The Best of Me - Nicholas Sparks [11]
Some might call it a midlife crisis, but she wasn’t sure that was exactly it. It wasn’t as though she felt the need to buy a sports car or visit a plastic surgeon or run off to some island in the Caribbean. Nor was it about being bored; Lord knows, the kids and the hospital kept her busy enough. Instead, it had more to do with the sense that somehow she’d lost sight of the person she’d once meant to be, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever have the opportunity to find that person again.
For a long time, she’d considered herself lucky, and Frank had been a big part of that. They’d met at a fraternity party during her sophomore year at Duke. Despite the chaos of the party, they’d somehow managed to find a quiet corner where they’d talked until the early hours of the morning. Two years older than her, he was serious and intelligent, and even on that first night she knew he’d end up being successful at whatever he chose to do. It was enough to get things started. He went off to dental school at Chapel Hill the following August, but they continued to date for the next two years. An engagement was a foregone conclusion, and in July 1989, only a few weeks after she’d finished her degree, they were married.
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. 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 in order to keep the heating bills down. As stressful and exhausting as those years had sometimes been, when she thought back on her life, she also 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 even 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 a single-minded passion, if only to keep the grief at bay. As the years passed and memories of their