The Notebook - By Nicholas Sparks Page 0,71

the better choice on our wedding day. Jane is, after all, the kind of person I always wished to be. While I tend toward stoicism and logic, Jane is outgoing and kind, with a natural empathy that endears her to others. She laughs easily and has a wide circle of friends. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that most of my friends are, in fact, the husbands of my wife’s friends, but I believe this is common for most married couples our age. Yet, Jane has always seemed to choose our friends with me in mind, and I’m appreciative that there’s always someone for me to visit with at a dinner party. Had we not been married, I sometimes think that I would have led the life of a monk.

There is more, too: I’m charmed by the fact that Jane has always displayed her emotions with childlike ease. When she’s sad, she cries; when she’s happy she smiles, and her expression when she’s surprised never fails to delight me. In those moments, there’s an ageless innocence about her, and though a surprise by definition is unexpected, for Jane, the memories of a surprise can arouse the same excited feelings for years afterward. Sometimes when she’s daydreaming, I’ll ask her what she’s thinking about and she’ll suddenly begin speaking in giddy tones about something I’ve long forgotten. This, I must say, has never ceased to amaze me.

While Jane has been blessed with the tenderest of hearts, in many ways, she’s stronger than I am. Like most southern women, her values and beliefs are grounded by God and family; she views the world through a prism of black and white, right and wrong. For Jane, hard decisions are reached instinctively—and are almost always right— while I, on the other hand, find myself weighing endless options and frequently second-guessing myself. And unlike me, my wife is seldom self-conscious. This lack of concern about other people’s perceptions requires a confidence that I’ve always found elusive, and above all else, I envy this about her.

I suppose that some of our differences stem from our respective upbringings. While Jane was raised in a small town with three siblings and parents who adored her, I was raised in a town house in Washington, D.C., as the only child of government lawyers, and my parents were seldom home before seven o’clock in the evening. As a result, I spent much of my free time alone, and to this day, I’m most comfortable in the privacy of my den.

As I’ve already mentioned, we have three children, and though I love them dearly, they are for the most part the products of my wife. She bore them and raised them, and it’s she with whom they are most comfortable. I feel the occasional pang of regret at the thought of all I missed while spending so many hours at the office and in my den. But I’m comforted by the thought that Jane more than made up for my absences, as evidenced by how well our kids turned out. They’re grown now and living on their own, but we’re fortunate that only one has moved out of state. My two daughters still visit us frequently, and my wife is careful to have their favorite foods in the refrigerator in case they’re hungry, which they never seem to be.

At twenty-seven, Anna is the oldest. Her looks—dark hair and even darker eyes—reflect her saturnine personality. She was a brooder who spent her teenage years locked in her room, listening to gloomy music and writing in a diary. She was a stranger to me back then; days might pass before she would say a single word in my presence and I was at a loss to understand what I might have done to provoke this. Everything I said seemed to elicit only sighs or shakes of her head; and if I asked what was wrong, she would stare at me as if the question was incomprehensible. My wife seemed to find nothing unusual in this, dismissing it as a phase typical of young girls, but then again, Anna still talked to her. Sometimes, I’d pass by Anna’s room and hear

Anna and Jane whispering to each other; but if they heard me outside the door, the whispering would stop. Later, when I would ask Jane what they’d been discussing, she’d shrug and wave a hand mysteriously, as if their only goal was to keep me in the dark.

Yet because she was my firstborn,