Edgar Alonzo was moving in for a cheek-to-cheek moment with Beatriz Rivera when he got his first indication that they weren’t going to see eye to eye. The two were at his cousin’s birthday party in January 2014, and she had agreed to dance with him. He suggested she take her heels off. She said, “If you can’t handle tall women, you shouldn’t ask them to dance.”
In many ways, Ms. Rivera, 50, was all wrong for Mr. Alonzo, 43. A recent breakup with a longtime girlfriend had left him playing the field, but Mr. Alonzo eventually wanted to marry and raise a child. He would soon find out that Ms. Rivera was in the midst of negotiating a divorce (one that wouldn’t be final until 2015), and that she had already raised a daughter, who was 23-years-old at the time.
That night, though, all he knew was that she’d been peevish about his shoe suggestion. Mr. Alonzo asked for her number anyway. “Beatriz is truly the kind of person who lights up whatever room she’s in,” he said, adding that he found her easy to talk to, too.
Despite their awkward moment on the dance floor, Ms. Rivera left the party energized by his interest. “Edgar made me feel like I was in high school again,” she said. “We talked so much, and he couldn’t believe my age. He told me how young I looked.” A week later, she and Mr. Alonzo had their first date at the Trappist, a now-closed bar in Oakland, Calif.
Mr. Alonzo was at this point living with his parents, Anna and Jose Alonzo, in San Pablo, Calif., after moving out of the place he had shared with his former girlfriend. His parents and grandmother, Lidia Courtade, immigrated to California from El Salvador in the 1960s. A graduate of St. Mary’s College of California, he was then working as a case manager for Genentech, a biotech firm.
Ms. Rivera was living in Berkeley, Calif., and teaching middle school Spanish at Park Day School in Oakland, where her supervisor was Lizette Dolan, Mr. Alonzo’s cousin at whose birthday party the two met.
A graduate of San Francisco State University, Ms. Rivera was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and moved to Oakland with her mother, Martha Rivera, at age 3. She grew up perfecting recipes for mole and Christmas tamales and found a passion for education, despite her own severe dyslexia; she now teaches Spanish at Jewish Community High School of the Bay in San Francisco.
Mr. Alonzo found a pleasing symmetry in their cultures. “They’re similar because El Salvador is a tiny country, so we listen to Mexican music, eat Mexican food and root for Mexico in World Cup soccer,” he said.
The two began to fall in love that spring as they hiked around Berkeley and Oakland and talked nightly on the phone. When Mr. Alonzo was accepted to an M.B.A. program at St. Mary’s College of California in the summer of 2014, there was only one person he wanted to celebrate with.
“As soon as I found out I got in, I called her,” Mr. Alonzo said, and he and Ms. Rivera met for beer and pizza at Jupiter in Berkeley. Until then, their dates had ended with a simple good night. But that evening, “She took me home,” he said. “Oh my God, it was one of the best days of my life.”
In August 2014, Mr. Alonzo, who is now a product strategist for Blue Shield of California, moved into Ms. Rivera’s duplex in Berkeley. For two years, while he worked and earned his degree, the couple got to know each other’s inner circle. Mr. Alonzo’s mother and grandmother fell for Ms. Rivera’s personality much the way he did. “They’re not the most trusting people, but they loved Bea,” he said.
Ms. Rivera’s daughter, Janette Calderon-Rivera, now 29, was slower to embrace Mr. Alonzo. “She never really approved of the relationship” at first, Ms. Rivera said. “She was hoping I would date someone older.” But when she saw how happy Mr. Alonzo made Ms. Rivera, Ms. Calderon-Rivera eventually grew to accept his role in her mother’s life.
That Ms. Rivera had already experienced marriage and motherhood before the couple met remained harder to accept for Mr. Alonzo, so much so that he broke up with her in September 2016.
“I was struggling with all these things I had in my mind about wanting a kid,” he said. But Ms. Rivera knew she couldn’t meet him halfway. “Edgar wanted to have the experience of having a family with someone who hadn’t already been married and had a child. We were just in two different places,” she said.
When he moved back in with his parents, Ms. Rivera crumbled. “All my friends were worried about me,” she said. Tristen Taylor, who has known Ms. Rivera since their daughters were preschoolers together, was one of them.
“I thought, I can’t ever see her hurt like that again,” Ms. Taylor said. Mr. Alonzo’s grandmother and mother felt that way, too, and started making sympathy calls to Ms. Rivera when Mr. Alonzo was out of earshot.
“His grandma was a firecracker,” Ms. Rivera said. “She came and picked me up one day in her Jeep — she always had rap music blasting — and she drove me around telling me all her experiences of heartbreak. She wanted me to know she understood, and that she loved me separately.”
Within a couple of months, Mr. Alonzo knew he had made a mistake. “I was feeling a void I had never experienced before,” he said. “It was like, if I had a child without her in my life, what was the point?” He approached Ms. Rivera to ask about her taking him back, and they began to rebuild their relationship. By then, his grandmother’s health was fading. In April 2019, she died of liver cancer, at age 78.
“We were with her when she passed,” Ms. Rivera said. “She had asked me, ‘If Edgar asks you to marry him, you’ll say yes, right?’” She promised she would. A month later, on a hike through the Muir Woods National Monument on May 24, he proposed. When Ms. Rivera said yes, “I was ugly crying,” she said. “Not cute crying at all. I was so happy.”
The following year came the pandemic. First it wrecked their plans for a September 2020 wedding with 200 guests at the Berkeley Rose Garden, a public park in Berkeley. Once they regrouped and scheduled an intimate ceremony at San Francisco City Hall on Oct. 1, 2021, rumors that bigger venues might reopen were circulating, so they scrapped that idea.
After they had settled on a third date of Nov. 20, 2021, and had put down a deposit for a celebration at Stern Grove park in San Francisco, Ms. Rivera got a call from a colleague.
“She said, ‘I heard about the water main break at Stern Grove,’” recalled Ms. Rivera, who was yet unaware. “I hope it doesn’t affect your wedding.’” It did. That wedding, too, was called off. “It was a catastrophe,” Ms. Rivera said.
The Stern Grove fiasco happened weeks before Ms. Rivera’s 50th birthday in September 2021. “She was so sad,” Mr. Alonzo said. To cheer her up, he went looking for a special place to celebrate her birthday, and found what he called a charming little bar with a patio, Acme Bar & Company, in Berkeley.
When its owner, Jennifer Siedman, heard about their struggles to get a wedding off the ground, she offered to host the reception after their ceremony, which they had rescheduled to take place at their original venue, the Berkeley Rose Garden, on Nov. 20. “We were so emotionally exhausted, and she told us she’d do everything we wanted and stay within our budget,” Ms. Rivera said. “She made it seem like she really cared.”
At the ceremony, Ms. Rivera, in a long white gown with a halter top and sweetheart neckline, walked down the garden’s tiered steps alone, holding a bright bouquet with a white rose tucked behind her ear. A hundred vaccinated guests stood to watch as Ms. Rivera’s daughter, her maid of honor, met her at an altar overlooking a lush thicket of rosebushes, then kissed the bride and Mr. Alonzo, in a blue suit, for good luck.
Before Frank Kennamer, a longtime friend and Universal Life Church minister, the couple read handwritten vows. “Thank you for seeing me, for loving me, for enhancing me,” Ms. Rivera told Mr. Alonzo. “I love you.” Mr. Alonzo thanked Ms. Rivera for dancing with him at his cousin’s birthday party in 2014. “I feel lucky to be your partner every day,” he said. “I feel lucky to look at you.”
On This Day
When Nov. 20, 2021
Where Berkeley Rose Garden, Berkeley, Calif.
Tacos and Cake At the reception, guests dined on birria tacos catered by the La Santa Torta taco truck and a tiered carrot cake with cream cheese frosting made by Tamara Durley, a friend of the couple.
Dress Fiasco Ms. Rivera’s wedding dress was hand embroidered in Mexico; she ordered it in 2019 just after Mr. Alonzo proposed. Because of the pandemic, she wasn’t able to fly to Mexico for in-person alterations until the summer of 2021. By then, the dress didn’t fit. After more alterations in Mexico and a month of waiting, the dress arrived in California. It still didn’t fit. Weeks before the ceremony, Veda Ambeau, a seamstress and the owner of Shirley’s Designs & Alterations in Oakland, came to the rescue and completed the final adjustments.
When it Rains Ahead of her nuptials, Ms. Rivera celebrated her daughter’s engagement: Ms. Calderon-Rivera’s fiancé proposed on July 24. They have not yet set a wedding date.
