Three Weeks With My Brother by Nicholas Sparks, Micah Sparks Read Free Book Online Page A

and with his arm around me, we sat for what seemed interminable hours in the shade.
    “Do you think Dana will die?” I asked eventually.
    “No,” he said.
    “What’s wrong with her?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Then how do you know she won’t die?”
    “Because she won’t. I just know it.”
    I glanced at him. “Mom looked scared. Dad, too.”
    He nodded.
    “I don’t want her to die,” I said.
    It was the first time I’d ever contemplated such a thing, and it scared me. We didn’t have much as a family, but we’d always had one another. Even though she was younger and didn’t explore like my brother and me, my sister had already taken on the best aspects of my mother’s personality. She had a perennially sunny disposition; she laughed and smiled, and—on those days when I wasn’t tagging along with my brother—was my best friend. Like me, she loved the Johnny West set, and at night we would play together for hours.
    My brother and I were a curious and sad sight in the parking lot. Strangers would see us as they got out of the car on their way to visit someone inside; hours later, when they came back out, we’d still be sitting in the same spot. A few people offered to buy us a soda or something to eat, but we’d shake our heads and say that we were fine. We’d been taught never to take anything from strangers.
    Later in the afternoon, while my brother was climbing in the tree, he lost his grip and fell to the pavement. Landing on his wrist, he screamed, and as he held it before me, I saw it begin to swell and slowly turn black-and-blue. We wondered aloud whether it was broken. We wondered whether we should disobey our mom and head into the hospital to tell her about it, and whether it might even need a cast.
    We didn’t move, though. We couldn’t. In the end, my sister would recover, and we’d learn that Micah’s wrist was sprained, not broken, but at the time, we knew nothing. Instead, we sat together with fear in our hearts, just the two of us, not saying much to each other the rest of the afternoon.

C HAPTER 4
    A fter listening to Micah’s admonition about cheating myself of the excitement about our trip around the world, I hung up the phone, thinking about what he’d said. What Cathy had been saying. What my agent had been saying. What everyone, in fact, had been saying about the trip whenever I’d mentioned it. Despite the logical arguments, despite the fact that it had been my idea to go, I still couldn’t summon any excitement about the trip.
    It’s not that I spent my days under a cloud of doom and gloom. Yes, I was busy, but to be honest, I found tremendous satisfaction in all that I was doing. My wife was right; I was busy because I liked being busy. Perhaps, I mused, the problem was that all my energies were focused in only three areas—father, husband, and writer—with little time for anything else. As long as things fit into these neat little boxes that I’d constructed for myself, I felt in control. Not only could I function, but I could thrive. But because it was all I could do to keep up in these three areas, the idea of stepping outside the boxes to do new things—travel, adventure, or spending three weeks with my brother—not only seemed impossible, but struck me as a trade-off I would regret. And in a rare moment of clarity in an otherwise foggy year, I suddenly realized that I had begun to take this to extremes.
    If I couldn’t even find excitement in the idea of taking a trip around the world, what kind of person was I? I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I didn’t want to stay that way forever. Somehow, I needed to find my balance again.
    Of course, there are thousands of books and talk shows offering ways to straighten out your life, and experts of every variety claim to have the answers. Intinctively, though, I wanted to figure things out with the help of the one person in my life who had lived through the same things I had: my brother.
    Micah had had his own