The Wedding - By Nicholas Sparks Page 0,4

back out as quietly as she’d come in. Over time, I learned not to say anything, and she’d sometimes linger in the office for an hour, watching me as I scribbled on yellow legal tablets. If I glanced toward her, she’d smile complicitly, enjoying this game of ours. I have no more understanding of it now than I did back then, but it’s ingrained in my memory as few images are.

Currently, Anna is working for the Raleigh News and Observer, but I think she has dreams of becoming a novelist. In college she majored in creative writing, and the stories she wrote were as dark as her personality. I recall reading one in which a young girl becomes a prostitute to care for her sick father, a man who’d once molested her. When I set the pages down, I wondered what I was supposed to make of such a thing.

She is also madly in love. Anna, always careful and deliberate in her choices, was highly selective when it came to men, and thankfully Keith has always struck me as someone who treats her well. He intends to be an orthopedist and carries himself with a confidence that comes only to those who’ve faced few setbacks in life. I learned through Jane that for their first date Keith took Anna kite flying on the beach near Fort Macon. Later that week, when Anna brought him by the house, Keith came dressed in a sports coat, freshly showered and smelling faintly of cologne. As we shook hands, he held my gaze and impressed me by saying, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Lewis.”

Joseph, our second-born, is a year younger than Anna. He’s always called me “Pop,” though no one else in our family has ever used that term, and again, we have little in common. He’s taller and thinner than I, wears jeans to most social functions, and when he visits at Thanksgiving or Christmas, he eats only vegetables. While he was growing up, I thought him quiet, yet his reticence, like Anna’s, seemed directed at me in particular. Others often remarked on his sense of humor, though to be honest, I seldom saw it. Whenever we spent time together, I often felt as if he were trying to form an impression of me.

Like Jane, he was empathetic even as a child. He chewed his fingernails worrying about others, and they’ve been nothing but nubs since he was five years old. Needless to say, when I suggested that he consider majoring in business or economics, he ignored my advice and chose sociology. He now works for a battered women’s shelter in New York City, though he tells us nothing more about his job. I know he wonders about the choices I’ve made in my life, just as I wonder about his, yet despite our differences, it’s with Joseph that I have the conversations that I always wished to have with my children when I held them as infants. He is highly intelligent; he received a near perfect score on his SATs, and his interests span the spectrum from the history of Middle Eastern dhimmitude to theoretical applications of fractal geometry. He is also honest—sometimes painfully so—and it goes without saying that these aspects of his personality leave me at a disadvantage when it comes to debating him. Though I sometimes grow frustrated at his stubbornness, it’s during such moments that I’m especially proud to call him my son.

Leslie, the baby of our family, is currently studying biology and physiology at Wake Forest with the intention of becoming a veterinarian. Instead of coming home during the summers like most students, she takes additional classes with the intention of graduating early and spends her afternoons working at a place called Animal Farm. Of all our children, she is the most gregarious, and her laughter sounds the same as Jane’s. Like Anna, she liked to visit me in my den, though she was happiest when I gave her my full attention. As a youngster, she liked to sit in my lap and pull on my ears; as she grew older, she liked to wander in and share funny jokes. My shelves are covered with the gifts she made me growing up: plaster casts of her handprints, drawings in crayon, a necklace made from macaroni. She was the easiest to love, the first in line for hugs or kisses from the grandparents, and she took great pleasure in curling up on the couch and watching

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