Message in a Bottle - Nicholas Sparks [125]
After a honeymoon in the Bahamas, she started her teaching job at a local elementary school, but when Jared came along the following summer, she took a leave of absence. Lynn followed eighteen months later and the leave of absence became permanent. By then, Frank had managed to borrow enough money to open his own practice and buy a small starter house in Durham. Those were lean years; Frank wanted to succeed on his own and refused to accept offers of help from either family. Back then, after paying the bills, they were lucky if they had enough money left over to rent a movie on the weekend. Dinners out were rare, and when their car died, Amanda found herself stranded in the house for a month, until they could afford to get it fixed. They slept with extra blankets on the bed to keep the heating bills down. As stressful and exhausting as those years had sometimes been, when she thought back on her life, she knew they’d been some of the happiest years of their marriage.
Frank’s practice grew steadily, and in many respects, their lives settled into a predictable pattern. Frank worked while she took care of the house and kids, and a third child, Bea, followed just as they sold their starter house and moved into the larger one they had built in a more established area of town. After that, things got even busier. Frank’s practice began to flourish while she shuttled Jared to and from school and brought Lynn to parks and playdates, with Bea strapped in a car seat between them. It was during those years that Amanda began to revisit her plans to attend graduate school; she took the time to look into a couple of master’s programs, thinking she might enroll when Bea started kindergarten. But when Bea died, her ambitions faltered. Quietly, she set aside her GRE exam books and stowed her application forms in a desk drawer.
Her surprise pregnancy with Annette cemented her decision not to go back to school. Instead, if anything, it awakened a renewed commitment in her to focus on rebuilding their family life, and she threw herself into the kids’ activities and routines with single-minded passion, if only to keep the grief at bay. As the years passed and memories of their baby sister began to fade, Jared and Lynn slowly regained a sense of normalcy, and she was grateful for that. Bright-spirited Annette brought a new kind of joy into their home, and every now and then, Amanda could almost pretend that they were a complete and loving family, untouched by tragedy.
She had a hard time pretending the same about her marriage.
She wasn’t under the illusion that marriage was a relationship characterized by endless bliss and romance. Throw any two people together, add the inevitable ups and downs, give the mixture a vigorous stir, and a few stormy arguments would be inevitable, no matter how much the couple loved each other. Time, too, brought with it other challenges. Comfort and familiarity were wonderful, but they also dulled passion and excitement. Predictability and habit made surprises almost impossible. There were no new stories left to tell, they could often finish each other’s sentences, and both she and Frank had reached the point where a single glance was filled with enough meaning to make words largely superfluous. But losing Bea had changed them. For her, it spurred a passionate commitment to her work at the hospital; for Frank, on the other hand, it changed him from someone who drank occasionally into a full-blown alcoholic.
She knew the distinction and she wasn’t a prude about drinking. There’d been several occasions in college when she’d had one too many at a party, and she still enjoyed a glass of wine with dinner. Sometimes, she might even follow that with a second glass, but that almost always sufficed. But for Frank, what started as a way to numb the pain had morphed into something he could no longer control.
Looking back, she sometimes