The Return - Nicholas Sparks Page 0,6

and he suggested that I try to find the answers. The holidays passed without notice, and with the arrival of the new year I listed my condo with a realtor, thinking it might take a few months to sell. Lo and behold, I had an offer within days, and closed in February. Since I’d soon be moving to Baltimore for residency, it didn’t make sense to find a place to rent temporarily. I thought about my grandfather’s place in New Bern and figured, why not?

I could get out of Pensacola, maybe get the old place ready to sell. If I was lucky, I might even be able to figure out why my grandfather had been in Easley, and what on earth he’d been trying to tell me.

Which is how and why I found myself scattering mothballs outside his rattletrap old cabin.

* * *

I didn’t really have lemonade on the back porch. That’s how my grandfather used to refer to beer, and when I was little, one of the great thrills of my young life was getting him a lemonade from the icebox. Strangely, it always came in a bottle labeled Budweiser.

I prefer Yuengling, from America’s oldest brewery. When I attended the Naval Academy, an upperclassman named Ray Kowalski introduced me to it. He was from Pottsville, Pennsylvania—home of the Yuengling Brewery—and he convinced me there was no finer beer. Interestingly, Ray was also the son of a coal miner and last I heard, he was serving on the USS Hawaii, a nuclear submarine. I guess he learned from his dad that when you’re working, sunlight and fresh air are overrated.

I wonder what my mom and dad would have thought about my life these days. After all, I haven’t worked in more than two years. I’m pretty sure my dad would have been appalled; he was the kind of father who would sit me down for a lecture if I received an A− on an exam and was disappointed when I chose the Naval Academy over Georgetown, his alma mater, or Yale, where he’d received his law degree. He woke at five in the morning every day of the week, read both the Washington Post and the New York Times while having his coffee, then would head to DC, where he worked as a lobbyist for whatever company or industry group had hired him. A sharp mind and an aggressive negotiator, he lived to make a deal and could quote large sections of the tax code from memory. He was one of six partners who oversaw more than two hundred attorneys, and his walls were decorated with photographs of him with three different presidents, half a dozen senators, and too many congressmen to count.

My dad didn’t simply work; his hobby was work. He spent seventy hours a week at the office and golfed with clients and politicians on the weekends. Once a month, he hosted a cocktail party at our home, with still more clients and politicians. In the evenings, he often secluded himself in his office, where there was always a pressing phone call to make, a brief to be written, a plan to be made. The idea of him kicking back on the porch and having a beer in the middle of the afternoon on a workday would have struck him as absurd, something a slacker might do, but never a Benson. There was nothing worse than being a slacker, in my father’s eyes.

Though he wasn’t the nurturing type, he wasn’t a bad father. To be fair, my mother wasn’t exactly a cookie-baking, hands-on PTA member, either. A neurosurgeon trained at Johns Hopkins, she was frequently on call and was a good match for my father in her drive and passion for work. My grandfather always said she came out of the wrapper that way, belying her small-town background and the fact that neither of her parents went to college. But I never doubted her or my father’s love for me, even if we ate takeout for dinner every night and I attended more cocktail parties as a teenager than family camping trips.

In any case, my family was hardly unusual for Alexandria. Everyone at my elite private school had high-powered and prosperous parents, and the culture of excellence and career success filtered down to their children. Stellar grades were the norm, but even that wasn’t enough. Kids were also expected to excel at sports or music or both and be popular to boot. I’ll admit I got sucked into

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