The gal in the white lace sundress was as sexy as I’d ever seen.
She had shoulder-length, sandy-blonde hair, a little tangled and windswept. Eyes as blue and inviting as a Caribbean cove, the kind you could dive right into. A strap of her dress dangled loosely off her shoulder, exposing the shape of her breast, and she smiled, bashful yet unconcerned. The second I laid my eyes on her I remembered thinking, Now there’s the woman I’ve been waiting for all these years. The one I could live with forever.
And as I stumbled down across the dunes to the ocean, lugging the bottle of Veuve Clicquot and our meal, the lights from our beach house washing over her face, I said for about the millionth time in the past twenty years just how lucky I was.
‘Get down here,’ Kathy called. ‘There’s not much time before I start to freeze my butt off and the whole thing’s ruined.’
‘You know, a little help might do the trick,’ I yelled back.
I was balancing the champagne, the bowl of fresh pasta I had just topped off with truffles and butter, and my iPod speaker. The blanket was already laid out on the sand – the ‘table’ set, the candles lit, re-creating that night from twenty years ago.
Our wedding night.
No fancy party or trip. Just us, for a change. Both of our kids were away. The truth was, we rarely even celebrated our anniversary, not since our daughter, Sophie, was born a year later on the very same day. August 28. But this year she was already at Penn and our sixteen-year-old, Max, was at fall lacrosse camp before school began.
We were at our beach house in Amagansett, basically just a cozy cape house nestled into the Hampton dunes.
‘Yow, sand crab!’ I yelped, hopping onto a foot and almost pitching the tray.
‘You drop that bowl, mister, and you can forget about whatever you have in mind for later!’ Kathy jumped up, taking the pasta from me and setting it on the blanket, where she had laid out a hand-printed menu, bamboo placemats, fluted champagne glasses, and candles. There were even little name cards.
I looked closer and noticed that they were from Annette’s, up in Vermont, where we’d had our wedding.
The very same name cards – with the same little blue ribbons – but this time they were inscribed with the words: ‘To my wonderful husband. For 20 beautiful years.’
I have to admit, my heart crumbled just a little on that one. ‘Nice touch.’
‘Thought you’d enjoy that one. Sophie did the lettering. Not to mention letting us have the day.’
‘Remind me later to thank her,’ I said. I sat down and started to pour out some champagne. ‘Wait – almost forgot!’ I connected the speaker to my iPod and pushed the play arrow. ‘My contribution!’
Bob Seger’s ‘We’ve Got Tonight’ spread over the beach. It wasn’t really ‘our song’; it was played a lot back then when we started getting cozy with each other back at college. I was never the big romantic or anything. Kathy always said she had a thirty-second window to hold my hand before I would let go.
‘So happy anniversary,’ I said. I leaned in close to kiss her.
‘Say it first,’ she said, keeping me at bay.
‘Say what?’
‘You know damn well what …’ She lifted her champagne glass with a determined glimmer in her eye. ‘Not like you said it back then … like you really mean it this time.’
‘You mean how you were the one I wanted to honor and take care of for the rest of our lives …?’
‘Yeah, right!’ She chortled. ‘If only you had said it like that.’
What I’d said, or kind of barked at her back then, going eighty on the New York Thruway – kind of a running joke all these years – after being nudged and pressed to set a wedding date, holding off until I’d finished my residency and hooked up with a job, then further delaying until Kathy was done with hers, was something a bit more like: ‘Okay, how about Labor Day? Does that work for you?’
‘Does that work …?’ Kathy blinked back, either in disbelief or shock at having received about the lamest proposal ever. ‘Yeah, it kinda works …’ She shrugged.
I think I drove on for another exit before I turned and noticed her pleased and satisfied smile.
‘Well, it seems to have …’ I wrapped my champagne glass around hers, looking in her eyes. ‘Worked. We’re still here!’
The truth was, I’d come from a family of revolving divorces. My father, five – all with beautiful, younger women. My mom, three. None of the marriages ever lasted more than a couple of years. In my family, whenever someone popped the question, it was more like code for saying that they wanted to split up.
‘So then say it,’ Kathy said. Her gaze turned serious. ‘For real this time.’
It was clear this wasn’t her usual horsing around. And the truth was, I’d always promised I’d make it up to her if we lasted twenty years.
So I put down my glass and pushed onto a knee. I took her hands in mine, in the way I had denied her those years before, and I fixed on those beautiful eyes and said, in a voice as true as I’d ever spoken: ‘If I had the chance to do it all over again – a hundred times, in a hundred different universes – I would. Each and every time. I’d spend my life with you all over again.’
Kathy gave me a look – not far from the one in the car twenty years ago – one that I thought at any second might turn into, Oh, pleeze, Jay, gimme a break.
Until I saw her little smile. ‘Well you have,’ she said, touching her glass against mine. ‘Taken care of me, Jay. All of us.’
I winked at her. ‘Now, can we eat?’
I think we both knew we would stay together from the first time we met. We were undergrads back at Cornell, and I had long, curly brown hair in those days and broad shoulders. Played midfield on the lacrosse team. We even went to the Final Four my junior year. Kathy was in veterinary science. I still kept my hair kind of long, but I’d added tortoiseshell glasses now, along with a slightly thicker waist. These days, it took a hundred sit-ups and a half hour on the treadmill every couple of days to keep me in some kind of shape.
‘Yes.’ She started to spoon out the salad. ‘Now we can eat.’
My cell phone suddenly sounded.
I groaned. I hadn’t even realized I’d had it on me. Habit, I guess. After twenty years of being on call, the ring of the phone intruding on a potential Cialis moment was the ultimate deflating sound.
Kathy sighed. ‘Probably the kids. You know how they like to bust a good mood.’
I looked at the screen. It wasn’t the kids at all. ‘It’s Charlie.’
My brother. Eight years older. He and his wife, both bipolar, each with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, lived in California as wards of the state, along with Evan, their twenty-one-year-old son. We helped out with their rent, pitched in financially when they got in over their heads. Which was often. They always seemed to need something. A call from them was rarely good news.
Kathy exhaled at me. ‘It’s our anniversary, Jay …’ My first thought was to let it go to voice mail, but I picked up.
‘Hi, Charlie …’ I answered, some irritation coming through.
It wasn’t him. It was Gabriella, his wife. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, Jay …,’ she began, like she always began, in her gravelly, deep-throated voice and still-heavy Colombian accent. ‘Something terrible has happened here, Jay.’ Her voice was shaky and distressed. ‘Evan is dead.’
‘Dead?’ My eyes immediately shot wide, finding Kathy’s. Evan was their only child. He had always been troubled; he’d been diagnosed as bipolar as well. Out of school. Not working. In and out of trouble with the law. But dead? ‘How?’
‘He jumped off the rock. In Morro Bay.’ Then she choked back a sob, any attempt at control completely unraveling. ‘Evan is gone, Jay. He killed himself. My son is no more.’