The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,142

waters off the coasts with Adam, and teased myself by diving outside the soft, mossy mouths of other springs, but I never went into one again. It was mostly fear that kept me away from the caves. But also, I didn’t want to lose the purity of that day, did not want the memory diminished by anything that followed.

Our lovemaking from that point on was as strong and as sharp as when we first met, but it also encompassed a bitter sweetness. A largeness. Early on, we’d been young and bare, our souls and hearts slender with innocence, but now we came to each other robust, fat with grief and joy. When we first were lovers, we did not know we could drift from each other. Our earlier lovemaking had been just us in the bedroom or under the sky. Now we brought with us old scars, a cacophony of experience, and the knowledge that we could part. It made our passion deeper and sweeter.

The winter after Adam took me diving in the springs, I turned forty. In those first months in Florida, with plenty of time on my hands, I’d scrutinized my face in mirrors, noting the first signs of age. Since Momma and Jennie died, my skin had begun to recall all those days working in the fields. Lines appeared around my eyes and mouth. My hair paled at my temples, the red fading in strands to sandy-gray and white.

One evening, I stood on the back steps, surveying my garden of lettuce, broccoli, and sugar peas. For me, it was an act of faith to put seeds in the ground at that time of year. The garden seemed puny by my standards, but I was growing food again and determined to do better in the spring.

Behind me, Adam straddled his workbench on the porch as he repaired a saddle. His grace of movement and his beauty were still arresting. For a moment, I saw Addie in the look of concentration on his face as he forced the needle through the leather. The sun shone in his eyes when he glanced up at me. The fine lines of his squint disappeared when he returned to his work.

I’d always admired his good skin. Unlike me, he and the girls tanned a golden brown in the sun. Yet his skin had none of the leathery quality I saw on men who spent a lot of time outdoors. I’d noticed many men seemed to age more slowly than their wives. But as I studied him, I saw that he really did not look a day older than when he set foot on my porch with the face of Roy Hope.

He’d arrived with no past, and had lived in an endless present before Jennie died. That innocence had left his life and his face, but its absence did not show as age. His skin reflected only the subtle changes of maturity. He’d settled into his features, but he still appeared to be a man in his late twenties.

How could I not have seen it before? His clock ticked more slowly. I sat down in the chair on the opposite side of the porch. From that angle, the smoothness of his hands and arms was more obvious. My own hands were freckled, the skin on the backs of them not yet lined but loosened.

He stopped at his work and looked up. His eyes were their most golden-brown in the direct afternoon sun. “What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying.” He laughed.

I went over to him, straddled the bench behind him, and pulled up close, my arms around his waist. “Yes, I am.”

He began humming, a song I’d heard on the radio.

“Later,” I said. “We can talk later. Finish your work now.”

He held up the saddle for me to see his repair.

“I think I need reading glasses,” I said as I admired his work.

After that, I studied men my age for their differences and compared them to Adam. Some looked thoroughly middle-aged, worn and beginning to gray. Others had held on to a kind of youthful bearing, their faces lived-in and beginning to slacken with age but not yet showing actual lines or wrinkles. A few had remarkably good skin, like Adam’s.

By mid-spring, our country drives focused on a single new purpose: buying our own land and business. Bud and Wanda were still on the farm and expecting their first child, but not farming. The fields were fallow. When we got a second, even more impressive offer on