Nicholas Sparks - A Bend in the Road

She’d moved into a quaint apartment on Middle Street a few blocks away, in the heart of downtown. The apartment was up the stairs and three doors away from the pharmacy where in 1898 Caleb Bradham had first marketed Brad’s drink, which the world came to know as Pepsi-Cola. Around the corner was the Episcopal church, a stately brick structure shaded with towering magnolias, whose doors first opened in 1718. When she left her apartment to take her walk, Sarah passed both sites as she made her way to Front Street, where many of the old mansions had stood gracefully for the past two hundred years.

What she really admired, however, was the fact that most of the homes had been painstakingly restored over the past fifty years, one house at a time. Unlike Williamsburg, Virginia, which was restored largely through a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, New Bern had appealed to its citizens and they had responded. The sense of community had lured her parents here four years earlier; she’d known nothing about New Bern until she’d moved to town last June. As she walked, she reflected on how different New Bern was from Baltimore, Maryland, where she’d been born and raised, where she’d lived until just a few months earlier. Though Baltimore had its own rich history, it was a city first and foremost. New Bern, on the other hand, was a small southern town, relatively isolated and largely uninterested in keeping up with the ever quickening pace of life elsewhere. Here, people would wave as she passed them on the street, and any question she asked usually solicited a long, slow-paced answer, generally peppered with references to people or events that she’d never heard of before, as if everything and everyone were somehow connected. Usually it was nice, other times it drove her batty.

Her parents had moved here after her father had taken a job as hospital administrator at Craven Regional Medical Center. Once Sarah’s divorce had been finalized, they’d begun to prod her to move down as well. Knowing how her mother was, she’d put it off for a year. Not that Sarah didn’t love her mother, it was just that her mother could sometimes be…draining, for lack of a better word. Still, for peace of mind she’d finally taken their advice, and so far, thankfully, she hadn’t regretted it. It was exactly what she needed, but as charming as this town was, there was no way she saw herself living here forever. New Bern, she’d learned almost right away, was not a town for singles. There weren’t many places to meet people, and the ones her own age that she had met were already married, with families of their own. As in many southern towns, there was still a social order that defined town life. With most people married, it was hard for a single woman to find a place to fit in, or even to start. Especially someone who was divorced and completely new to the area. It was, however, an ideal place to raise children, and sometimes as she walked, Sarah liked to imagine that things had turned out differently for her. As a young girl, she’d always assumed she would have the kind of life she wanted: marriage, children, a home in a neighborhood where families gathered in the yards on Friday evenings after work was finished for the week. That was the kind of life she’d had as a child, and it was the kind she wanted as an adult. But it hadn’t worked out that way. Things in life seldom did, she’d come to understand. For a while, though, she had believed anything was possible, especially when she’d met Michael. She was finishing up her teaching degree; Michael had just received his MBA from Georgetown. His family, one of the most prominent in Baltimore, had made their fortune in banking and were immensely wealthy and clannish, the type of family that sat on the boards of various corporations and instituted policies at country clubs that served to exclude those they regarded as inferior. Michael, however, seemed to reject his family’s values and was regarded as the ultimate catch. Heads would turn when he entered a room, and though he knew what was happening, his most endearing quality was that he pretended other people’s images of him didn’t matter at all. Pretended,of course, was the key word.

Sarah, like every one of her friends, knew who he was when he showed up at a party, and she’d been surprised when he’d come up to say hello a little later in the evening. They’d hit it off right away. The short conversation had led to a longer one over coffee the following day, then eventually to dinner. Soon they were dating steadily and she’d fallen in love. After a year, Michael asked her to marry him.

Her mother was thrilled at the news, but her father didn’t say much at all, other than that he hoped that she would be happy. Maybe he suspected something, maybe he’d simply been around long enough to know that fairy tales seldom came true. Whatever it was, he didn’t tell her at the time, and to be honest, Sarah didn’t take the time to question his reservations, except when Michael asked her to sign a prenuptial agreement. Michael explained that his family had insisted on it, but even though he did his best to cast all the blame on his parents, a part of her suspected that had they not been around, he would have insisted upon it himself. She nonetheless signed the papers. That evening, Michael’s parents threw a lavish engagement party to formally announce the upcoming marriage. Seven months later, Sarah and Michael were married. They honeymooned in Greece and Turkey; when they got back to Baltimore, they moved into a home less than two blocks from where Michael’s parents lived. Though she didn’t have to work, Sarah began teaching second grade at an inner-city elementary school. Surprisingly, Michael had been fully supportive of her decision, but that was typical of their relationship then. In the first two years of their marriage, everything seemed perfect: She and Michael spent hours in bed on the weekends, talking and making love, and he confided in her his dreams of entering politics one day. They had a large circle of friends, mainly people Michael had known his entire life, and there was always a party to attend or weekend trips out of town. They spent their remaining free time in Washington, D.C., exploring museums, attending the theater, and walking among the monuments located at the Capitol Mall. It was there, while standing inside the Lincoln Memorial, that Michael told Sarah he was ready to start a family. She threw her arms around him as soon as he’d said the words, knowing that nothing he could have said would have made her any happier.

Who can explain what happened next? Several months after that blissful day at the Lincoln Memorial, Sarah still wasn’t pregnant. Her doctor told her not to worry, that it sometimes took a while after going off the pill, but he suggested she see him again later that year if they were still having problems. They were, and tests were scheduled. A few days later, when the results were in, they met with the doctor. As they sat across from him, one look was enough to let her know that something was wrong.

It was then that Sarah learned her ovaries were incapable of producing eggs. A week later, Sarah and Michael had their first major fight. Michael hadn’t come home from work, and she’d paced the floor for hours while waiting for him, wondering why he hadn’t called and imagining that something terrible had happened. By the time he came home, she was frantic and Michael was drunk. “You don’t own me” was all he offered by way of explanation, and from there, the argument went downhill fast. They said terrible things in the heart of the moment. Sarah regretted all of them later that night; Michael was apologetic. But after that, Michael seemed more distant, more reserved. When she pressed him, he denied that he felt any differently toward her. “It’ll be okay,” he said, “we’ll get through this.”