“Breaks are good for your brain, Merritt. It’s been proven.”
“Where exactly?” she asked, standing up from her chair.
“I don’t know. Studies. Science. I was an English major, don’t ask me.”
“You’re lucky I was an English major, too.”
The two of them put their coats on. There was a door in the kitchen that led to the yard, which Whit held open for Merritt before following her out.
“What were you planning to do with that English major?” he asked as he began to lead her on the trail into the woods to the right of the house. “Write?”
“Not originally,” she said from behind him. “I didn’t know what to do really. My first job out of school was a horrible fundraising job in elementary schools, where I’d beg kids to sell wrapping paper and buckets of popcorn, which was not quite what I’d dreamed of back in class reading Toni Morrison and George Eliot.”
“And you gave all that up,” Whit asked without looking back, “for grad school?”
A sniff of a laugh behind him, then: “Kind of. I got a technical writing job eventually, doing instructional materials and troubleshooting guidelines for a software company—really grim stuff. And then my dad got sick.”
Merritt’s pause let Whit know, somehow, that her father had not gotten better.
“So I came here for a bit, and then, after—well, after, I started the MFA program.”
“I’m sorry,” Whit said.
“Me, too, sometimes. Two years and nothing to show for it—”
“No,” Whit interrupted, “I mean about your dad.”
“Oh.”
He turned to look at Merritt. Her indigo coat stood out against the yellows, oranges, reds, and greens of the trees around them.
“What was his name?”
Whit had read somewhere that this was a kind thing to ask, though in his case, with Helen, it hadn’t often been necessary. It turned out to be true, however, because Merritt’s face brightened.
“Barry,” she said, almost laughing. “A very dad name.”
Whit smiled and nodded, and then turned to walk. Theypassed the next few minutes quietly, listening to the wind and the crunch of leaves punctuated by occasional animal sounds, until Merritt spoke.
“By the way, did you walk the five miles to the bookstore that day you came in about the baby-giant thing?”
Something hot filled Whit’s face. He glanced back at her.
“You’re looking at me like that’s crazy,” he told her.
She smirked at him. “It is a little crazy.”
He shrugged. “Thatday I definitely did have writer’s block. But then, I had writer’s block basically every day before we started working together.”
Merritt looked down, rubbing her arm absent-mindedly, and Whit realized he had probably sounded embarrassingly desperate. To move on, he started walking again, then stopped to point at something to their right.
“There, that stream there is what Helen based the one in the book off of.”
“The Brook of Lost Memory?” Merritt asked, stopping to stand at his shoulder.
“Yeah, that.”
Merritt made a noise of amusement at his persistent ignorance, thenhmm-ed. “I can see it, I think. Yeah, that’s sort of how I imagined it.”
