all received a letter from Paul, April had felt uneasy. She didn’t like feeling that way. She wanted things settled and comfortable. Knowable. It was one reason she had married so young. Well, at the time, it didn’t feel young. She had felt grown-up and responsible. Or at least she had told herself that because it made her decision the right one.
She had met Ron Page in her second semester of community college on the first day of history class when they both headed to the same seat in the lecture hall. Front row, left aisle seat. She always chose that seat.
Being short was a decided disadvantage. If you wanted to see the teacher, you had to sit up front. Sitting at the end of a row meant she could swivel out of her chair and be up and out of the room without stumbling over people.
For a split second, transfixed by the sight of him, she had paused, then said, “This is my seat,” and then covered her mouth, afraid she had been too forward.
“Of course it is,” he said, as he moved to the chair beside her. “Do you mind if I sit here?”
April had not only not minded, she loved it. Mostly. Because it didn’t take long before his nearness distracted her from what the teacher was saying. Later, Ron had confessed to the same feeling. He told her a year later when he had asked her to marry him as they had dinner at their favorite restaurant.
Ron explained he was leaving to finish his schooling at the university, and he wanted her to go with him. April had hesitated only for a split second, thinking of the four friends she would leave behind and the plans she had made for herself once she got through school.
But the idea of spending the rest of her life with Ron chased every fear away. Her friends had been happy for her. At least she believed they had been. They had all cried and hugged as she and Ron drove away—her looking back and waving, Ron’s eyes on the road taking them to their future.
That’s the way their life had been for almost thirty years. Ron led the way. After Ron finished his degree, they moved even further away when Ron took a job in Silver Lake. He loved it. It was exciting and fulfilling for him and provided for his family, which he had always said was his priority.
April, who had grown up with parents who were carefree and sometimes not careful about providing for her, was grateful that Ron had kept his promise always to protect and provide for her and the kids.
Although the plan had been to finish school with Ron, instead, she worked to make sure he got through school. After that, the idea of going to school didn’t appeal to her. Besides, she had gotten pregnant with their first child almost immediately.
While the children grew up, April kept herself busy being a full-time mom, raising two children who grew up to be adventurers like their grandparents. One started traveling, rarely settling down.
The other married and moved to Canada, leaving her and Ron to make a new life for themselves. The only adventure they planned would be to travel to see their grandchild when he was born.
They still sat beside each other. Ron, careful and planning, was always on her left, as he had been that first day of history class. But now that the kids were grown, she had grown restless. April worried that maybe her parents’ carefree nature had finally surfaced in her after all these years.
She pretended that wasn’t true, that she wasn’t restless, that she wasn’t wondering about what she had missed in life. Then Paul’s letter arrived.
Until that day, it had been easy to tell herself that her life was exactly what she had wanted. She had said to herself that she needed nothing more.
But the letter made her face the truth that she did want more. What that was, or how it would happen in their carefully planned life, was not something she had allowed herself to think about until she read the letter.
Now that her friends, the ones she barely knew anymore, were caught up in Paul’s scavenger hunt, the fear that she had missed out on something in her life and now would miss out on the adventure the others were having was causing her stomach to hurt.
She wanted to take part, but how? Ron liked her by his side, not gallivanting all over the country, as he had said when she mentioned visiting Judith and Cindy in Spring Falls.
“It’s hardly gallivanting,” she had laughed, thinking at first he was joking.
When he scowled at her for laughing, she stopped, stepped back, and looked at the man she had been married to all these years. Physically, he looked almost the same, just aged to perfection. Why men aged to look better and women simply aged had never seemed fair to her.
Ron’s slightly nerdy appearance had matured, only making him more attractive. His brown hair had turned gray, and he didn’t wear glasses anymore. Yes, at fifty, he was a very handsome man.
He kept his promises to me, April thought. But then, seeing the look he was giving her, asked herself how had she not noticed that her parents had always visited them, and never the other way around?
Her parents had both passed away a few years earlier, and since they had moved to Florida not long after she and Ron moved away, she had flown down for both their funerals, Ron and the children at her side.
Which meant there had only been one time she had been to Spring Falls since the day she had looked back and waved at her friends, wiping tears from her eyes, turned forward to face the life she and Ron would make together.
It was for Bree and Paul’s wedding, and she suspected now that had only happened because Ron didn’t want her friends to know how he intended to run her life from that point on. They might have stopped her then—if she would have listened—which was doubtful.
No, Ron would not be happy about her decision to do more with her life now. And she would start with helping Bree. It was time to be in the front row again. This time, life would be the teacher.
If Ron wanted to be beside her, she would be grateful. But either way, she was ready for something different in life. What that would be, April didn’t know. It surprised her that she was pleased with the idea. But she had glimpsed the girl she used to be, and that meant she could not turn back. That girl, older and wiser, would make the decisions from now on.