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 immediately. 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 carpet 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 contractor 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 estimate 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 continually 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 supposed 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 intervening years had been reversed, and though it was a ridiculous notion, she wondered if her daughter had noticed 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 realize 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 people believed that they lay in the past.
It was true for her as well, at least partly, but as wonderful as the past had been, she refused to allow herself to remain 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 library.
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 people 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.