He was borrowing these lines, verbatim, from Helen. It was what she had said to guests, and now he was repeating the words like flight attendants on a weekly flight from Tampa to Raleigh.
Get it together, Whit.
“Can I get you something to drink? Water? Tea?”
“I’d accept tea.”
Merritt followed him to the kitchen. Everyone who’d been in his house for the last year had been there before: his sister, his mother, Willa, some of his and Helen’s couple friends who’d checked in on him early on, then came around less and less frequently. Merritt was the first guest in who knew how long to see the place with fresh eyes. He didn’t look back as they walked, but he wondered what she saw: The sad remnants of a concluded marriage? A bachelor’s hovel? Or something else?
“I love this house,” she said once they were in the wide-open kitchen. When he turned to look at her, he decided she meant it. Thank God he had cleaned up.
“Thank you. It feels like home.”
She nodded, then leaned against the counter that ran beneath a long window, her backpack still on.
“Sorry,” he said, filling the kettle at the farm sink. He popped it onto the stove, lit one of the eight burners, and turned to her. “Let me take your bags to my study.”
She was distracted. “You have one of those things.”
Whit followed her gaze to the pot filler faucet over the stove.
“Oh, right,” he laughed. “I always forget.”
Merritt looked at him as if she were trying to crack an interesting, somewhat amusing code. It made Whit’s face burn slightly.
“Your things?” he said, and she shook herself out of her musings to hand over her bags. Whit left her in the kitchen, then took the walk down the hallway as an opportunity to do some deep breathing exercises. Why, he could not say. He was not a deep breather. But this was turning into one of the more awkward encounters of hislife, despite the early ease he’d felt with Merritt at the bookstore and the bistro. He could not make heads or tails of that, and now here he was, standing in his study, trying to remember whether you were supposed to breathe in for three seconds or five seconds and what came after that.
“Enough,” he said aloud after a moment, giving himself two small slaps on one cheek. “Be normal.”
When he got back to the kitchen, Merritt was examining the fridge display. Annie’s schoolwork and artwork and a single photo from a trip to Niagara Falls, the three of them in yellow ponchos on a boat amid the spume, laughing and hugging and happy.
Merritt turned, and Whit felt his hackles rise reflexively in preparation for the pitying smile she would lay on him. Instead, she offered him a genuine grin and said, “Your daughter’s such an artist.”
“Oh, Annie?” he said, because of course he did, because the two slaps to the face had not been enough to remind him how many children he had. “Yes, it seems like it comes really naturally to her. And she didn’t get it from her parents, I can tell you that much.”
“I can hardly draw stick figures,” Merritt said.
“For some reason, I doubt that.”
They stared at each other for a second, both of them trying to figure out what he meant, until the kettle started whistling. After a painfully protracted discussion of the teas Whit had available, they settled on a pot of green, which Whit privately disliked. When they moved to the study, Whit saw it, too, through Merritt’s eyes, realizing for the first time that his deep clean had not quite extended this far. Once, he had watched a video online about Roald Dahl’s writing cottage, in which old Roald said the only time he’d ever vacuumed the space was when a goat broke in and pooped everywhere. Unfortunately, Whit had unconsciously taken this is as writing advice from a master, and, well, now thedesk against the window and the shelves against the walls were covered with piles of loose paper and manila folders and several empty or half-empty coffee mugs. There were books open everywhere, and the armchair by the space heater was sagging beneath the weight of a year’s worth of unread magazines, which he only now realized was probably an extreme fire hazard. And why had he never listened to Helen and had this ghastly green rug replaced with something less like the top of a pool table?
“Okay, well...” he said. He looked at Merritt to see if she appeared to be making an escape plan, but she was just smiling kindly, and yes, perhaps a smidge pityingly.
“Well,” she said gamely, “can you show me what you have so far?”
“I’m afraid not much has changed since we last spoke.”
Merritt laughed.
“Sure, but I just mean your notes and outlines, that sort of thing?”
Whit’s face remained unchanged as he waited and a pit in his stomach opened.
“Oh,” Merritt said, reading the signs. “So... really,nothing?”
“Please don’t mock me, I will cry.”
It was a joke, but Merritt looked horrified. “I wasn’t mocking—”
