his head. “It wasn’t. Not always. All those letters I used to write to her were a way of reminding her not only how I felt about her, but of the vow we’d once made to each other.”
I wondered if he was trying to remind me of the time he’d suggested that I do such a thing for Jane, but I made no mention of it. Instead, I brought up something I’d been meaning to ask him.
“Was it hard for you and Allie after all the kids had moved out?”
Noah took a moment to think about his answer. “I don’t know if the word was hard, but it was different.”
“How so?”
“It was quiet, for one thing. Really quiet. With Allie working in her studio, it was just me puttering around the house a lot of the time. I think that’s when I started talking to myself, just for the company.”
“How did Allie react to not having the kids around?”
“Like me,” he said. “At first, anyway. The kids were our life for a long time, and there’s always some adjusting when that changes. But once she did, I think she started to enjoy the fact that we were alone again.”
“How long did that take?” I asked.
“I don’t know. A couple of weeks, maybe.”
I felt my shoulders sag. A couple of weeks? I thought.
Noah seemed to catch my expression, and after taking a moment, he cleared his throat. “Now that I think about it,” he said, “I’m sure it wasn’t even that long. I think it was just a few days before she was back to normal.”
A few days? By then I couldn’t summon a response.
He brought a hand to his chin. “Actually, if I remember right,” he went on, “it wasn’t even a few days. In fact, we did the jitterbug right there in front of the house as soon as we’d loaded the last of David’s things in the car. But let me tell you, the first couple of minutes were tough. Real tough. I sometimes wonder how we were able to survive them.”
Though his expression remained serious as he spoke, I detected the mischievous gleam in his eye.
“The jitterbug?” I asked.
“It’s a dance.”
“I know what it is.”
“It used to be fairly popular.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“What? No one jitterbugs anymore?”
“It’s a lost art, Noah.”
He nudged me gently. “Had you going, though, didn’t I.”
“A little,” I admitted.
He winked. “Gotcha.”
For a moment he sat in silence, looking pleased with himself. Then, knowing he hadn’t really answered my question, he shifted on the bench and let out a long breath.
“It was hard for both of us, Wilson. By the time they’d left, they weren’t just our kids, but our friends, too. We were both lonesome, and for a while there, we weren’t sure what to do with each other.”
“You’ve never said anything about it.”
“You never asked,” he said. “I missed them, but of the two of us, I think it was worse for Allie. She may have been a painter, but she was first and foremost a mother, and once the kids were gone, it was like she wasn’t exactly sure who she was anymore. At least for a while, anyway.”
I tried to picture it but couldn’t. It wasn’t an Allie that I’d ever seen or even imagined possible.
“Why does that happen?” I asked.
Instead of answering, Noah looked over at me and was silent for a moment. “Did I ever tell you about Gus?” he finally asked. “Who used to visit me when I was fixing the house?”
I nodded. Gus, I knew, was kin to Harvey, the black pastor I sometimes saw when visiting Noah’s property.
“Well, old Gus,” Noah explained, “used to love tall tales, the funnier the better. And sometimes we used to sit on the porch at night trying to come up with our own tall tales to make each other laugh. There were some good ones over the years, but you want to know what my favorite one was? The tallest tale Gus ever uttered? Now, before I say this, you have to understand that Gus had been married to the same gal for half a century, and they had eight kids. Those two had been through just about everything together. So anyway, we’d been telling these stories back and forth all night, and he said, ‘I’ve got one.’ So then Gus took a deep breath, and with a straight face, he looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Noah, I understand women.’ ”
Noah chuckled, as if