Track 36 Love You for a Long Time
Track 36
Love You for a Long Time
Jake
The delay in Jake Finley writing his vows was not because he didn’t know what to say; it was because he had too much to say.
He could remember the very first time he and Renee had spoken.
She was fourteen, boarding the boat with her parents. He was fifteen, and it was his first summer as an official deckhand, though he had been a fixture on the ferry since he could walk.
She was wearing a sundress, and her hair was teased high on top of her head, the way teenage girls wore it then.
“Ticket, please,” he’d asked, wondering if the sudden burning in his cheeks was visible to her piercing green eyes.
“My dad has it.” She smiled coyly, like she already knew the power that her smile held.
Now he pulled out a piece of paper and wrote.
Renee, you are as beautiful today as you were the day I met you.
Two years later, at sixteen, they were at a house party together over in Point O’ Woods. Jake didn’t go to many parties. Summer, for him, meant rising before the sun and working long hours on the ferry. While most other kids had cushy jobs scooping ice cream or working at the day camp, Jake’s job was his priority. His father was the ferry captain back then, and his father’s father was the ferry captain before that. He had a lot to live up to.
That night thirty-plus years ago, sometime after midnight, Renee was heading back to Bay Harbor, alone. Not unlike what happened this weekend, Bea, who she had come to the party with, had to leave on account of Veronica’s antics. Jake watched from the back deck as Renee walked down the beach stairs. He could see her reticence as she reached the bottom, so he took a few steps down himself. A rowdy group walking on the beach called out to her, clearly making her uncomfortable. She took a step back. Jake took ten forward.
“Want me to walk you home?” he asked.
“Thanks, Jake, that would be nice.”
She knew his name. He did his best to hide a massive grin.
It was a chilly night, and he took off his prized Fire Island Ferries Crew sweatshirt and handed it to her without even asking. It was a good move, he thought, as she silently slipped it over her head. They talked about the regular stuff, mostly what it was like living on the island all year long. It was a common question, and he did his best to impress her with tales of riding his bike across the frozen bay and ski jumping off snow-covered roofs. When they got to her street, she took off the sweatshirt and handed it back to him. He badly wanted her to keep it and toyed with telling her so when she leaned in and kissed him gently on the lips.
“Thanks for walking me,” she said softly.
He kissed her back and their tongues touched, igniting a sweet exploration of each other’s mouths. She was standing on her tippy-toes in the sand. He was bent forward, not unlike a giraffe. It was over quickly, but he thought about it forever. He still thought about it. It was his first kiss.
He continued with his vows.
You were my first kiss, and you will be my last.
Renee’s parents divorced soon afterward and sold the house at the beach. And that kiss became a core childhood memory—as much as riding his bike across the frozen bay or ski jumping off a snow-covered roof. Until many years later, when Renee and her then husband, Arthur, bought a summer home in Bay Harbor and their son, Matty, and his daughter, Dylan, became the best of friends.
Since Jake was a single father, Renee had helped with Dylan often over the years. Aside from feeding her many a meal while he worked the long summer shifts, she took it upon herself to teach her girly things—like how to shave her legs and use a tampon. For years, nearly every interaction between married Renee and Jake involved the kids.
You have been there for me and Dylan over the years in ways I could never repay.
Until about a year and a half ago, when Jake got a frantic phone call from Renee in the middle of the night. He ran over in his pajamas.
“It came from in there.” She pointed to her sunken bathtub and they both listened intently for the sound of the mad scratching that she had heard.
“It stopped,” she cried. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Living here in the off-season requires a certain amount of courage.”
“I wish you’d told me that before I decided to do it.”
“That’s OK. Call me whenever you need me. I can be brave for the both of us.”
The next night at 1 a.m. he was right back there, listening for the sound, again. And again, it stopped when he arrived. Truth was, he was pretty confident that he knew what she’d been hearing. There was most likely a raccoon, or a whole family of them, living below the house and sleeping in the under basin of her tub. But the truth also was he loved this knight-in-shining-armor/damsel-in-distress thing they had going on.
“How about this?” he suggested. “I’ll just come over at midnight tomorrow and we can sit and wait for it?”
“How about I make us a late dinner and you can stay till then?”
“Sounds good. What can I bring? I have a nice bottle of Sicilian red.”
“Perfect.”
The next night they sat on Renee’s bed and waited—and waited and waited—for the sound to come from the bathroom. While waiting, they finished off the bottle of wine, reminisced about the past, and confessed to how lonely they both felt without their kids in the house. Somehow, after a while, Renee was brave enough to voice the question that she had always wanted to ask.
“Do you remember when I kissed you on the beach?”
If I close my eyes right now, I can still picture that kiss.
“Like it was yesterday. That’s what happens when you play something over and over again in your head,” Jake bravely admitted. He may not have feared raccoons, but beautiful women were a different story.
They had both blushed at his surprisingly tender confession.
“You do? I always thought you’d forgotten. I barely remember it,” she said with a small pout.
“Maybe I can remind you,” he said, in possibly the coolest comeback of his life.
And they kissed.
She never heard the raccoon again, but Jake had slept over every night since, just in case.
Initially, Jake doubted that the woman in his arms could stay aloft on the pedestal he had placed her on, but his teenage infatuation soon evolved into adult love. He envied her wild combination of vulnerability and strength, the way she could quote all three Die Hard movies on call but would also tear up bingeing This Is Us . The way she took to the winter vibe on the beach, relishing the mahi-mahi sandwich at CJ’s like she was dining on paté at a Paris café, and the way she rolled over when he woke up in the morning and kissed him gently on the lips before rolling back over to sleep some more.
For his whole life, Jake had lived for being out on the water. The sea air filled his soul and helped him breathe easy. But now he breathed easiest on land, specifically the land that held the house that held the bedroom that held the bed where he laid his head every night next to his beloved, Renee.
You are my port in the storm, and I will be by your side for as long as we both shall live.
A tear fell from Jake’s eye onto the paper, smudging the page. He didn’t remember the last time he’d cried. Better to get it out now than during the ceremony.
He would read it over and over until it didn’t break him.