Nicholas Sparks - Two by Two

“Have to. Gonna snow this week. I already have the winter survival kit in the backseat. I wouldn’t want your mom to have to get it out of the trunk in case she gets stuck on the roads.”

“It’s not going to snow,” I said. The temperature was already springlike; I was wearing a T-shirt and had actually debated wearing shorts to their house.

He squinted at me from under the hood. “Have you been watching the weather?”

“I heard something about it on the radio, but you know weather guys. They’re wrong more often than they’re right.”

“My knees say it’s going to snow, too.”

“It’s almost seventy degrees!”

“Suit yourself. I’m going to need some help wrapping the pipes after I finish up here. You’ll be around to pitch in like the old days?”

My dad, I should say, had always been that type of guy. If a hurricane was expected to hit the Carolina coast, my dad would spend days clearing debris from the yard, moving things to the garage, and closing up the shutters, despite the fact Charlotte was nearly two hundred miles from the coast. “You weren’t around when Hugo hit in 1989,” he would tell Marge and me. “Charlotte might as well have been Dorothy’s farmhouse. Whole city practically blew away.”

“Yeah, I’ll be here,” I said to him. “But you’re wasting your time. It’s not going to snow.”

I went inside and visited with my mom for a while; when my father came in and motioned toward me an hour later, I knew what he expected. I helped without complaint, but even when I watched him start to work on his own car, I didn’t take his cautions to heart. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what might be included in a winter-survival kit. That’s what I told myself later, anyway, but the real reason I wasn’t ready for what came next was that, at that age, I thought I was smarter than he was.

As late as Tuesday afternoon, the temperature was still inching toward sixty degrees; on Wednesday, despite the clouds rolling in, the temperature nearly hit fifty and I’d forgotten completely about my dad’s warning. On Thursday, however, the storm smashed into Charlotte with a fury: It began to snow, lightly at first, and then more heavily. By the time I was driving to work, the snow was accumulating on the highways. Schools were closed for the day, and only half the people made it to the agency. The snow continued to fall, and when I left work in midafternoon, the roads were nearly impassable. Hundreds of motorists ended up skidding off the highway, myself included, amidst a snowfall of more than a foot in a city with only a few snowplows available. By nightfall, the city of Charlotte had come to a standstill.

It took nearly five hours for a tow truck to arrive and pull me out. Though I wasn’t in danger-I’d brought a jacket, had half a tank of gas and my heater was working-I kept thinking about the differences between my dad and me.

While I blithely hoped for the best, my dad was the kind of guy who always expected and prepared for the worst.

August brought with it sweltering temperatures and high humidity broken by the occasional afternoon thunderstorm, but the weeks leading up to London’s first day of school felt entirely different than the previous weeks, if only because I was actually earning an income .

Despite being scheduled every single minute of the day, I felt less stressed than I had since starting my business. I worked with the tech guy for everything tech related, scouted locations and got the releases I needed, talked with the head of the film and sound crews, picked up the permits, talked to an agent at the local casting agency, signed a contract for the billboards, and locked in a great deal for television advertising. All that in addition to finalizing the rehearsal and shooting schedule for the first two commercials and overseeing the casting session for the third commercial, all of which would take place the same week London began school.

Despite those things, I still got London to and from her activities, went bike riding, received a million hugs and kisses, and even got her piano and art classes rescheduled once school began. Tennis camp came to an end right around the time we attended an open house at the school, where London had a chance to meet her new teacher. There, she learned that Bodhi would also be in her class, and I was able to visit with Emily for a minute. Since her ex had been in town, her schedule had been unpredictable and I hadn’t seen her much since our playdate. I introduced her to Vivian-my wife’s demeanor could best be described as distant, but with a warning-and understood that I better keep such visits with Emily to a minimum or there were going to be problems .

Vivian spent two or three nights a week in Atlanta, and when at home, she continued to blow warm and cool. That was better than the hot and cold I’d been experiencing, but the excitement of the date night toward the end of July wasn’t repeated, and the endlessly shifting temperature of my wife’s moods left me both excited and nervous about seeing her whenever the SUV pulled up in the drive.

If there was any other change to my routine during that period, it had to do with exercise. The day after I’d really looked at myself in the mirror, I took Marge’s advice and on the first Monday of the month, I set the alarm forty minutes earlier. I donned a pair of running shorts and commenced a slow trudge through the neighborhood, one in which I was passed by every jogging mother, two of whom were also pushing strollers. Years ago, I’d been able to jog five or six miles and feel refreshed when I finished: after a mile and a half on day one of my new regime, I practically collapsed on the front porch rocker. It took me more than an hour to feel like myself again. Nonetheless, I did it the following morning, and the morning after that, a streak that hasn’t been broken. By the second week of August, I added push-ups and sit-ups to my routine, and my pants became steadily looser as the month wore on.

London had improved enough on her bike to allow me to ride beside her, and on the day after the open house at school, we traversed the neighborhood together, even racing for an entire block. I let her win, of course. After stowing our bikes back in the garage, I gave her a high-five, and we ended up drinking lemonade on the back porch, hoping to see another bald eagle while the sun began its descent.

But even though we didn’t, I suspected I’d long remember that day, if only because it, too, was perfect in its own way.

“Don’t you think she already has enough clothes for school?” I asked Vivian. It was the Saturday before school was supposed to start, and because Vivian had arrived home late from Atlanta the night before, we’d agreed to put off date night until tonight.

“I’m not getting clothes,” Vivian said as she finished dressing in the bathroom. She’d already been to yoga and the gym, and had showered; it was one of those mornings of frantic activity for her. “I’m getting school supplies. Backpack, pencils, erasers, and some other things. Did you even check the school website?”

I hadn’t. In all frankness, the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. I had, however, received and paid the bill for the first semester tuition, which put another dent in the savings.

“I thought we were going to Mom and Dad’s.”

“We are,” Vivian answered. “This isn’t going to take that long. Why don’t you head over and we’ll meet you there?”