Beach House Rules

15. Alice Eligible Bachelor

Alice Eligible Bachelor

I met my second husband, Glen, in the ordinary way: at the eligible bachelor auction to support Juniper Shores Elementary. Okay, so maybe that wasn’t ordinary. I didn’t even want to go to the auction, but it had been nearly two years since Jeremy’s death and, while I wouldn’t say my friends were still rallying around me in quite the same way, they were still conscious of making sure I got out and about. “Come on!” my friend Kate begged. “It will be fun. You don’t have to bid on anyone.”

I hadn’t planned to. All the bachelors were dancing onto the stage when it was their turn, gregarious and extroverted. And then there was Glen. Shy and quiet, cheeks flaming, he took his hands out of his pockets long enough to wave tentatively to the audience. He was tall and broad-shouldered—a former Juniper Shores Prep basketball benchwarmer turned math teacher—ten years my elder.

Our paths had never crossed. But when I saw him up there, so uncomfortable, and realized that he wasn’t getting as many bids as the other men, I couldn’t let him flounder. So I raised my paddle and my voice. The previous bid had been twenty-five dollars—and it had taken three bids to get there—so I said, “Two hundred seventy-five dollars!” That was twenty dollars more than our super-hot UPS driver, who was clearly the most eligible of the eligible bachelors.

I’d been careful not to spend my inheritance from Jeremy, saving every penny for a rainy day. I lived meagerly and quietly on my very small teaching assistant salary. But this was an emergency. All I could think about was what I would do if I were standing up there, mortified and alone. And so, I bid.

The auctioneer, a.k.a. the principal, said, “Going once, going twice, sold to Alice Bailey for two hundred seventy-five dollars.”

Glen practically melted off the stage and over to me. “Thank you,” he whispered.

I hadn’t planned on actually going on the date. But then Glen said, “I promise I make a beach picnic so good it will be worth your investment.”

He had dimples when he smiled and so much hope in his voice I couldn’t possibly say no. I didn’t plan to fall in love with him; I didn’t plan to marry him. But, well, Glen was quiet and soft-spoken. He held me like I was a porcelain doll. We sort of quietly coexisted, spending evenings in, cooking and watching movies. We pooled our salaries to rent a small town house two blocks from the ocean. We never could have afforded it, but Glen had tutored the owner’s child to a B+ in AP Calculus, and he had rented it to us for a steal. I look back on those years as tinged with a sort of solemn happiness, like the golden glow of early-morning light on the water before the showiness of sunrise.

We met when I was twenty-nine, married when I was thirty-one. A few months later, over a messy cake that Glen had made for me himself, he said as I blew out the candles, “Is one of your birthday wishes this year for a baby?”

My stomach gripped when he asked. It seems insane now that we hadn’t talked about children before we married. It’s hard to explain our relationship. It was like I fell into this comfortable moment that made me feel like I was breathing again, and Glen was afraid to push too hard for fear that I would figure out what I had done and run away. Was this mad, passionate, great love? No. But it was safe. We were happy. Or as happy as I could imagine being while still mired in the grief that I was dead set on never letting go.

I had given thought to children, of course. I’d always wanted to feel that type of true, unconditional love. I spent a moment feeling terribly guilty that I could even imagine having children—my dream with Jeremy—with anyone else.

But Jeremy was gone, a fact that washed over me with fresh horror every single day. It certainly wasn’t fair to deny this truly decent man the joy of children because of the past I could never change. And so I smiled. “I think a baby would be perfect.”

I’ll never forget the way Glen beamed. “I think it’s time then,” he said.

Glen had an old knee injury that gave him the tiniest limp. He knew he needed a knee replacement, but he’d been putting it off as long as possible so that with luck he would only have to do it once. He was forty-two now, which was maybe not quite old enough, but he said, “I want to be able to run around with my children. I want to coach their teams and be the dad playing with them in the yard.”

His eyes filled with tears. Mine did too. Glen would be a wonderful father. Patient. Kind. Loving. Any healing I had done had come from his ability to meet me where I was. He would ask about Jeremy, listen when I needed him most. He never seemed threatened or upset with me for holding on to this part of my past. He never minded holding me, stroking my hair, when I woke up screaming from a nightmare about Jeremy. And, in that way, I was able to move forward.

I remember sitting in his lap, putting my arms around him. He kissed me softly. “I’ll schedule the surgery,” he said.

I was teaching when he went to his pre-op appointment. I went to the grocery store after school, anxiously awaiting his call. The police knocked on my front door right as I was walking in the back. When I saw them, I knew. I don’t know how, but I knew. I dropped the bag of groceries, the eggs breaking and seeping through the cardboard into the carpet. I’ve blocked out the rest.

I blamed myself for years. I should have taken off from school that day. I should have driven him. No matter how many times the priest or friends assured me there was nothing I could have done, I blamed myself.

I left that townhome, used Glen’s shockingly generous life insurance and savings to purchase a tiny cottage in downtown Juniper Shores, and saved the rest. I felt so guilty.

I had learned over the years, when I let my mind wander to that horrible night, to “choose a happier thought.” It was hard, but sometimes it worked.

Yes, the past was a dark, scary place that I had to save myself from. But every now and then, I couldn’t help myself: I looked in the rearview mirror. Tonight was one of those times. Elliott’s many, many texts had asked if we could get together, just to talk. As much as I wanted to feel firm in our decision to break up, I decidedly did not. Not when I saw him again. Not before that. And I had to admit that I was more than a little interested in what he wanted to say. I was equally interested in whether being open to this conversation was a step in the right direction for me, if it signaled growth.

So now Elliott had his arm slung over my shoulders as if it had been there every day for the past 341 days since I had seen him. Since I’d told him—in the midst of the terror that I would lose him—that we couldn’t be together. Since he had left town.

We were walking slowly through the crowds at Juniper Shores Village. It is one of the most appealing parts of this area, the thing most written up in travel magazines and lifestyle columns, the place that inspires tourists to start saving so they can retire here one day.

Three open-air restaurants grace the oceanfront: a burger place popular with the late-night crowd that has the most eclectic bar scene on the beach, a Mexican cantina where one can eat tacos and drink Modelos from the comfort of a hammock or play cornhole, and the Fish Camp, which makes the best fried seafood on the East Coast. Bar none.

Behind those mainstays is the Airstream Park, a cluster of seven Airstreams: two women’s clothing outposts, a rosé slushie truck, a coffee truck, a pizza truck, a fresh juice and smoothie truck, and a vegan health food truck. There’s also a long pier with an arcade at the end and a huge NO FISHING sign that is roundly ignored. It’s fun and so clean it resists being seedy.

But tonight, even if it was seedy, I wouldn’t have cared because I was slightly tipsy from a rosé slushie with the man I had missed even more than I’d realized. Elliott was guiding me, and I knew where we were going before he even said it. “In the interest of making you feel loving and nostalgic toward me, I thought it was important to relive our first real date,” he said, smiling at me. He was so tan that the creases around his eyes and mouth were a shade slightly lighter than his skin, and his blue eyes sparkled. He had that distinctive look of a man who was made to live beside the ocean, who worked hard but loved every single minute of his life. He looked like a man who had never lost one night’s sleep trying to prove himself to anyone else. And he was causing me to take a hard look at the life I had led, at why I was so darn interested in proving myself. Proving myself to whom? I knew I hadn’t killed my husbands. They knew it. Elliott knew it. Why did I care what all those strangers thought anyway?

We walked up to the reception stand at the Fish Camp. “Hi, Elliott,” said the hostess, who was wearing frayed jean shorts and a tank top, and couldn’t possibly be a day over twenty-three. She wrapped her hair, which was long and wavy and white-white blond, around her finger.

“Hi, Kylie.” He smiled. “I have a reservation for two.”

She looked from Elliott to me and back to Elliott, making a face like I was the day-old fish they threw out. “That’s for you?” She looked at me again. “And you?”

The Fish Camp didn’t take reservations. It wasn’t a table-for-two kind of restaurant. It was the type of place where they lined raw wood tables with newspaper and dumped oysters or shrimp or clams. You ate wherever there was a seat with whoever else happened to be sitting there. In fact, I thought, panic suddenly rushing through me, that would be great. I knew Elliott was trying to create this perfect night for me. And it had been working. Until this moment when I remembered that so much was at stake here.

“We’ll just sit at the community table” burst out of me. Big, scary conversations about why we broke up and whether we could move forward couldn’t happen at the community table. I could put off whatever Elliott had in mind, stay in the purgatory of nondecision that, sure, was hard, but was easier than the hell of another clean break.

Elliott put his arm around me and squeezed, calming me, settling me. Could he read my mind? “No,” Elliott said. “I called ahead.”

“Fine.” Kylie took two laminated menus and meandered to our table, smacking her gum, like this was all so boring she could die.

“Tell Roger thanks,” Elliott said, pulling out a chair for me as best he could on the sand.

Elliott sat and grabbed my hand hungrily across the table. Elliott always had this almost palpable need to touch me. And it was one of the things that had made him so irresistible to me. I was trying to ignore it, but I had to admit that I felt the same. But I was also afraid of what loving him this much could cost me, could cost him .

“Sorry,” he said. “I just have to make sure this is real and you’re here and this is happening.”

I took a deep breath, pulling my hand away. I wanted to sink into how good it felt to be with him, to ignore that every man I had given my life to was gone. But that wasn’t reality. For almost a year together, I had ignored that. And then the truth had sunk in. I was in love with Elliott; he was in love with me. And after a year, a couple in their late thirties (him) and midforties (me) had to move forward. I would have to make hard decisions about what came next. We couldn’t just sail along with Elliott at his house and me at the mommune. And all the old fear that I’d spent so much time and energy chasing away had crept in. What if I did change my life? What if I let myself really be with Elliott, full-force, all-in? And what if he died? I couldn’t let that happen. And so, I had let him go.

“Elliott…” I started. I didn’t know what came next. This was impossible. I wanted this. I wanted him . But I had no idea how to move forward.

Elliott shook his head. “Can I say something before you do?”

He had saved me. Because what was I going to say anyway?

“Al, you broke my heart.”

I bit my lip. I knew it, but I hated to hear him say it.

“I have spent three hundred forty-one days blaming you for my pure misery.”

My heart fluttered nervously. Had I read this all wrong? Was I here so he could tell me off?

Elliott leaned toward me. “And three days ago, I woke up, and I had an epiphany: I’m just as much to blame here as you are. Because I never should have walked away from you.”

I thought back to that night on the beach, me sobbing, telling Elliott it was over. That I was cursed, that I couldn’t lose another man I loved. “Elliott, I was pretty firm in that decision,” I said. Broken and battered, but resolute.

He shook his head and looked me straight in the eye. “Alice, you love me.”

I wondered for a moment if he was trying to hypnotize me, his eyes were locked on mine so intensely. But he didn’t have to convince me. I knew I loved him. I loved him so much that I wanted to save him. From me.

“I know you love me because I lived that year with you. I have never, ever felt about anyone the way I do about you.” He sighed. “Look, what I’m trying to say is that you insisted on this breakup because you were afraid I was going to leave you. And then I did. I left. And that was the wrong thing to do. I never should have walked away from you. And, if you’ll let me love you, if you’ll let me be with you, I’ll never walk away from you again.”

Tears stood in his eyes, and he was so sincere, so beautiful, that I just wanted to sink into him, let him love me, throw caution to the wind. But what I said was, “No, Elliott. I wasn’t afraid you’d leave me. I was afraid I’d kill you.”

At the exact wrong time, a skinny, pale server approached with a bottle of champagne, looking nervous. I couldn’t blame him. I’d basically just confessed to premeditated murder. Context is really key in these situations.

“Sir, the 2018—”

“I’ve got it,” Elliott said, motioning for the bottle. The server handed it to him and scurried away.

Setting the bottle down, Elliott stood and took my hand. He pulled me up, away from the restaurant, out into the night on the beach where a humid breeze was blowing softly. He turned toward me, and I wrapped my arms around myself, even though it wasn’t cold.

“Al, you’re not going to kill me,” he said, rubbing my shoulders. “Do you hear yourself? Do you hear how ridiculous that sounds when I say it back to you?”

“It should be ridiculous,” I said, my throat thick with tears and fear. “But, with all due respect, Elliott, you have no idea what I’ve been through. I’m trying to protect you.”

Elliott pulled me into him, and I let him. He rested his cheek on top of my head. “I love you, Alice, and I’m not leaving you again. I don’t care what you say.”

My shoulders relaxed, maybe from his words, maybe from his arms, maybe from the scent of Old Spice body wash and something a little like Old English furniture polish that always clung to him. Because that was what I was afraid of, really, wasn’t it? At my core? Being alone? And a knowing coursed through me. He was right. If he had fought me that night on the beach, if he had refused to walk away, we would still be together. I loved him so fiercely that I wasn’t only protecting him. I was protecting myself from losing another man I loved.

He pulled away from me. “I’m strong, Al,” he said. “You can depend on me. I love you and I want you, but the last three hundred forty-one days have taught me something: I don’t need you.”

I wondered what those words would have sounded like to any other woman. Grace would have been offended, I was certain. But the most delicious feeling washed over me. Julie needed me. Brenna and Jamie and Audrey needed me. To a lesser extent, Grace and Charlotte needed me. I had enough of being needed. I wanted to be wanted . I loved my day-to-day existence, taking care of the people in my home. But it was a different kind of love, one that came with stress and structure. What Elliott was offering me was something entirely different. And I understood then that, as much as I loved him, I had always underestimated him.

I realized, looking into his eyes as the waves crashed on the shore, that he saw me in a way that I hadn’t fully recognized. That simple sentence had changed everything.

Elliott took my hands in his. “I’m patient, Alice,” he said. “I know you have a lot of scars, and that’s okay. I can wait until you’re ready. But I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going to leave you again.”

I never asked for what I wanted anymore, but, for the first time in a long time, I found myself pleading with God that Elliott would finally be the one who got to stay.