Chapter Two
T he gal in the white lace sundress was as sexy as I’d ever seen.
She had shoulder-length, sandy-blond 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 that I had.
“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 place mats, fluted champagne glasses, and candles. There were even little name cards.