Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [32]
Our house—another rental, of course—had four bedrooms, an almost unfathomable luxury in our young minds, yet I couldn’t help but notice that my father had claimed one of the bedrooms as his office. With the master bedroom obviously taken, that left two bedrooms for the three of us kids, and my mom quickly announced that my sister would be the one to have her own room, the reason being, “She’s a girl.”
Because it was so late in the first term, our parents held us out of school until after the new year, when the new term started. My parents also bought a dog, a Doberman pinscher named Brandy, and as we always did in new places, my brother and I set out to explore, this time with our dog in tow. Our street dead-ended a few houses up, bordering on what seemed like wilderness, and our first instinct was to “learn the terrain.” Nowadays, Fair Oaks is almost completely developed, but back then, there were wide-open fields and hills, an abandoned house, and climbing trees—everything young boys need to have fun. Even better, we weren’t the only kids our age on the street. Almost all of our neighbors had led a nomadic lifestyle, similar to ours, so it wasn’t as if we were the only new kids on the block. In the afternoons, they would play on the street outside, and gradually my brother and I got to know them. And, as had happened in Nebraska, my brother soon began leaving me behind, preferring the company of his newfound friends.
Despite the fact that my parents had reunited, they continued to lead largely separate lives. My mom, who had taken another job as an optometrist’s assistant, would rise with us and get us off to school while my father slept; after she got off work, she’d come home to an empty house two or three evenings a week, since my father sometimes had to teach at night. On those evenings he didn’t have to teach, my dad would either grade papers and exams, or read, hoping to keep abreast in his chosen field of study. Like all professors, he was also pressed to publish, and he could frequently be heard typing in his office. Occasionally, my mom and dad would bump into each other in the kitchen, but in general they seemed to spend little time together.
While it would be easy to surmise that they didn’t enjoy each other’s company—neither one seemed to go out of the way to visit with the other, after all—they had a comfort-able relationship. They joked and laughed at the kitchen table over dinner; I sometimes even caught my dad nuzzling the back of my mom’s neck when they didn’t realize I was watching. While they weren’t overtly affectionate most of the time, they weren’t needy, possessive, or jealous either. I never heard either of them say something negative about the other, and I seldom heard them argue anymore. They’d put the past behind them more successfully than most, and seemed to be exactly what the other one needed.
To that point, they’d lived a life of sacrifice, and I think that united them as well. Neither, after all, was living the life of their dreams. My dad wanted a life with less pressure and fewer financial worries; while he didn’t desire great wealth, he was frequently discouraged by the daily struggle of keeping the family afloat. Nor could he envision any change in the future, and that weighed on him as well. My mom was no different. Once I found her crying in the bedroom, and the discovery terrified me. It was so unlike her that I began to tear up as well, and my mom pulled me close.
“I was just thinking how nice it would be to live in the country with horses like I did when I was little,” she said. “Maybe with a little house, where we could go riding on the weekends . . . it would just be so wonderful. I wish we would have been able to