The Wedding - By Nicholas Sparks Page 0,69

window.” He squinted into the sun. “Did you know that at first there was only one heart, not five?”

I raised my eyebrows. “No, I didn’t.”

“I didn’t plan on that, of course, but after Jane was born, I sort of got to thinking that the first heart looked mighty skimpy and I needed to plant some more bushes to fill it out. But I kept putting it off because it had been so much work the first time, and by the time I finally got around to the task, she was already pregnant again. When she saw what I was doing, she just assumed I’d done it because we had another child on the way, and she told me it was the sweetest thing I’d ever done for her. After that, I couldn’t exactly stop. That’s what I mean when I say it’s only partly right. The first one might have been a romantic gesture; but by the last one, it felt more like a chore. Not just the planting, but keeping them going. Roses are tough. When they’re young, they sort of sprout up like a tree, but you have to keep cutting them back so they form right. Every time they started blooming, I’d have to head out with my shears to prune them back into shape, and for a long time, the garden seemed as though it would never look right. And it hurt, too. Those thorns are sharp. I spent a lot of years with my hands bandaged up like a mummy.”

I smiled. “I’ll bet she appreciated what you were doing, though.”

“Oh, she did. For a while, anyway. Until she asked me to plow the whole thing under.”

At first, I didn’t think I’d heard him correctly, but his expression let me know I had. I recalled the melancholy I sometimes felt when staring at Allie’s paintings of the garden.

“Why?”

Noah squinted into the sun before sighing. “As much as she loved the garden, she said it was too painful to look at. Whenever she looked out the window, she’d start crying, and sometimes it seemed like she’d never stop.”

It took a moment before I realized why.

“Because of John,” I said softly, referring to the child who’d died of meningitis when he was four. Jane, like Noah, seldom mentioned him.

“Losing him nearly killed her.” He paused. “Nearly killed me, too. He was such a sweet little boy—just at that age where he was beginning to discover the world, when everything’s new and exciting. As the baby, he used to try to keep up with the bigger kids. He was always chasing after them in the yard. And he was healthy, too. Never had so much as an ear infection or a serious cold before he got sick. That’s why it was such a shock. One week he was playing in the yard, and the next week, we were at his funeral. After that, Allie could barely eat or sleep, and when she wasn’t crying, she just sort of wandered around in a daze. I wasn’t sure she’d ever get over it. That’s when she told me to plow the garden under.”

He drifted off. I said nothing, knowing it wasn’t possible to fully imagine the pain of losing a child.

“Why didn’t you?” I asked after a while.

“I thought it was just her grief talking,” he said quietly, “and I wasn’t sure if she really wanted me to do it, or just said it because her pain was so awful that day. So I waited. I figured if she asked me a second time, I would do it. Or I’d offer to remove just the outer heart, if she wanted to keep the rest of it. But in the end, she never did. And after that? Even though she used it in a lot of her paintings, she never felt the same way about it. When we lost John, it stopped being a happy thing for her. Even when Kate got married there, she had mixed feelings about it.”

“Do the kids know why there are five rings?”

“Maybe in the back of their minds they do, but they would have had to figure it out on their own. It wasn’t something Allie or I liked to talk about. After John died, it was easier to think about the garden as a single gift, rather than five. And so that’s what it became. And when the kids were older and finally got around to asking about it, Allie just told them that I’d