第 10 页

“What for?”

“I don’t know.”

“He didn’t tell me about no letter.” As he spoke, the muscles in his jaw began to clench.

“Can you tell him I’m here?”

The young man hooked his thumb into his belt. “He’s not in.”

As he said it, his eyes flashed to the house, and Paul wondered if he was telling the truth.

“Will you at least tell him I came by? I left a note on the door telling him where he can reach me.”

“He doesn’t want to talk to you.”

Paul dropped his gaze, then looked up again.

“I think that’s for him to decide, don’t you?” he said.

“Who the hell do you think you are? You think you can come here and try to talk your way out of what you did? Like it was just some mistake or something?”

Paul said nothing. Sensing his hesitation, the young man took a step toward him and went on, his voice rising.

“Just get the hell out of here! I don’t want you around here anymore, and my dad doesn’t, either!”

“Fine . . . okay. . .”

The young man reached for a nearby shovel and Paul raised his hands, backing away.

“I’m going. . .”

He turned and started toward the car.

“And don’t come back,” the young man shouted. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough already? My mother’s dead because of you!”

Paul flinched at the words, feeling their sting, then got in the car. After starting the engine, he pulled away with-out looking back.

He didn’t see the neighbor come down from the ladder to speak with the young man; he didn’t see the young man throw the shovel. He didn’t see the living room curtain fall back into place inside the house.

Nor did he see the front door open or the wrinkled hand that retrieved the note after it had fallen to the porch.

Minutes later, Adrienne was listening to Paul as he re-counted what had happened. They were in the kitchen, and Paul was leaning against the counter, his arms crossed as he gazed out the window. His expression was blank, withdrawn; he looked far more tired than he had earlier in the morning. When he finished, Adrienne’s face showed a mixture of sympathy and concern.

“At least you tried,” she said.

“A lot of good that did, huh?”

“Maybe he didn’t know about his father’s letter.”

Paul shook his head. “It’s not just that. It goes back to the whole reason I came here. I wanted to see if I could fix it somehow or at least make it understandable, but I’m not even going to get the chance.”

“That’s not your fault.”

“Then why does it feel that way?”

In the silence that followed, Adrienne could hear the ticking of the heater.

“Because you care. Because you’ve changed.”

“Nothing’s changed. They still think I killed her.” He sighed. “Can you imagine how it feels to know that some-one believes that about you?”

“No,” she admitted, “I can’t. I’ve never had to go through something like that.”

Paul nodded, looking drawn.

Adrienne watched to see if his expression would change, and when it didn’t, she surprised herself by moving toward him and reaching for his hand. It was stiff at first, but he re-laxed and she felt his fingers curl into hers.

“As hard as it is to accept, and no matter what anyone says,” she said carefully, “you have to understand that even if you had talked to the father this morning, you probably wouldn’t have changed his son’s mind, He’s hurting, and it’s easier to blame someone like you than to accept the fact that his mother’s time had come. And no matter how you think it went, you did do something important by going there this morning.”

“What’s that?”

“You listened to what the son had to say. Even though he’s wrong, you gave him the chance to tell you how he feels. You let him get it off his chest, and in the end, that’s probably what the father wanted all along. Since he knows the case isn’t going to make it to court, he wanted you to hear his side of the story in person. To know how they feel.”

Paul laughed grimly. “That makes me feel a whole lot better.”

Adrienne squeezed his hand. “What did you expect would happen? That they’d listen to what you had to say and accept it after a few minutes? After hiring a lawyer and continuing the Suit, even when they knew they didn’t have a chance? After hearing what all the other doctors had said? They wanted you to come so you could listen to them. Not the other way around.”

Paul said nothing, but deep down he knew she was right. Why, though, hadn’t he realized it before?

“I know it wasn’t easy to hear,” she went on, “and I know they’re wrong and it isn’t fair to blame what happened on you. But you gave them something important today, and more than that, it was something you didn’t have to do. You can be proud of that.”

“None of what happened surprised you, did it 1”

“Not really.”

“Did you know that this morning? When I first told you about them ?”

“I wasn’t sure, but I thought it might go like this.”

A brief smile flickered across his face. “You’re some-thing, you know that?”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

He squeezed her hand, thinking that he liked the way it felt in his. It felt natural, almost as if he’d been holding it for years.

“It’s a great thing,” he said.

He turned to face her, smiling gently, and Adrienne sud-denly realized that he was thinking of kissing her. Though part of her longed for just that, the rational side suddenly reminded her that it was Friday. They’d met the day before, and he’d be leaving soon. And so would she. Besides, this wasn’t really her, was it? This wasn’t the real Adrienne— the worried mom and daughter, or the wife who’d been left for another woman, or the lady who sorted books at the li-brary. This weekend she was someone different, someone she barely recognized. Her time here had been dreamlike, and though dreams were pleasant, she reminded herself that they were just that and nothing more.

She took a small step backward. When she released his hand, she saw a flash of disappointment in his eyes, but it vanished as he looked off to the side.

She smiled, forcing herself to keep her voice steady.

“Are you still up for helping me with the house? Before the weather sets in, I mean?”

“Sure.” Paul nodded. “Just let me throw on some work clothes.”

“You’ve got time. I’ve got to run up to the store first, anyway. I forgot to get ice and a cooler so I can keep some food handy in case the power goes out.”

“Okay.”

She paused. “You gonna be all right?”

“I’ll be fine.”

She waited as if to make sure she believed him, then turned away. Yes, she told herself, she’d done the right thing. She was right to have turned away, she was right to have let go of his hand.

Yet as she slipped out the door, she couldn’t escape the feeling that she’d turned away from the chance to find a piece of Happiness she’d been missing for far too long.

Paul was upstairs when he heard Adrienne’s car start up. Turning toward the window, he watched the waves crash-ing in, trying to make sense of what had just happened. A few minutes ago, when he’d looked at her, he’d felt a flash of something special, but just as quickly as it had come, it was gone, and the look on her face told him why.

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 re-quired stability and predictability. He’d been the same way once, and though he was now in the position to live by dif-ferent 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, want-ing nothing more than to gently press his lips against hers.

It didn’t matter. All he knew for sure was that he was be-ginning 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 liv-ing 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 at-torneys 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 de-grees. 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. Genera-tion 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 con-sidered 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 vari-ous 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 sand-wiches, 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 ques-tions 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 prac-tice 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 charm-ing 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 be-fore in her life—like physicians, attorneys were often no-torious 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 some-one 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.