Nights in Rodanthe(11)
Author: Nicholas Sparks

He could understand Adrienne’s reservations—they all lived in a world defined by limits, after all, and those didn’t always allow for spontaneity, for impulsive attempts to live in the moment. He knew that was what allowed order to prevail in the course of one’s life, yet his actions in recent months had been an attempt to defy those limits, to reject the order that he had embraced for so long.

It wasn’t fair of him to expect the same thing of her. She was in a different place; her life had responsibilities, and as she’d made clear to him yesterday, those responsibilities required stability and predictability. He’d been the same way once, and though he was now in the position to live by different rules, Adrienne, he realized, wasn’t.

Nonetheless, something had changed in the short time he’d been here. He wasn’t sure when it had happened. It might have been yesterday when they were walking on the beach, or when she’d first told him about her father, or even this morning when they had eaten together in the soft light of the kitchen. Or maybe it happened when he found himself holding her hand and standing close, wanting nothing more than to gently press his lips against hers.

It didn’t matter. All he knew for sure was that he was beginning to fall for a woman named Adrienne, who was watching the Inn for a friend in a tiny coastal town in North Carolina.

Eleven

Robert Torrelson sat at the aging rolltop desk in his living room, listening as his son boarded up the windows at the back of the house. In his hand was the note from Paul Flanner, and he was absently folding and unfolding it, still wondering at the fact that he had come.

He hadn’t expected it. Though he’d written the request, he’d been sure that Paul Flanner would ignore it. Flanner was a high-powered doctor in the city, represented by attorneys who wore flashy ties and fancy belts, and none of them had seemed to give a damn about him or his family for over a year now. Rich city folk were like that; as for him, he was glad that he’d never had to live near people who pushed paper for a living and weren’t comfortable if the temperature at work wasn’t exactly seventy-two degrees. Nor did he like dealing with people who thought they were better than others because they had better schooling or more money or a bigger house. Paul Flanner, when he’d met him after the surgery, had struck him as that type of person. He was stiff and distant, and though he’d explained himself, the clipped way he’d spoken the words had left Robert with the feeling that he wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep because of what had happened.

And that wasn’t right.

Robert had lived a life with different values, values that had been honored by his father and grandfather and their grandfather before that. He could trace his family’s roots in the Outer Banks back nearly two hundred years. Generation after generation, they’d fished the waters of Pamlico Sound since the times when the fish were so plentiful that a person could cast a single net and pull in enough fish to fill the bow. But all that had changed. Now there were quotas and regulations and licenses and big companies, all chasing fewer fish than there’d ever been. These days, when Robert went down to the boat, half the time he considered himself lucky if he caught enough to pay for the gas he’d needed.

Robert Torrelson was sixty-seven but looked ten years older. His face was weathered and stained, and his body was slowly losing the battle with time. There was a long scar that ran from his left eye to his ear. His hands ached with arthritis, and the ring finger on his right hand was missing from the time he’d got it caught in a winch while dragging in the nets.

But Jill hadn’t cared about any of those things. And now Jill was gone.

On the desk was a picture of her, and Robert still found himself staring at it whenever he was alone in the room. He missed everything about her; he missed the way she rubbed his shoulders after he came in on cold winter evenings, he missed the way they used to sit together and listen to music on the radio while they sat on the porch out back, he missed the way she smelled after dabbing her chest with powder, an odor that was simple and clean, fresh like a newborn.

Paul Flanner had taken all that away from him. Jill, he knew, would still have been with him had she never gone to the hospital that day.

His son had had his turn. And now the time had come for his.

Adrienne made the short drive to town and pulled into the small gravel parking lot of the general store, breathing a sigh of relief to find that it was still open.

There were three cars out front parked haphazardly, each coated with a thin layer of salt. A couple of older men wearing baseball hats were standing out front, smoking and drinking coffee. They watched Adrienne as she got out of the car, and they stopped speaking; as she passed them on her way into the store, they nodded a greeting.

The store was typical of those in rural areas: a scuffed wooden floor, ceiling fans, shelves with thousands of various items packed close together. Near the register was a small barrel offering dill pickles for sale; next to that was another barrel containing roasted peanuts. In the rear was a small grill offering fresh cooked burgers and fish sandwiches, and though no one was behind the counter, the odor of fried food lingered in the air.

The ice machine was in the far rear corner, next to the refrigerated compartments containing beer and soda, and Adrienne headed that way. As she reached for the handle of the ice machine door, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrored door panel. She stopped for a moment, as if seeing herself through different eyes.

How long had it been, she wondered, since someone had found her attractive? Or someone she’d just met had wanted to kiss her? If someone had asked her those questions before she’d come here, she would have answered that neither of those things had happened since the day Jack had moved out. But that wasn’t exactly true, was it? Not like this, anyway. Jack had been her husband, not a stranger, and since they’d dated for two years before they walked down the aisle, it was closer to twenty-three years since she’d encountered something like this.

Of course, had Jack not left, she could have lived with that knowledge and never thought twice about it; but here and now, she found that impossible. More than half her life had passed without the interest of an attractive man, and no matter how much she wanted to convince herself that her reasons for turning away had been based on common sense, she couldn’t help but think that being out of practice for twenty-three years had something to do with it as well.

She was drawn to Paul, she couldn’t deny that. It wasn’t just that he was handsome and interesting, or even charming in his own quiet way. Nor was it just the fact that he’d made her feel desirable. No, it was his genuine desire to change—to be a better person than he had been—that she found most compelling. She’d known people like him before in her life—like physicians, attorneys were often notorious workaholics—but she had yet to come across someone who’d not only made the decision to change the rules that he’d always lived by, but was doing so in a way that most people would be terrified to contemplate.

There was, she decided, something noble in that. He wanted to fix the flaws he recognized in himself, he wanted to forge a relationship with his estranged son, he had come here because a stranger seeking redress from him had sent a note requesting it.

What kind of person did those things? What kind of strength would that take? Or courage? More than she had, she thought. More than anyone she knew, and as much as she wanted to deny it, she was gratified that someone like him had found her attractive.

As she reflected on these things, Adrienne grabbed the last two bags of ice and a Styrofoam cooler and carried it all to the register. After paying, she left the store and headed for the car. One of the elderly men was still sitting on the porch as she left, and as she nodded to him, she wore the odd expression of someone who had attended a wedding and a funeral on exactly the same day.

In her brief absence the sky had grown darker, and the wind cut past her as she stepped out of the car. It had begun to whistle as it moved around the Inn, sounding almost ghostlike, a spectral flute playing a single note. Clouds swirled and banded together, shifting in clumps as they passed overhead. The ocean was a sea of white tips, and the waves were rolling heavily past the high-water mark from the day before.

As she was reaching for the ice, Adrienne saw Paul come out from behind the gate.

“Did you get started without me?” she called out.

“No, not really. I was just making sure I could find everything.” He motioned to the load. “Do you need a hand with that?”

Adrienne shook her head. “I’ve got it. It’s not that heavy.” She nodded toward the door. “But let me get started in there. Would you mind if I went into your room to close up the shutters?”

“No, go ahead. I don’t mind.”

Inside, Adrienne set the cooler next to the refrigerator, cut open the bags of ice with a steak knife, and poured them in. She pulled out some cheese, the fruit that had been left over from breakfast, and the chicken from the night before, stacking it with the ice, thinking it wasn’t a gourmet meal, but good enough in case nothing else was available. Then, noting that there was still room, she grabbed one of the bottles of wine and put it on top, feeling a forbidden thrill at the thought of sharing the wine with Paul later.

Forcing the feeling away, she spent the next few minutes making sure all the windows were closed and latching the shutters from the inside on the bottom floor. Upstairs, she took care of the empty guest rooms first, then made her way to the room where he’d slept.

After unlocking the door, she stepped in, noticing that Paul had made his own bed. His duffel bags were folded beside the chest of drawers; the clothes he’d worn earlier that morning had already been put away, and his loafers were on the floor near the wall, toes together and facing out. Her children, she thought to herself, could learn something from him about the virtues of keeping things neat in their rooms.

In his bathroom, she closed up a small window, and as she did, she spied the soap dish and brush he used to create lather lying next to his razor. Both were near the sink, next to a bottle of aftershave. Unbidden, an image came to her of him standing over the sink that morning; and as she pictured him there, some instinct told her that he’d wanted her beside him.

She shook her head, feeling strangely like a teenager poking through a parent’s bedroom, and headed to the window beside his bed. As she was closing it up, she saw Paul carrying one of the rockers off the porch to store beneath the house.

He moved as if he were twenty years younger. Jack wasn’t like that. Over the years, Jack had grown heavy around the midsection from one too many cocktails, and his belly tended to shimmy if he engaged in any sort of physical activity.

But Paul was different. Paul, she knew, wasn’t like Jack in any way, and it was there, while upstairs in his room, that Adrienne first felt a vague sense of anxious anticipation, something akin to what a high roller might feel when hoping for a lucky roll of the dice.

Beneath the house, Paul was getting things ready.

The hurricane guards were corrugated aluminum, two and a half feet wide and six feet high, and all had been labeled with a permanent marker as to which window they protected on the house. Paul began lifting them from the stack and setting them aside, putting each group together, mentally outlining what he needed to do.

He was finishing up just as Adrienne came back down. Thunder sounded in the distance, rumbling long and low over the water. The temperature, she noticed, was beginning to drop. “How’s it going?” she asked. Her tone, she thought, was unfamiliar, like another woman was speaking the words.

“It’s easier than I thought it would be,” he said. “All I have to do is match up the grooves and slip them into the braces, then drop these clips in.”

“What about the wood to hold it in place?”

“That’s not too bad, either. The joints are already up, so all I have to do is put the two-by-fours in their supports and hammer a couple of nails. Like Jean said, it’s a one-person job.”

“Do you think it’ll take long?”

“Maybe an hour. You can wait inside if you’d like.”

“Isn’t there something I can do? To help, I mean?”

“Not really. But if you’d like, you could keep me company.”

Adrienne smiled, liking the invitation in his voice. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”

For the next hour or so, Paul moved from one window to the next, slipping the guards into place as Adrienne kept him company. As he worked, he could feel Adrienne’s eyes on him, and he felt the same awkwardness he’d felt after she’d let go of his hand earlier that morning.

Within a few minutes a light rain started, then it began to fall with more intensity. Adrienne moved closer to the house to keep from getting wet, but she found that it didn’t help much in the swirling wind. Paul neither sped up nor slowed down; the rain and wind didn’t seem to affect him at all.

Another window covered, then the next. Sliding in the guards, dropping the hooks, moving the ladder. By the time the windows were done and Paul had started on the braces, there was lightning over the water and the rain was driving hard. And still Paul worked. Each nail was sunk with four blows, coming regularly, as if he’d worked in carpentry for years.

Despite the rain, they talked; Adrienne noticed that he kept the conversation light, far from anything that could be construed the wrong way. He told her about some of the repairs he and his father had done on the farm and that he might be doing a bit of this in Ecuador as well, so that it was good to get the feel of it again.

As Adrienne listened to him talk of this and that, she could tell that Paul was giving her the space he thought she needed, that he thought she wanted. But as she watched him, she suddenly knew that keeping her distance was the furthest thing from her mind.

Everything about him made her long for something she had never known: the way he made what he was doing look easy, the shape of his h*ps and legs in his jeans as he stood on the ladder above her, those eyes that always reflected what he was thinking and feeling. Standing in the pouring rain, she felt the pull of the person he was, and the person she realized she wanted to be.