ansley
As the sun began to set on Caroline and Emerson’s fourth day back in Peachtree Bluff, as I remembered that Sloane would be joining us the next day, I realized that this was as good a time as any to take a peek at Jack’s boat. I knew it needed a ton of work. What that work was exactly was as of yet unclear.
I turned left onto the sidewalk and right onto the boardwalk, my flats tapping on the wood beneath them, proud of myself that I hadn’t even changed my clothes or fixed my hair. I was pretty sure that meant I was safe. Just work. Nothing else. I had thought of Jack more than I would like to admit over the past few days, but I rationalized that I think about all of my projects a lot.
I wasn’t sure if Jack would even be there, but then I saw him, sitting in a plastic chair, sipping a beer, his feet propped up on the stern. “Oh, wow,” he said when he spotted me. “You actually came.”
I shrugged. I still felt uneasy around Jack. But at least it wasn’t written all over my face now—and I could breathe, which was always good. He seemed more relaxed with me as well. But he was drinking, so it wasn’t a fair fight. He tried to help me into the boat, but I avoided his hand, jumping onto the deck and landing with a thud.
Jack made a face. “That was optimistic.”
“What?”
“Believing that you wouldn’t fall through the deck.”
I may have avoided his hand, but there was no way to shirk his wrapping me in that same hug he had all those years ago. I’ve never given much thought to hugs. But Jack’s was one you never forgot. It was an earnest hug, a comforting one, like being wrapped in an afghan a beloved relative had knitted just for you. I inhaled deeply, remembering the smell of him, a mix of sunscreen, Old Spice, beer, and wood. I relaxed into him, as if by memory, and then scolded myself for it.
I held up my camera, and Jack said, “You take pictures. I’ll get you some wine.”
“Oh, that’s OK,” I said. “I don’t really—”
But he was already gone before I could say “drink.” And, honestly, between Mr. Solomon, the scene on the lawn with the girls, and seeing the interior of the boat that Jack swore was seaworthy but looked as though it had seen its best days half a century ago, when Jack offered me a drink, there was no way I could say no. It had definitely been a drink kind of day.
We sat on the back of the boat in plastic chairs, our feet up on the stern, the teak worn and very, very vintage, and watched the most beautiful sunset in the world. It was pink and orange and so very vibrant, like someone had painted it by hand, mixing the colors just so, streaking the sky into a masterpiece. My husband, Carter, had been a wonderful artist, and when we first moved to Peachtree after he died, I would pretend that he was painting the sunset for me, sending it down from heaven to make me feel like all was not lost.
“So get me up to speed,” I said. “What have I missed over the past, um, thirty-five years or so.”
We both laughed. The wine was making my face warm already. On the bright side, I was decidedly less awkward. That was a plus.
“Well,” he said. “Let’s see. I retired last year.”
“Retired?” I said, shocked. “How did you pull that off?”
He laughed. “I figured out something very useful early on in my career.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“Well, remember how I started a restaurant in Atlanta and it wasn’t doing so hot?”
I nodded, not wanting to remember, not wanting to be back in that moment where Jack had told me that, wanting to keep myself in the present and out of the past. “Yeah.”
“I opened one in Athens, and it did great. So then I opened one in Chapel Hill. It did even better. And one in Columbia. It was the best of all.”
“Ah,” I said, getting the drift. “So what worked in one college town worked in all the others?”
He nodded, holding a sip of wine in his mouth. “Not all of them, but for the most part. So that one little hot dog joint turned into one hundred and eighty-five hot dog joints.” He shrugged. “And then I sold out.”
“Now that’s the American Dream,” I said. “Starting with something small, working your way up.”
He smiled. “Yeah.” I could tell that he was starting to feel more comfortable with me as well. “Just think. A few hot dogs led to all of this.” He swept his arm majestically around the dilapidated boat, and we both laughed so hard I thought wine would come out of my nose.
This was nice, actually, reconnecting with an old friend. It wasn’t so scary after all. It would be fun to work with him for a few weeks.
“I was really sorry to hear about Carter,” Jack said.
“Thanks.” I took a sip of wine.
“I wanted to reach out but . . .”
He trailed off, and I picked up. “No. That’s all right. I understand. I understood then, too.”
“So work is good with you?”
I looked out over the water, the sun now a bright, fiery red before its final descent. “It really is. I was scared, you know? I hadn’t worked in all those years. But I had nowhere to turn. And I made it.”
Jack smirked, but he didn’t say anything. And he didn’t have to open his mouth for me to know that he was rolling the phrase “nowhere to turn” around in his brain.
“You?” I said. “Wife? Kids?”
“Ex-wife,” he said, turning toward me. By the look in his eyes I could tell that he wasn’t drunk, but he was almost to that point where the wine was going to make those lips a little too loose. I almost said I needed to go. But, really, I had to hear about the ex-wife.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Yeah. She left me when she saw the boat.”
We both laughed and Jack looked me in the eye for the first time that night. “Your laugh is exactly the same.”
I looked down into my wineglass, and he asked, with something like sadness in his voice, “Do you remember the night we met?”
And, there we were. The loose lips. That was my cue to go. I started to stand, but I made the mistake of looking at him again, of remembering the Jack and Ansley we used to be.
He wasn’t handsome then. Not like he is now. He was a scrawny sixteen-year-old kid, a line of sweat around his buzz cut. Nope. Not a thing handsome about that kid. But he had something. Swagger. That’s what they would call it now. Back then, we would have said confidence. But either way, I couldn’t possibly forget. He still had it. It was a quality you could see clearly, as though you could reach out and touch it. It was a quality you couldn’t help but be drawn to.
“Of course,” I said softly.
I didn’t want to remember. But I was a tad tipsy, and it felt so good. I knew already, even then, that it couldn’t keep feeling this good. It wasn’t possible. But for the moment, I was riding the wave. After all of the pain of the past decade and a half or so, losing Carter, my daughters hating me, hiding Carter’s secrets, hiding my own . . . It felt good to drink wine and smile and remember.
That night I met Jack had been the first sandbar party of the year. In between Peachtree Bluff and Pecan Beach, which was right across the bridge and was where my girls built many a sand castle, lies the sandbar, the one where Jack and I had run into each other a few days earlier. If you don’t know the area, it’s treacherous, because your boat is sure to get stuck there, as it’s completely hidden during high tide. But when the tide is low, the sandbar makes its appearance, barely popping up out of the water. It’s as long as a football field and about half as wide. Only the most seasoned boaters know how to weave among the marsh grass without getting stuck. To the right, the coastline was dotted with what we called the mermansions, huge cedar-shake houses with boat docks and breathtaking views. To the left were smaller, simpler houses with views made even lovelier by the fact that the mermansions were in their line of sight. Every summer, at least three or four times, we would all anchor our boats around that little patch of sand.
This first party began as a family picnic. Everyone pitched in, setting up tables and portable grills on the sand, and then we all stood around with plates of cold fried chicken and barbecue or hot dogs and hamburgers, sipping sweet tea and beer, the kids sneaking another one of Mrs. Bennett’s famous brownies. It was almost Memorial Day and just cool enough. The entire summer lay ahead, ripe with promise, teeming with possibility, a flower right on the verge of blooming. You could taste the energy of that night as clearly as the potato salad, as if everyone was leaving behind the stress of the year, sending it out to sea, letting it go to fully enjoy this, one of the most special places on the planet.
It was there, on that sandbar, over a plate of Mrs. Bennett’s brownies, that Jack’s hand brushed mine for the first time as we both reached for the biggest one on the top.
“I remember, too,” Jack said now, interrupting my thoughts. “Those cutoff jean shorts. That yellow-and-white-striped bikini top. Those big hoop earrings. The way you tasted like bubble gum when I kissed you.”
I was close enough that I could swat his leg with my hand. He grabbed it. “Do you still taste like bubble gum?”
“Stop it,” I said. “Stop it now, or I’m going home.” I pulled my hand away and sat up straighter.
Truth be told, I hadn’t been alone with a man since Carter died. Plenty had asked. Occasionally, I had been tempted. I was only forty-two when he died, after all. But I couldn’t imagine trying to start over with anyone else. No one else could possibly understand the life we had lived.
“So tell me about this wife of yours,” I said.
“Ah, yes,” Jack said. “The wife.” He paused. “She was entirely too young for me. Thirty-five.”
I laughed. “Thirty-five. For heaven’s sake, Jack. That’s practically Caroline’s age.”
He looked at me, and I looked back. It wasn’t fair not to face him.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for, Ans. It is as we always said it would be.”
“Well, I’m sorry your marriage didn’t work out.” I was. Kind of. But really, Jack was mine. He had always been mine. He would always be mine. And that was how I had seen it from that very first night on that sandbar. Not that I was interested in him in that way now. But still. It was the principle.
As the tide began to rise, the parents had fled, leaving just the teenagers splashing around. That was when the sandbar was the most magical, if you asked me. You couldn’t see the ground we were standing on, and all around us was deep, dark water. I imagined from the mermansions it must have looked as though we could walk on it. It made me feel timeless, weightless, fearless. The lukewarm beer we sipped out of Solo cups didn’t hurt, either. I remember the way Jack flirted with me that night, the way I knew already that he wasn’t scared of anything, not like I was. But it was more than that. The molecules in the air rearranged themselves when Jack and I were together. Anyone around us could feel it, knew from that first night that no matter what the future held, in some small way, the stars aligned for us, the moon rose for us, pulling the tide higher and higher until we were forced back onto our boats. Jack kissed me that night, standing in his fifteen-foot Boston Whaler, our hearts thumping in time, the mosquitoes circling around our bug-bitten ankles under the sweet, sweet full moon of summer.
“Want to tell me why your marriage didn’t work?” I asked him.
He gestured around with his beer bottle. “I told you already. The boat.”
I rolled my eyes. “It was not the boat.”
He nodded. “Before we got married, she didn’t want children. After we got married, she decided she did.”
“And you didn’t?” I said. But I already knew the answer. Jack had never wanted children. And it had broken my heart. Because as much as I had loved him, I knew I was meant to be a mother.
“It seemed . . .” He trailed off, fiddling with his beer bottle. “Complicated.”
I swallowed a lump in my throat. “Yeah.” I paused. My phone beeped. Caroline. I held it up. “Kids complicate things. That’s for sure.”
“Actually, by then, I realized that I would kind of like to have kids.” He cleared his throat and looked out over the water. “And I loved her and she made me happy in a lot of ways. But I also knew that she wasn’t who I wanted to have children with.” He smiled, but I could see the sadness behind his eyes. That’s how it is with people you’ve known since you were teenagers at the sandbar party. “I’ve never admitted that before, not even to myself.”
He finally looked at me again, and I looked back. I didn’t say anything, but he could read my face.
“It’s not your fault, Ans.” He said it, but as the words tumbled out, there was an edge to his tone. One that made me uneasy. One that made me know that despite how cool he seemed, despite how nonchalant he was trying to be, he thought a lot of things were my fault.
I looked down into my wine. He couldn’t have blamed me for his unhappiness any more than I blamed myself. I always felt that if I had compromised, if we had been together, his life would have been better. But mine, I knew, would have been unspeakably incomplete.
He reached over and lifted my chin toward him, softening. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really mean that. It’s not your fault.”
I could feel the tears in my eyes. I was suddenly aware that I’d had too much wine and too much heat for one day. I wiped my cheeks quickly. “I need to go home,” I said.
“Want some company?” he asked. And he was back to normal, back to the easy Jack I knew.
Everything inside me wanted to say yes. Everything inside me wanted not to be alone. I wanted to pretend that we were teenagers again. That the world was fresh and new. That we were standing on the edge of everything, that life was out there waiting for us to grab it. But we weren’t. And it wasn’t.
And he knew it, too. That’s how he knew I meant it when I said, “No.”