Nights in Rodanthe - Nicholas Sparks [51]
The car turned as it reached the highway, and he pressed his hand to the glass one last time. Adrienne raised her hand, watching the car roll forward, away from Rodanthe, away from her.
She stood in the drive as the car grew smaller in the distance and the noise of the engine faded away. Then, a moment later, he was gone, as if he’d never been there at all.
The morning was crisp, blue skies with puffs of white. A flock of terns flew overhead. Purple and yellow pansies had opened their petals to the sun. Adrienne turned and made her way toward the door.
Inside, it looked the same as the day she’d arrived. Nothing was out of place. He’d cleaned the fireplace yesterday and stacked new cords of wood beside it; the rockers had been put back into their original position. The front desk looked orderly, with every key back in its place.
But the smell remained. The smell of their breakfast together, the smell of aftershave, the smell of him, lingering on her hands and on her face and on her clothes.
It was too much for Adrienne, and the noises of the Inn at Rodanthe were no longer what they had once been. No longer were there echoes of quiet conversations, or the sound of water rushing through the pipes, or the rhythm of footfalls as he moved about in his room. Gone was the roar of waves and the persistent drumming of the storm, the crackling of the fire. Instead, the Inn was filled with the sounds of a woman who wanted only to be comforted by the man she loved, a woman who could do nothing else but cry.
Sixteen
Rocky Mount, 2002
Adrienne had finished her story, and her throat was dry. Despite the breezy effects of a single glass of wine, she could feel the ache in her back from sitting in one position too long. She shifted in her chair, felt a tinge of pain, and recognized it as the beginnings of arthritis. When she’d mentioned it to her physician, he’d made her sit on the table in a room that smelled of ammonia. He’d raised her arms and asked her to bend her knees, then gave her a prescription that she’d never bothered to fill. It wasn’t that serious yet, she told herself; besides, she had a theory that once she started taking pills for one ailment, more pills would soon follow for everything else that doomed people of her age. Soon, they’d be coming in the color of rainbows, some taken in the morning, others at night, some with food and some without, and she’d need to tape up a chart on the inside of her medicine cabinet to keep them straight. It was more bother than it was worth.
Amanda was sitting with her head bowed. Adrienne watched her, knowing the questions would come. They were inevitable, but she hoped they wouldn’t come immediately. She needed time to collect her thoughts, so she could finish what she’d started.
She was glad Amanda had agreed to meet her here, at the house. She’d lived here for over thirty years, and it was home to her, even more than the place she’d lived as a child. Granted, some of the doors hung crookedly, the carpet was worn paper thin in the hallway, and the colors of the bathroom tiles had been out of style for years, but there was something reassuring about knowing that she could find camping gear in the far left corner of the attic or that the heat pump would trip the fuse the first time it was used in the winter. This place had habits; so did she, and over the years, she supposed they’d meshed in such a way as to make her life more predictable and oddly comforting.
It was the same in the kitchen. Both Matt and Dan had been offering to have it remodeled for the last couple of years, and for her birthday they’d arranged to have a contractor come through to look the place over. He’d tapped on doors, jabbed his screwdriver in the corners of the cracking counters, turned the switches on and off, and whistled under his breath when he saw the ancient range she still used to cook with. In the end, he’d recommended she replace just about everything, then dropped