Being married to a sailor is not like being married to anyone else.
People don’t understand that. They think it’s romantic. And it is, sometimes. But mostly it’s lonely.
For the first fifteen years of our marriage, Martin was gone more than he was home. Three months at sea, one month at home. Sometimes four months at sea. Once, when he was a second mate on a tanker running to the Persian Gulf, he was gone for seven months straight.
I raised our son, David, mostly by myself. I took him to his first day of kindergarten alone. I sat in the emergency room alone the night he broke his arm falling off his bike. I taught him to tie his shoes and ride a bike and drive a car. Martin missed so many things. Birthdays. Christmases. School plays. The night David won the state spelling bee.
He hated missing them. I know he did. He’d call from whatever port he was in, on crackling ship-to-shore phones that cost a fortune by the minute, and he’d ask about everything. Every little detail.
“What word did he win on?”
“Catamaran.”
He was quiet on the line. Then he laughed so hard I had to hold the phone away from my ear.
“Of course he did,” he said. “Of course it was a boat.”
And he always sent postcards. Every port. Every single one. In forty-nine years, I don’t think he missed a single port. Lisbon. Singapore. Cape Town. Rio de Janeiro. Sydney. Hong Kong. Valparaíso. Reykjavik. I kept every one of them in shoeboxes in the hall closet. By the end, there were eleven shoeboxes.
They all said the same thing on the back, in one way or another.
Wish you were here.
And every time he came home, it was like falling in love all over again.
I’d hear his truck in the driveway, and my heart would start pounding like I was twenty-one. I’d run out the front door, and he’d drop his duffel bag on the lawn and pick me up and spin me around. Right there, in front of the neighbors. Every single time.
“Hello, mermaid,” he’d say into my hair. “Did you miss me?”
“Not even a little.”
“Liar.”
He always smelled like salt and diesel and sunshine. It took three days of laundry to get the smell out of his clothes. Sometimes I didn’t wash them right away. Sometimes, when he was gone, I’d take one of his old sweaters out of the closet and hold it against my face.
When he was home, he was completely home. He didn’t talk about work. He didn’t look at the ocean. He mowed the lawn and fixed the gutters and took David fishing at the pond behind the school. A pond. Not the ocean. For me.
And every Saturday night, no matter what, he took me dancing.
Not anywhere fancy. Usually just the VFW hall on Route 1, where a five-piece band played old songs for old people. But he’d put on his good shirt and I’d put on a dress, and he’d hold me close on that worn wooden floor and hum along to the music in my ear.
Our song was “Moon River.” Andy Williams. It was the fourth song we danced to at the Pier Pavilion, that first night. The band at the VFW knew it by heart. Whenever we walked in, the bandleader would wink at Martin and play it.
“Moon River, wider than a mile,” Martin would sing softly, off-key, with his cheek against mine. “I’m crossing you in style, someday.”
“You can’t sing,” I’d tell him.
“I know. But you love it anyway.”
“I do,” I’d say. “Heaven help me, I do.”
Over the years, Martin rose up through the ranks. Third mate. Second mate. Chief mate. Then, when he was forty-eight, his first command. A cargo ship running between Boston and northern Europe.
He called me from Rotterdam the night he took command.
“Evelyn,” he said. His voice was shaking. “I’m sitting in the captain’s chair. My chair. It’s got my name on the door.”
“I’m so proud of you.”
“I wish you could see it. I wish you were here.”
“I know.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Someday,” he said. “Someday you will be.”
When he was fifty-eight, a big cruise line recruited him. They wanted experienced captains with perfect safety records. Martin had never had a single serious incident in thirty-five years at sea. Not one.
He became captain of the Aurelia. A beautiful white cruise ship, twelve decks tall, carrying two thousand passengers. She sailed all over the world. The Mediterranean in summer. The Caribbean in winter. Alaska. Norway. The Greek islands. Once, a full world cruise. A hundred and twenty days, around the entire planet.
And every single time, he asked me to come.
“Come with me this time,” he’d say, packing his duffel bag. “Just one cruise. One week. The Caribbean. It’s calm there. Like a bathtub.”
“I don’t like bathtubs either.”
“The ship is huge, Evie. Twelve decks. You won’t even feel the water. You’ll forget you’re on the ocean.”
“I’ll never forget I’m on the ocean.”
“There’s a ballroom,” he said. “With a real orchestra. We could dance every night. I’d ask the band to play ‘Moon River.’”
That one almost got me. Almost.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t.”
He’d sigh. Then he’d smile. He always smiled.
“Well,” he’d say, kissing my forehead. “A sailor found himself a mermaid who only wants to stay on land. What’s a man to do?”
“Go to sea,” I’d say. “And come back to me.”
“Always,” he’d say. “Always.”
You have no idea how many times he asked. Hundreds. For twelve years. Every time he left for a voyage, he’d ask again. Every time, I said no.
I wasn’t proud of it. I wanted to say yes. I really did. I wanted to see the places on all those postcards. I wanted to dance with him in that ballroom.
But every time I thought about it, I saw Higgins Beach. Tommy’s head going under. The lifeguard running. The water closing over him like a door.
I couldn’t do it.
Martin never pushed. Never got angry. He just kept asking, patient as the tide.
“I’m a patient man,” he’d say. “You’ll come around.”
He turned seventy-two the winter before our fiftieth anniversary.
The cruise line had been gently suggesting he retire for a couple of years. He kept putting it off. He loved that ship too much. He loved his crew. He knew every single one of them by name. Eight hundred people. The waiters. The cooks. The engineers. The cabin stewards from the Philippines and India and Indonesia who sent money home to families they hadn’t seen in months. He knew all their kids’ names.
Then, in January, he came home from a Caribbean cruise and sat me down at the kitchen table.
He had an envelope in his hands. He slid it across to me.
“Open it,” he said.
Inside were two tickets. Two cruise tickets. For the Aurelia. A fourteen-day Mediterranean voyage. Barcelona. Marseille. Monaco. Florence. Rome. Santorini. Athens.
The dates were in June. The sailing included June eleventh.
Our fiftieth wedding anniversary.
I looked up at him. He was grinning like a little boy.
“Honey,” he said, “you’re not getting out of it this time.”
“Martin—”
“I mean it. I’m leaving the captain’s uniform behind. I’m not working this one. I’m a passenger. Just like you.” He reached across the table and took my hands. “You and I are going to see all these beautiful places. The ones on all those postcards. We’re going to enjoy the music and the delicious food. And we’re going to dance.”
“Martin, I can’t—”
“Fifty years, Evie,” he said softly. “Fifty years, I’ve been asking. And for fifty years, you’ve been the most patient, most wonderful wife a sailor could ever have. You waited for me through every storm. Every ocean. Every month alone.” His eyes were shining. “Let me show you what you’ve been waiting for. Just once. Please.”
I looked at those tickets for a long time.
I thought about eleven shoeboxes full of postcards. Wish you were here. Forty-nine years of wishing.
My knees were trembling. They were actually shaking under the table.
“Okay,” I whispered.
He stared at me. “What?”
“Okay. I’ll go.”
Martin let out a whoop so loud that the neighbor’s dog started barking. He jumped up, knocked over his chair, came around the table, and picked me up and spun me around the kitchen like I was twenty-one again.
“She said yes!” he shouted at the ceiling. “Fifty years, and the mermaid finally said yes!”
I was laughing and crying at the same time.
I was terrified. I was so terrified I could barely breathe.
But I was happy. So happy that Martin and I would celebrate fifty years of marriage on a wonderful cruise. Together. Finally.
But that never happened.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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