The Best of Me - Nicholas Sparks [122]
Early last summer, he’d signed up for an economics class at the local community college, and to Amanda and Frank’s enormous pride and relief he announced soon thereafter that he’d decided to re-enroll full-time at Davidson in the fall. Later that same week he’d mentioned over dinner, in an almost offhand way, that he’d read about a man who’d lived thirty-one years after his heart transplant. Since medicine was improving every year, he figured he’d be able to live even longer.
Once he was back in school, his spirits continued to lift. After consulting with his doctors, he took up running, working up to the point where he now ran six miles a day. He started going to the gym three or four times a week, gradually regaining the physique he’d once had. Fascinated by the course he had taken in the summer, he decided to focus on economics when he returned to Davidson. Within weeks of returning to school, he met another prospective economics major, a girl named Lauren. The two of them had fallen head over heels in love, and they’d even begun to talk about getting married after they graduated. For the past two weeks, they’d been on a mission trip to Haiti, sponsored by her church.
Aside from diligently taking his medications and abstaining from alcohol, Jared, for the most part, now lived the life of an ordinary twenty-one-year-old. Even so, he didn’t begrudge his mother’s desire to bake him a cake to celebrate the transplant. After two years, he’d finally reached the point where, despite everything, he considered himself lucky.
There was, however, a recent twist in Jared’s thinking that Amanda wasn’t sure how to handle. A few evenings ago, while she’d been loading dishes into the dishwasher, Jared had joined her in the kitchen, stopping to lean against the counter.
“Hey, Mom? Are you going to do that charity thing for Duke this fall?”
In the past, he’d always referred to her fund-raising luncheons as things. For obvious reasons, since the accident, she hadn’t hosted the event, nor had she been volunteering at the hospital. Amanda nodded. “Yes. They asked me to take over as the chairperson again.”
“Because they botched it the last couple of years without you, right? That’s what Lauren’s mom said.”
“They didn’t botch the events. They just didn’t go as well as planned.”
“I’m glad you’re doing it again. For Bea, I mean.”
She smiled. “Me, too.”
“The hospital likes it, too, right? Because you’re raising money?”
She reached for a towel and dried her hands, studying him. “Why are you suddenly so interested?”
Jared absently scratched at his scar through his T-shirt. “I was hoping that you could use your contacts at the hospital to find something out for me,” he said. “It’s something I’ve been wondering about.”
With the cake cooling on the counter, Amanda stepped out onto the back porch and inspected the lawn. Despite the automatic sprinklers that Frank had installed last year, the grass was dying in spots as the roots withered away. Before he’d gone to work this morning, she’d seen him standing over one of the dull brown patches, his face grim. In the past couple of years, Frank had become fanatical about the lawn. Unlike most of the neighbors, Frank insisted on doing his own mowing, telling anyone who asked that it helped him relax after a day spent filling cavities and shaping crowns at the office. Though she supposed there was some truth in that, there was also something compulsive about his habits. Rain or shine, he mowed every other day, making checkerboard patterns in the lawn.
Despite her initial skepticism, Frank hadn’t had a single beer or even a sip of wine since the day of the accident. At the hospital, he’d sworn he was stopping for good, and to his