager's sarcastic comments about her not being virginal enough for white. "This is my sister Jane's bridesmaid dress."

"Aunt Jane must have HATED having to wear this. I think the only time I've seen her wear a dress was at dad's inauguration," Ellie laughed.

"She wasn't too pleased, I'll admit that. But you do for family what you won't do for others. Your cousin Danielle wore that." Abbey nodded at the frilly ivory tulle dress Zoey had pulled out. "She was all of about four when she was our flower girl. Her six year old brother Anthony was our ring bearer."

Ellie pulled out the satin pillow her parent's wedding rings had been tied to. Both of their names had been embroidered on the bed of the pillow where their rings had lain.

"That is just exquisite handiwork," Jordan picked up the pillow to admire it.

"My great grandmother did that for me as a wedding gift. She also embroidered mine and Jed's first initials intertwined on the train of my wedding gown."

Next out of the trunk came a gauzy veil, a pale blue garter, a pair of white elbow length satin gloves, and a pair of white sling back shoes with a crystal clasp and 3 ½ inch heels. But, Abbey was no longer paying attention to what came out of the trunk, she had moved on to the black garment bag that lay over a railing. She was gently unzipping it when CJ came up to stand behind her.

"What's tha…" her question trailed off as she saw what the zipper revealed. "God, it's your wedding gown, isn't it?"

"Mmm…" Abbey smiled, touching the fabric almost reverently. She hadn't had much time to plan her wedding but she had taken her time to find exactly the perfect dress. It had meant trying on almost every gown in the greater Boston area, but it had been worth the effort. She truly loved the gown she had chosen. She took it carefully out of the garment bag and everyone stood admiring it for a few moments.

"Why don't you try it on, Mom. See if it still fits." Zoey said.

Abbey's protests fell on deaf ears and before she knew it she was standing behind an old armoire and Ellie was slipping her gown over her head.

Breathless oohs and ahhhs filled the room as she stepped out from behind the armoire.

"Oh, Abbey, you look stunning." Amy was the first to regain her speech.

"Thank you." Abbey stood in front of the old full-length mirror watching as Ellie buttoned her up. The gown had a very low cut back but still had almost a dozen mother of pearl buttons. She gazed down at the cleavage being revealed by the gown. "I wasn't quite so busty when I was 21," she grinned.

"You mean there is hope for me, even though I'm long past the age of 21," CJ glanced down at her less than ample chest.

"Just have a couple of babies and see what happens."

Finally Ellie was finished with the buttons and Abbey turned to them. The gown was absolutely perfect, a fairytale-wedding gown and Abbey looked like a fairytale princess in it. The beaded and embroidered dropped waist corset bodice revealed Abbey's tiny waist, while the double spaghetti strapped scooped neckline showed off her figure to it's best advantage, leaving her shoulders bare. It had been, after all, a summer wedding. The skirt flared from her waist into yards of Duchesse satin and taffeta and a cathedral train. Elbow length satin gloves finished off the elegant look.

Jed stepped up unnoticed into the attic. Unnoticed because everyone was circled around Abbey. When the circle parted momentarily, Jed's breath caught in his throat. Seeing Abbey he was transported to that July day of his 22nd year, the year that had changed his life forever. The year that Abbey had become his bride. Amazingly enough she hadn't changed all that much, if anything she was even more beautiful now than she had been then, having fulfilled the promise of a pretty girl who turned into a beautiful woman.

"Abbey…" He choked.

Abbey turned, her hand rising to her throat with surprise. "Jed."

TBC...