She looked at him as though he might be about to deliver some sort of meaningful statement.
“Yes?”
He nodded at the cards. “Don’t you want to play again?”
She rolled her eyes, then relaxed. “Actually, I do.”
They played four more games, but after the first, they forgot to keep score.
In fact, it took her days to hold up her end of the deal. She typed the message, attached the incomplete doc, the whole thing, but the email sat unsent for at least seventy-twohours.
This was stupid, of course. She’d spent the first year of her MFA building up the calloused skin necessary to endure criticism, especially the brutal, unfiltered kind that came from those students most willing to demolish their peers to get a leg up themselves. Still, Whit was Whit. This was risky, like jeopardizing her standing in his eyes; she was inviting him to judgeher. What if giving him access to her work—the book of her heart—what if that somehow proved, once and for all, that she wasn’t cut out to be an author in her own right?
It took another hike, another morning spent staring at the same misty pond—its trees now leafless and black against the pinkish dawn light—before she was ready.I am going to be a writer, she reminded herself, then pulled out her phone and released the email from the confines of her drafts folder.
Immediate regret. That was her first emotion. Then, after taking two deep breaths and stretching her arms to their fullest extent, she felt relief. It was done now, and anyway, things were going well. For the first time in—what was it? a year?—Merritt felt like she awoke each day with a purpose. It reminded her of those early months of grad school, when she was visited by a total certainty that she had made the right decision, that she was right where she should be, that her future would work out in the right way. She had written so freely and fearlessly back then. She’d been prolific and inventive. Now as then, she felt in control, like each day she was choosing to do the things that mattered, writing with Whit by daylight and then, in the hours before bed, writing at the little desk in her room while the sun set over the park beyond her window.
She loved writing with Whit—loved both being with Whit and doing the work itself. The two of them were good partners, making something she felt proud of, and even if she was a little confused about where things stood between them, she was allowing herself to enjoy the time she spent at the Longacre house. And it wasn’t just that. Her work at the bookstore felt more fulfilling, and her own writing was compelling again in a way that hadn’t been true since Graydon had called writing for children “trite and easy.” She was feeling early-in-a-project momentum, but here she was, almost finished with the manuscript.
Thingsweregoing well. Really well. And people were starting to notice.
“There’s myradiantdaughter,” Kathleen said one morning. She liked to do this—to pretend she and Merritt were the cheesy mother-daughter duo in a bad Netflix movie.
Sometimes Merritt would play along, but today she was too focused on reading Whit’s third book as she waited for water to boil in the kitchen. (She had flown throughA Liturgy for Mourning, and Whit, it turned out, had been right: the books did get better as she went on.)
When Kathleen, standing in the arched doorway, spotted the oatmeal packet in Merritt’s hand, she pointed as if it were a shocking wound.
“Yuck. It’s Saturday. Let’s go get breakfast instead.”
Merritt was not hard to convince. She switched off the burner, and in ten minutes, two of which were spent debating over wearing a scarf, they were walking down Cork Street. Other people were out, too, as the morning was mild and the farmers’ market would be happening on the village green. Watching kids in beanies holding their parents’ hands and noting the steam rising from people’s coffee cups, Merritt liked how fullyfallit all felt. Her feet continually found crunchy leaves to step on, and her hair lifted gently in the perfectly cool breeze. A couple approached them, holding hands, and Merritt and her mother naturally split to give way to them.
“You know,” Kathleen said, as she and Merritt rejoined each other farther down the sidewalk, “you are in a markedly better mood than I’ve seen you in weeks. I was joking about you being radiant, but it’s also true.”
Merritt felt the blush in her neck and cheeks, and she wished she’d worn the scarf. She could feel her mother looking at her as a dozen ways of answering the implied question stacked up in her mind. Kathleen knew about Whit and the kiss that wasn’t, and she knew about Graydon—not everything, but enough to hate the man and rejoice at Merritt’s freedom. She knew a bit lessabout Merritt’s dashed writing dreams, at least from the source, but Merritt realized that her mother had probably intuited quite a lot.
After too long, Kathleen spoke again.
“Well, now you’re just being obvious, dear.”
“Mom.”
Kathleen finally looked away. “I’m just saying, a quick, short response could have forestalled me, but you look as if you’re playing 20 Questions with yourself.”
Merritt sighed and looked across the street, where people were standing in line for doughnuts.
“No, you know what you look like? Sherlock Holmes when he’s thinking through all the possibilities. Please, Merritt, answer me, you look like a cocaine-addled Victorian detective.”
“Speaking of, did you finish your book?” Merritt asked, leaning heavily on the barest trace of a segue—from general nineteenth-century detective fiction to the specific nineteenth-century political novel her mother had been reading.
“I did,” Kathleen said. “I loved it in the end, as is my way. But I will not be diverted.”
Merritt sighed again, hating the petulance rising up in her. “Mom, please.”
“I am just happy that you’re happy. Because you are happy, yes?”
It was a simple question, but of course, it opened a chasm in the sidewalk that Merritt felt herself peering into. A month ago, she would have saidno. Or, she would have saidyes, of course, and been lying. A year and a half ago, she’d have replied,Yes, yes, I’m deliriously happy!, but now, in hindsight, that felt false, too. Perhaps shewasdeliriously happy, “deliriously” being the operative word.
Maybe now she should just say yes and spare her mother from fretting. For all of Kathleen’s discernment and keen insights, there were times when Merritt thought her mother’s primary desire was to assuage her own worries about her daughter—the only person she had left to worry about—as quickly and easily as possible.
