I wanted to yell bye to Wagner, but I knew better. I would embarrass him in front of his cool summer friends, and I had spent too much money on tall socks (the short ones were out),New Balances (the only good shoe brand this summer), and Under Armour everything else (extra points for a smaller, understated logo) to risk mortifying him now.
As I started across the street toward the clubhouse and pool, Andrew called, “I’m serious. I’m going to track you down later today.” I glanced back to see him say, more quietly, “I’m impossible to resist.”
I laughed and shook my head—but I had a feeling he was right.
Marcy was standing on the sidewalk waiting for me in a linen cover-up with a deep V, the sleeves casually rolled. I could just make out the outline of a teeny bikini underneath.
I threw my hands up as if to say,Sonowyou decide to show up?
“What?” She looked truly mystified.
“I felt like I was very specific about meeting here at nine a.m.,” I teased.
“You said ten,” Marcy said. Then she paused. “Or maybe you said nine, but I knew I would never be up that early so I decided to hear ten.…”
I laughed and wondered what it would be like to be that carefree. Marcy was thirty-one, only three years younger than I was, but our lives were so different. She had never been married, had no children, and lived footloose and fancy-free year-round in the waterfront home beside mine that her parents, who lived in Maine, had bought for investment purposes and visited only once a year.
I had been married for nine years, had an eight-year-old son, and had bought my second home in Cape Carolina when I landed the largest client of my career at ClickMarket.Mycompany. I was mad all over again.
Marcy pointed toward the tennis courts. “What the hell was that all about?” she asked.
I rolled my eyes, and we made our way toward the beach for one of the long walks that comprised our summer exercise routine. There was nothing I looked forward to more than the sand under my feet, the surf splashing around my ankles. “Wagner’s tennis pro asked me out for a drink, but I think he must have been kidding. You know, doing it for effect because Brooke was standing there being Brooke.”
Marcy stopped, her hand frozen to the top of the pool gate. “Wait. Brooke was standing there?”
I smiled. “Yeah. It was kind of awesome.”
“Gray, the hot tennis pro wants to date you. When God gives, you take. You take and you run and you don’t look back.”
I smiled. I knew logically that my thirty-fifth birthday wouldn’t magically make me old. But I think everyone has a scary age, an age by which they think they are supposed to have it all figured out. For me, it was always thirty-five. And it wasn’t scary for a long, long time because I had it all together. And now, only months before my scary age, my perfectly choreographed life had fallen apart. I was back at square one. Barring a miracle, it didn’t seem like I was going to have it all back together by October.
We walked through the pool deck exchanging waves with the women already lounging there, watching their kids train for swim team. As our feet hit the warm sand, she said, “But don’t you remember it?”
“Remember what?”
“Dating a twenty-five-year-old,” Marcy said wistfully.
I raised my eyebrows at her.
“Oh, right,” she said. “You haven’t been on a date in a hundred years. How do I always forget that?”
I smirked.
“Seedy bars and karaoke, beer pong tournaments and sleeping on the beach just because you can. Meeting new people, kissing without the expectation of anything more, your stomach flip-flopping over whether he’ll text you the next day.…”
“So, not nice dinners followed by20/20? No neatly hanging your clothes up in the closet and lining your shoes up by the bed before slipping between the pressed sheets trying not to get them wrinkled?”
We both laughed.
To be honest, I had kind of enjoyed the nice dinners and the20/20. I thought my seventh year of marriage was amazing, blissful even. Wagner was old enough that having a child wasn’t super stressful anymore. Greg was making money, which made him feel like I wasn’t the sole breadwinner. ClickMarket was up 20 percent in the first quarter, and I felt like my meticulously edited staff was the dream team. Our friends were fun. The living was easy.
And then the storm broke. Seven years and eight monthsinto the marriage, and he didn’t love me anymore. They call it the seven-year itch for a reason.
I looked down at my pedicured but unpolished toes, nauseated at the mere thought of dipping them back into the dating pool. I sighed. The cellulite-blasting exercises in my Self.com e-mail that morning ran through my mind. “It has only been sixteen months. That’s not that long.”
“Sixteen months?” Marcy put her finger in her ear and wiggled it around as though she couldn’t possibly be hearing this properly. “Sixteenmonths? I’ve heard after a year you go into spontaneous menopause. Your reproductive organs give up and you get chin hair and it’s over.”
I couldn’t help but laugh, which was something Marcy had been good for since the day we met. The day my now almost ex-husband, Greg, and I closed on our beach house five years ago, Marcy came by with a measuring cup in her hand.
