“She’s fine,” he replied. “Remarried, too, by this point. She’s over it.”
“And you?”
Silence. Then, “Not quite there yet. Even though I did agree to take this road trip with him, to this wedding, and be a groomsman. It was supposed to be this big re-bonding experience.”
I dug a toe into the wet sand, wiggling it until it disappeared. “And how’s that going?”
“I’m out here, alone, in the dark. Or at least I was until you came along,” he replied. “You tell me.”
“Ethan!”
The voice was behind us, coming from the steps that led up to the hotel. When I turned, I saw a heavyset woman in a green metallic dress, her hair done in an updo, peering down at us. The boy beside me said, “Yeah?”
“You’re missing everything!” she called out. “Joe and Margy will be leaving soon!”
“Okay,” he replied. “Just a sec.”
Placated, she turned, adjusting her hair, then started back toward the party, her shadow stretching long down the stairs behind her. Ethan turned back to the water, a tired look on his face. “My aunt Didi. Who has kind of taken my estrangement from my dad personally.”
“Family is complicated,” I said.
“Exactly. Unless you’re...” He raised his eyebrows at me. “What’s your name?”
“Louna,” I said.
“Like the moon?”
“Like Louis and Natalie, young vegans in love, circa 1999.” Now I made a face.
“Wow,” he said, looking impressed. “I think this is a story I have to hear.”
I looked back at the steps, where Aunt Didi was now just a green blur in the distance. “Too bad you have to go back.”
“Yeah.” He glanced over as well. “Too bad.”
We stood there for a second, facing each other. His shirttails, now untucked, were ruffling in the wind. I’d never had this feeling before, that something big was about to happen, and there was nothing I had to do but wait for it. A beat. Then another. Finally, Ethan stepped back from me, away from the thrown brightness of the hotel and into the dimness of the beach beyond. The wind blew my hair, the straps of my shoes twisting around each other as he smiled at me, then gestured for me to join him there.
I didn’t even hesitate. So much of life is not being sure of anything. How I wished, later, I’d been able to savor them, those few steps and moments when for once, I just knew.
We walked for what felt like a long time, just talking. First about my mom and dad and their marriage in the woods with the chickens, and then how his parents imploded in the midst of a huge home renovation that was never completed. (“She wanted an exercise and yoga room, and he wanted a wine cellar. They ended up with a divorce. Nice, right?”) Hiscynicism, at least about this subject, was a comfort to me, and made it easy for me to tell him about my mother and William’s views on love and marriage and how, unfortunately or not, they’d been passed on to me.
“I don’tnotbelieve in love,” he told me, as we passed the last of the hotels and began to see houses up on the dunes. “I’m just not sure about marriage as an institution.”
“Maybe you’ll be the more barefoot, chicken-keeping, lifetime partner but no ring kind of person,” I suggested.
“Because that’s what happens to guys like me from New Jersey who play lacrosse and mow lawns.”
“Maybe it is.”
He laughed again, throwing his head back. You had to love—or okay, maybe just like—a person who could revel in the humor of something so fully. It made me want to laugh, too.
“I can get behind the idea of a good marriage,” I said, as we stepped around some abandoned beach chairs. “Like my best friend Jilly, her parents. They run a food truck company, have five kids between two and seventeen, and their lives are total chaos. But they can’t keep their hands off each other. I’ve never seen two people more in love.”
Ethan looked up at the sky. “When it works, it works, I guess.”
“That’s entirely too vague for me. I need to knowhowit works,” I said. “Preferably with diagrams and bullet points. I want a guarantee.”
“Wow. That’s a big ask,” he said.
