Nights in Rodanthe - Nicholas Sparks [13]
“You might need this,” she said.
“Mom?”
Adrienne slid the glass across the table.
“Do you remember when I went to Rodanthe? When Jean asked if I could watch the Inn?”
It took a moment before it clicked.
“Back when I was in high school, you mean?”
“Yes.”
When Adrienne began again, Amanda found herself reaching for her wine, wondering what this was all about.
Five
Standing near the railing on the back porch of the Inn on a gloomy Thursday afternoon, Adrienne let the coffee cup warm her hands as she stared at the ocean, noting that it was rougher than it had been an hour earlier. The water had taken on the color of iron, like the hull of an old battleship, and she could see tiny whitecaps stretching to the horizon.
Part of her wished she hadn’t come. She was watching the Inn for a friend, and she’d hoped it would be a respite of sorts, but now it seemed like a mistake. First, the weather wasn’t going to cooperate—all day, the radio had been warning of the big nor’easter heading this way—and she wasn’t looking forward to the possibility of losing power or having to hole up inside for a couple of days. But more than that, despite the angry skies, the beach brought back memories of too many family vacations, blissful days when she’d been content with the world.
For a long time, she’d considered herself lucky. She’d met Jack as a student; he was in his first year of law school. They were considered a perfect couple back then—he was tall and thin, with curly black hair; she was a blue-eyed brunette a few sizes smaller than she was now. Their wedding photo had been prominently displayed in the living room of their home, right above the fireplace. They had their first child when she was twenty-eight and had two more in the next three years. She, like so many other women, had trouble losing all the weight she’d gained, but she worked at it, and though she never approached what she had once been, compared to most of the women her age with children, she thought she was doing okay.
And she was happy. She loved to cook, she kept the house clean, they went to church as a family, and she did her best to maintain an active social life for her and Jack. When the kids started going to school, she volunteered to help in their classes, attended PTA meetings, worked in their Sunday school, and was the first to volunteer when rides were needed for field trips. She sat through hours of piano recitals, school plays, baseball and football games, she taught each of the children to swim, and she laughed aloud at the expressions on their faces the first time they walked through the gates of Disney World. On her fortieth birthday, Jack had thrown a surprise party for her at the country club, and nearly two hundred people showed up. It was an evening filled with laughter and high spirits, but later, after they got home, she noticed that Jack didn’t watch her as she undressed before getting into bed. Instead, he turned out the lights, and though she knew he couldn’t fall asleep that quickly, he pretended he had.
Looking back, she knew it should have tipped her off that all was not as it seemed, but with three children and a husband who left the child rearing up to her, she was too busy to ponder it. Besides, she neither expected nor believed that the passion between them would never go through down periods. She’d been married long enough to know better. She assumed it would return as it always had, and she wasn’t worried about it. But it didn’t. By forty-one, she’d become concerned about their relationship and had started perusing the self-help section of the bookstore, looking for titles that might advise her on how to improve their marriage, and she sometimes found herself looking forward to the future when things might slow down. She imagined what it would be like to be a grandmother or what she and Jack might do when they had the time to enjoy each other’s company as a couple again. Maybe then, she thought, things would