The Best of Me - Nicholas Sparks [14]
“That Tuck Hostetler’s still a wizard with cars, but he’s sure gone crazy as a loon,” one of them said, and laughed, shaking his head. “Talking to his dead wife is one thing, but swearing that he can hear her answer is another.”
The old man’s friend snorted. “He was always an odd one, that’s for sure.”
It sounded nothing like the Tuck she’d known, and after paying for her coffee, she got into her car and retraced the almost forgotten dirt drive that led to his house. They ended up spending the afternoon sitting in rockers on his collapsing front porch, and since then she’d made a habit of dropping by whenever she was in town. At first it was once or twice a year—she couldn’t handle visiting her mother any more than that—but lately she’d visited Oriental and Tuck even when her mother was out of town. More often than not, she cooked dinner for him as well. Tuck was getting on in years, and though she liked to tell herself that she was simply checking in on an old man, both of them knew the real reason she kept coming back.
The men in the diner had been right, in a way. Tuck had changed. He wasn’t the mostly silent and mysterious, sometimes gruff figure she remembered, but he wasn’t crazy, either. He knew the difference between fantasy and reality, and he knew his wife had died long ago. But Tuck, she eventually decided, had the ability to make something real simply by wishing it into existence. At least it was real for him. When she’d finally asked him about his “conversations” with his dead wife, he’d told her matter-of-factly that Clara was still around and always would be. Not only did they talk, he confessed, but he saw her as well.
“Are you’re saying she’s a ghost?” she asked.
“No,” he answered. “I’m just sayin’ she don’t want me to be alone.”
“Is she here now?”
Tuck peered over his shoulder. “Don’t see her, but I can hear her puttering around inside the house.”
Amanda listened but heard nothing other than the squeak of the rockers on the floorboards. “Was she around… back then? When I knew you before?”
He drew a long breath, and when he spoke, his voice sounded weary. “No. But I wasn’t trying to see her then.”
There was something undeniably touching, almost romantic, about his conviction that they loved each other enough to have found a way to stay together, even after she was gone. Who wouldn’t have found that romantic? Everyone wanted to believe that endless love was possible. She’d believed in it once, too, back when she was eighteen. But she knew that love was messy, just like life. It took turns that people couldn’t foresee or even understand, leaving a long trail of regret in its wake. And almost always, those regrets led to the kinds of what if questions that could never be answered. What if Bea hadn’t died? What if Frank hadn’t become an alcoholic? What if she’d married her one true love? Would she even recognize the woman who now looked back at her in the mirror?
Leaning against the car, she wondered what Tuck would have made of her musings. Tuck, who ate eggs and grits at Irvin’s every morning and dropped dry-roasted peanuts into the glasses of Pepsi that he drank; Tuck, who’d lived in the same house for almost seventy years and had left the state only once, when he’d been called to serve the country in World War II. Tuck, who listened to the radio or phonograph instead of watching television, because that’s what he’d always done. Unlike her, Tuck seemed to embrace the role that the world had laid out for him. She recognized that there was probably wisdom in that kind of unflinching acceptance, even if she’d never be able to achieve it.
Of course, Tuck had Clara, and maybe that had something to do with it. They’d married at seventeen and had spent forty-two years together, and as Tuck talked to Amanda, she’d gradually learned the story of their lives. In a quiet voice, he’d told her about Clara’s three miscarriages, the last of which came with serious complications. According