“I’m in a good place, Mom,” she said, nudging her with her shoulder. “Really.”
Kathleen smiled at that, easily pleased, and then Merritt’s hopes that she had put a stop to this line of questioning were immediately deflated.
“I’m so glad, Merritt. Truly. And may I askwhyyou’re in such a good place?”
Internally, Merritt bristled at both the question and the addition of the word “such,” which pushed the description she’d applied to herself into the realm of exaggeration.
Outwardly, Merritt lifted her hands. “I like my job, Mom. Jobs. I’m finding them fulfilling right now.”
Kathleen nodded, as if this information were obvious. “But which job in particular, dear?”
“Thewritingone, obviously. Because I’m getting paid to write.”
“Which you’ve always wanted.”
“Yes.”
“And I suppose you’ve forgiven Whit for almost kissing you?”
Merritt nodded.
“Nothing to forgive. It was dumb of him, and he knows it.”
“My favorite kind of man.”
Merritt laughed. They paused their conversation for a few steps. They could see the bistro now, and she hoped this landmark would provide a natural endpoint to the conversation. It did not.
“Though maybe it wasn’tthatdumb of him—”
“Mom,” Merritt groaned, stopping right there on the sidewalk. “I told you. We agreed to move on, and we haven’t talked about it since. It would be stupid to ruin things.”
“Yes, but something must have happened. You were so high-strung and serious after that party, and now, look at you.” Sheshrugged at her daughter with her whole upper body. “Radiant, like I said.”
Merritt allowed her feet to begin moving again, primarily because Kathleen had only slowed rather than stopping completely, and Merritt refused to revert to anything resembling the strategies of an adolescent temper tantrum.
The door to the bistro was ten paces away when Merritt said, “I don’t know, Mom. He apologized, and it was nice. I think he really respects my position and my contributions. And that just feels... good.”
“Well, good,” Kathleen said, pausing with her hand on the door pull. “And you know I abhor violence, darling, but I do need to tell you that the world will be down one mystery novelist if Whit Longacre fucks this up.”
“Mom!”
Kathleen grinned, shrugged again, then opened the door.
“Table for two, please,” she told the host, and it was several seconds before Merritt recovered enough from her mother’s threat of violence, and what must have been her first use of the F-word in the last twenty years, to follow her to the table.
Over a breakfast of pecan coffee, crusty rye toast with strawberry-sumac jam, peppery bacon, and eggs Benedict, Merritt’s mother mercifully relented. Instead of Whit, they discussed Thanksgiving, which was the following Thursday.
Merritt had spent the holiday in Texas the year prior, helping Graydon host an elaborate dinner party that would go down as one of the most stressful evenings of her life. Besides several professors and local authors, Graydon’s teenage daughters were also in attendance, as was his ex-wife, Leonora, and her boyfriend, a man ten years older than Graydon.
“It’s the holidays,” Graydon had said, as if this explained the unconventional guest list, and Merritt had of course understood about the twins. But she had never met Leonora, who scared her a bit.
Merritt did very little in the way of cooking, as Graydon had the day catered by the same operation he apparently used annually. She did make her mother’s citrusy cranberry sauce, which made her feel a little less guilty about leaving Kathleen alone in cold New England, and she watched eagerly during the meal to see which guests enjoyed it. In the end, she felt it was woefully neglected in favor of a prosaic brown gravy.
Before the meal, however, she had finally met Leonora, and that went even worse than expected. Horribly, the woman wasnice. She seemed perfectly unfazed by Merritt’s existence, entirely unthreatened, and she was funny, much to Merritt’s dismay. And Graydon laughed at her jokes incessantly, and he touched her frequently, on the elbow, the shoulder, and once with a jaunty little hip-to-hip movement she’d never seen him do before.
It was miserable. Merritt wasonthe whole time, desperate to impress the Orange Prize and Lambda Award winners, to be cool in front of the twins, and to make Leonora like her, at the same time that she was pathetically, heartbreakingly desperate to feel like Graydon was even slightly aware of her presence.
She missed her mother terribly the whole time, and even worse, she missed her late father, who loved Thanksgiving and would have hated Graydon. As it turned out, that evening had been the beginning of the end for them. Merritt confronted Graydon afterwards, while washing dishes as he put away leftovers and finished off the wine. She had started obliquely at first.
