The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,182

car. I walked around the hedge to greet them.

“Good Lord, Evelyn!” Wanda gasped. She and Bud hurried me out of the rain toward the house.

On the porch, I stared back at them stupidly, then realized how I looked, shovel in hand and dirt on my mouth. My clothes rumpled from the long drive and now muddy, my hair wet.

For the first time in months, I laughed out loud.

Everything in the recently remodeled kitchen shone new and modern. In the brightly tiled bathroom, I washed my hands and face. The iron-red clay swirled away from my dirty hands in the white porcelain sink.

After they fed me a hearty supper, I walked through the stable. The barn had been taken down the year before. Old furniture cluttered one of the far stalls. Dismembered motorcycles, Bud’s hobby, filled the stalls closest to the house. The air smelled of engine oil and dust.

When I pushed open the broad door at the far end of the stable, the air moved behind me. Something fluttered at the corner of my eye, and I turned just in time to see an owl, pale against the darkness of the trees, bank off to the left and disappear into the large oak that had been the base of the twins’ playhouse. I followed him and listened for a long time. In the last of the light, I heard only the traffic of the highway, distant and oceanic.

Something seemed to release in me, not a wild widow’s grief but a sharper, more specific need. All the things I’d never said about A., all my silent months since he’d been gone, everything I might have said at a funeral, beat inside me. I wanted to speak. I lusted for the truth. I wanted to, as Adam had always urged his riders, “true myself.”

I went inside to call Cole, the first person I had lied to.

We hadn’t seen each other in years, but he readily agreed to meet me the next day at the little pizzeria that had replaced Bun’s Café.

I arrived early and kept my eyes on the door. I let myself relish how right it felt to be telling Cole. Like me, he had known both of them. Many times he had sat across the supper table from Addie and then Adam. Now, finally, he would know who they were. He would also understand why I had left him so many years ago.

When I’d finished telling him, I would go straight back to Florida, round up my girls, and tell them. They would understand, I knew, and that rift I’d felt between us since their father went into the cave would be healed.

I felt light-headed, filled with a giddy anticipation. What I wanted to tell Cole felt enormous, but like a great weight poised on the summit of a hill, I had only to give it a gentle push and everything I knew about Adam would roll away from me, no longer mine alone. I squirmed restlessly on the bench seat while I waited. Was this how Adam had felt on the way to his mountain trips, the release of his feral howl waiting in his chest?

As Cole climbed out of his truck and strolled to the restaurant, the slight limp from the bad break so many years ago was barely noticeable. The lines around his mouth and across his forehead had deepened, but something of the boy remained in his smile. His brown hair had thinned. His sixty-plus years of life showed. In his thirties, he’d quit horse-breeding and gone to the mill. One of his sons had died of a drug overdose, and his wife, Eloise, of cancer.

While we ate our pizza, I told him what had happened to Adam, knowing he’d surely already heard. He told me about his wife and son as if I might not have heard. Then he spotted the bouquet of flowers I’d brought lying on the seat next to me. I held the bundled blossoms up for his inspection. “They’re for Jennie and Momma. Come with me to visit their graves. Please?” For a second, I was afraid he might refuse and I would have to tell him about A. in a crowded restaurant.

He smiled. A good, ordinary man. I wondered, as I had many times before, what my life would have been like with him. He saw how I studied his face; he touched my hand. “Of course, I’d be honored.”

I drove us to the cemetery. Cole chatted about his family’s