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 rec-ognized it as the beginnings of arthritis. When she’d men-tioned 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 in-side 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 imme-diately. 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 car-pet 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 con-tractor 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 off an esti-mate and a list of references. Though Adrienne knew her sons had meant well, she told them that they’d be better off saving the money for something they needed for their own families.

Besides, she liked the old kitchen as it was. Updating it would change its character, and she liked the memories forged here. It was here, after all, that they’d spent most of their time together as a family, both before and after Jack had moved out. The kids had done their homework at the table where she now sat; for years, the only phone in the house hung on the wall, and she could still remember those times when she’d seen the cord wedged between the back door and the frame as one of the kids tried his or her best for a bit of privacy by standing on the porch. On the shelf supports in the pantry were the penciled markings that showed how fast and tall the children had grown over the years, and she couldn’t imagine wanting to get rid of that for something new and improved, no matter how fancy it was. Unlike the living room, where the television contin-ually blared, or the bedrooms where everyone retreated to be alone, this was the one place everyone had come to talk and to listen, to learn and to teach, to laugh and to cry. This was the place where their home was what it was sup-posed to be; this was the place where Adrienne had always felt most content.

And this was the place where Amanda would learn who her mother really was.

Adrienne drank the last of her wine and pushed the glass aside. The rain had stopped now, but the drops remaining on the window seemed to bend the light in such a way as to make the world outside into something different, a place she couldn’t quite recognize. This didn’t surprise her; as she’d grown older, she’d found that as her thoughts drifted to the past, everything around her always seemed to change. Tonight, as she told her story, she felt as if the in-tervening years had been reversed, and though it was a ridiculous notion, she wondered if her daughter had no-ticed a newfound youthfulness about her.

No, she decided, she almost certainly hadn’t, but that was a product of Amanda’s age. Amanda could no more conceive of being sixty than she could of being a man, and Adrienne sometimes wondered when Amanda would real-ize that for the most part, people weren’t all that different. Young and old, male or female, pretty much everyone she knew wanted the same things: They wanted to feel peace in their hearts, they wanted a life without turmoil, they wanted to be happy. The difference, Adrienne thought, was that most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future, while most older peo-ple believed that they lay in the past.

It was true for her as well, at least partly, but as wonder-ful as the past had been, she refused to allow herself to re-main lost in it the way many of her friends had. The past wasn’t merely a garden of roses and sunshine; the past held its share of heartbreak as well. She had felt that way about Jack’s effects on her life when she’d first arrived at the Inn, and she felt that way about Paul Flanner now.

Tonight, she would cry, but as she’d promised herself every day since he’d left Rodanthe, she would go on. She was a survivor, as her father had told her many times, and though there was a certain satisfaction to that knowledge, it didn’t erase the pain or regrets.

Nowadays, she tried to focus on those things that brought her joy. She loved to watch the grandchildren as they discovered the world, she loved to visit with friends and find out what was happening in their lives, she had even come to enjoy the days she spent working in the li-brary.

The work wasn’t hard—she now worked in the special reference section, where books couldn’t be checked out— and because hours might pass before she was needed for something, it offered her the opportunity to watch people who pushed through the glassed entryway of the building. She’d developed a fondness for that over the years. As peo-ple sat at the tables or in the chairs in the quiet rooms, she found it impossible not to try to imagine their lives. She would try to figure out if a person was married or what she did for a living, where in town she lived, or what books might interest her, and occasionally, she would have the chance to find out whether she’d been right. The person might come to her for help in finding a particular book, and she’d strike up a friendly conversation. More often than not, she’d end up being fairly close in her guesses and would wonder how she’d known.

Every now and then, someone would come in who was interested in her. Years ago, those men had usually been older than she was; now they tended to be younger, hut ei-ther way, the process was the same. Whoever he was, he would start spending time in special reference, would ask a lot of questions, first about books, then about general top-ics, and finally about her. She didn’t mind answering them, and though she never led them on, most of them eventu-ally asked her out. She was always a bit flattered when that happened, but at her core she knew that no matter how wonderful this suitor might he, no matter how much she enjoyed his company, she wouldn’t be able to open her heart to him in the way she once had done.

Her time in Rodanthe had changed her in other ways as well. Being with Paul had healed her feelings of loss and betrayal over the divorce and replaced them with some-thing stronger and more graceful. Knowing that she was worthy of being loved made it easier to hold her head high, and as her confidence grew, she was able to speak to Jack without hidden meanings or insinuations, without the blame and regret that she’d been unable to hide in her tone in the past. It happened gradually; he’d call to talk to the kids, and they’d visit for a few minutes before she handed off the phone. Later, she’d begun asking about Linda or his job, or she’d fill him in on what she’d been doing recently. Little by little, Jack seemed to realize that she was no longer the person she used to be. Those visits became more friendly with the passing months and years, and sometimes they called each other just to chat. When his marriage to Linda started to unravel, they’d spent hours on the phone, sometimes until late in the night. When Jack and Linda di-vorced, Adrienne had been there to help him through his grief, and she’d even allowed him to stay in the guest bed-room when he came to see the kids. Ironically, Linda had left him for another man, and Adrienne could remember sitting with Jack in the living room as he swirled a glass of Scotch. It was past midnight, and he’d been rambling for a few hours about what he was going through, when he fi-nally seemed to realize who it was that was listening to him.

“Did it hurt this bad for you?” he asked.

“Yes,” Adrienne said.

“How long did it take to get over it?”

“Three years,” she said, “but I was lucky.”

Jack nodded. Pressing his lips together, he stared into his drink.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The dumbest thing I ever did was to walk out that door.”

Adrienne smiled and patted his knee. “I know, But thank you anyway.”

It was about a year after that when Jack called to ask her to dinner. And as she had with all the others, Adrienne po-litely said no.

Adrienne rose and went to the counter to retrieve the box she’d carried from her bedroom earlier, then came back to the table. By then, Amanda was watching her with al-most wary fascination. Adrienne smiled as she reached for her daughter’s hand.

As she did, Adrienne could see that sometime during the past couple of hours, Amanda had realized that she didn’t know as much about her mother as she thought she did. It was, Adrienne thought, a role reversal of sorts.

Amanda had the same look in her eyes that Adrienne sometimes had in the past, when the kids would get to-gether over the holidays and joke about some of the things they’d done when they were younger. It was only a couple of years ago that she’d learned that Matt used to sneak out of his room to go out with friends late at night, or that Amanda had both started and quit smoking as a junior, or that Dan had been the one who’d started the small fire in the garage that had been blamed on a faulty electrical out-let. She’d laughed along with them, feeling naive at the same time, and she wondered if that was the way Amanda was feeling now.

On the wall, the clock was ticking, the sound regular and even. The heat pump clicked on with a thump. In time, Amanda sighed.

“That was quite a story,” she said.

As she spoke, Amanda fingered her wineglass with her free hand, rotating the glass in circles. The wine caught the light, making it shimmer.

“Do Matt and Dan know? I mean, have you told them about it?”

“No.”

“Why not ?”

“I’m not sure they need to know.” Adrienne smiled. “And besides, I don’t know if they would understand, no matter what I told them. They’re men, for one thing, and a little on the protective side—I don’t want them to think that Paul was simply preying on a lonely woman. Men are like that sometimes—if they meet someone and fall in love, it’s real, no matter how fast it happened. But if some-one falls for a woman they happen to care about, all they do is question the man’s intentions. To be honest, I don’t know if I’ll ever tell them.”

Amanda nodded before asking, “Why me, then?”

“Because I thought you needed to hear it.”

Absently, Amanda began to twirl a strand of hair. Adri-enne wondered if that habit was genetic or learned by watching her mother.

“Mom ?”

“Yes ?”

“Why didn’t you tell us about him? I mean, you never mentioned anything about it.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

Adrienne leaned back in her chair and took a deep breath. “In the beginning, I guess I was afraid it wasn’t real. I know we loved each other, but distance can do strange things to people, and before I was willing to tell you about it, I wanted to be certain that it would last. Then later, when I started getting letters from him and knew it would . . . I don’t know . . . it just seemed such a long time until you could meet him that I didn’t see the point in it. .”

She trailed off before choosing her next words carefully.

“You also have to realize that you’re not the same person now that you were then. You were seventeen, Dan was only fifteen, and I didn’t know if any of you were ready to hear something like this. I mean, how would you have felt if you’d come back from your father’s and I told you that I was in love with someone I’d just met?”

“We could’ve handled it.”

Adrienne was skeptical about that, but she didn’t argue with Amanda. Instead, she shrugged. “Who knows. Maybe you’re right. Maybe you could have accepted something like this, but at the time, I didn’t want to take the chance. And if I had to do it all over, I’d probably do the same thing again.”

Amanda shifted in her chair. After a moment, she looked her mother in the eye. “Are you sure he loved you?” she asked.

“Yes,” she said.

Amanda’s eyes looked almost blue green in the fading light. She smiled gently, as if trying to make an obvious point without hurting her mother.

Adrienne knew what Amanda would ask next. It was, she thought, the only logical question left.

Amanda leaned forward, her face filled with concern. “Then where is he?”

In the fourteen years since she’d last seen Paul Flanner, Adrienne had traveled to Rodanthe five times. Her first trip had been during June of the same year, and though the sand seemed whiter and the ocean melted into the sky at the horizon, she made the remainder of her trips during the winter months, when the world was gray and cold, know-ing that it was a more potent reminder of the past.

On the morning that Paul left, Adrienne wandered the house, unable to stay in one place. Movement seemed to be

the only way she could stay ahead of her feelings. Late in the afternoon, as dusk was beginning to dress the sky in faded shades of red and orange, she went outside and looked into those colors, trying to find the plane that Paul was on. The odds of seeing it were infinitesimal, but she stayed out anyway, growing chilled as the evening deep-ened. Between the clouds, she saw an occasional jet trail, but logic told her they were from planes stationed at the naval base in Norfolk. By the time she went in, her hands were numb, and at the sink she ran warm tap water over them, feeling the sting. Though she understood that he was gone, she set two place settings at the dinner table just the same.

Part of her had hoped he would come back. As she ate her dinner, she imagined him coming through the front door and dropping his bags, explaining that he couldn’t leave without another night together. They would leave tomorrow or the next day, he would say, and they would follow the highway north, until she made the turn for home.

But he didn’t. The front door never swung open, the phone never rang. As much as Adrienne longed for him to stay, she knew she’d been right when she’d urged him on his way. Another day wouldn’t make it easier to leave; an-other night together would only mean they’d have to say good-bye again, and that had been hard enough the first time. She couldn’t imagine having to say those words a sec-ond time, nor could she imagine having to relive another day like the one she had just spent.

The following morning, she began cleaning the Inn,

moving steadily, focusing on the routine. She washed the dishes and made sure everything was dried and put away. She vacuumed the area rugs, swept the sand from the kitchen and entranceway, dusted the balustrade and lamps in the sitting room, then worked on Jean’s room until she was satisfied that it looked the same as when she’d arrived.

Then, after carrying her suitcase upstairs, she unlocked the door to the blue room.

She hadn’t been in there since the previous morning. The afternoon sunlight cast prisms on the walls, He’d fixed the bed before he’d gone downstairs but seemed to have realized that he didn’t need to make it neat. There were slight bulges under the comforter where the blanket had wrinkled, and the sheet poked out in a few places, nearly grazing the floor. In the bathroom, a towel hung over the curtain rod, and two more had been lumped together near the sink.

She stood without moving, taking it all in, before fi-nally exhaling and putting down her suitcase. As she did, she saw the note that Paul had written her, propped on the bureau. She reached for it and slowly sat on the edge of the bed. In the quiet of the room where they’d loved each other, she read what he had penned the morning before.

When she was finished, Adrienne lowered the note and sat without moving, thinking of him as he’d written it. Then, after folding it carefully, she put it into her suit-case along with the conch. When Jean arrived a few hours later, Adrienne was leaning against the railing on the back porch, looking toward the sky again.

Jean was her normal, exuberant self, happy to see Adri-enne, happy to be back home, and talking incessantly about the wedding and the old hotel in Savannah where she had stayed. Adrienne let Jean go on with her stories without interruption, and after dinner, she told Jean that she wanted to take a walk on the beach. Thankfully, Jean passed on the invitation to go with her.

When she got back, Jean was unpacking in her room, and Adrienne made herself a cup of hot tea and went to sit near the fireplace. As she was rocking, she heard Jean enter the kitchen.

“Where are you?” Jean called out.

“In here,” Adrienne answered.

Jean rounded the corner a moment later, “Did I hear the teakettle whistle ?”

“I just made a cup.”

“Since when do you drink tea?”

Adrienne gave a short laugh but didn’t answer.

Jean settled in the rocker beside her. Outside, the moon was rising, hard and brilliant, making the sand glow with the color of antique pots and pans.

“You’ve been kind of quiet tonight,” Jean said.

“Sorry.” Adrienne shrugged. “I’m just a little tired. 1 guess I’m just ready to go home.”

“I’m sure. I was counting the miles as soon as I left Sa-vannah, but at least there wasn’t much traffic. Off-season, you know.”

Adrienne nodded.

Jean leaned back in her chair. “Did it go okay with Paul Flanner? I hope the storm didn’t ruin his stay.”

Heating his name made Adrienne’s throat catch, but she tried to appear calm. “I don’t think the storm bothered him at all,” she said.

“Tell me about him. From his voice, I got the impression that he was kind of stuffy.”

“No, not all, He was . . . nice.”

“Was it strange being alone with him?”

“No. Not once I got used to it.”

Jean waited to see if Adrienne would add anything else, but she didn’t.

“Well.. . good,” Jean continued, “And you didn’t have any trouble boarding up the house?”

“No.”

“I’m glad. I appreciate your doing that for me. I know you were hoping for a quiet weekend, but I guess fate wasn’t on your side, huh?”

“I suppose not.”

Perhaps it was the way she said it that drew Jean’s glance, a curious expression on her face. Suddenly needing space, Adrienne finished her tea.

“I hate to do this to you, Jean,” she said, trying her best to make her voice sound natural, “but I think I’ll call it a night. I’m tired, and I’ve got a long drive tomorrow. I’m glad you had a good time at the wedding.”

Jean’s eyebrows rose slightly at her friend’s abrupt ending to the evening.

“Oh . . . well, thank you,” she said. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

Adrienne could feel Jean’s uncertain gaze on her, even as she made her way up the stairs. After unlocking the door to

the blue room, she slipped out of her clothes and crawled into the bed, naked and alone.

She could smell Paul on the pillow and on the sheets, and she absently traced her breast as she buried herself in the smell, fighting sleep until she could do so no longer. When she rose the following morning, she started a pot of coffee and took another walk on the beach.

She passed two other couples in the half hour she spent outside. A front had pushed warmer air over the island, and she knew the day would lure even more people to the water’s edge.

Paul would have arrived at the clinic by now, and she wondered what it was like. She had an image in her mind, something she might have seen on one of the nature chan-nels—a series of hastily assembled buildings surrounded by an encroaching jungle, ruts in a curving dirt road out front, exotic birds chirping in the background—but ............