Chapter Three
Tuesdays were writing group days, which were at turns wonderful and excruciating. Wonderful, of course, because writing is
a solitary art, and joining with one’s peers—particularly peers who wrote in different fields and therefore were not competitors
but fellow creators—was life-giving to Whit. But writing group days were also terrible, horrible, because they meant sharing
a bit about what you’d written since the last meeting and what your goals were for the day. Then they would write together,
and lately, for Whit, that meant staring at his blank computer screen while his writing partner tap-tap-tapped away next to
him.
As Whit walked toward Carafe, the coffee shop where the group met, he made his mental lists:
What I’ve Written Since Last Time:
Nothing.
Goals for Today:
Avoid being crushed beneath the monumental weight of potential failure, the possibility I may never write anything worthwhile
again, the reverberating notion that maybe I should have learned a real trade, the not-terribly-slim chance my agent and/or
publisher will drop me, all made exponentially worse by my wife’s death and everything that comes with that.
Respond to emails.
He’d start with number 2.
Carafe was located on Cork Street, which was not technically the main street of Whelk Harbor, though everyone in town treated
it that way. This came down to cuteness. The brick sidewalks were lined with beech trees, and in about a month the street
would be decorated with multicolored Christmas lights and coniferous greenery. Red bows would be wrapped around lampposts,
arranged in arches over doorframes, and perched in the display windows of the boutique, the bakery, the bookstore, the bistro,
and the ice cream shop, all of which had taken over the white colonial-style buildings with black roofs. The church and the
town hall, as well as the bank and a real estate agency, backed up to Cork Street, which was a favorite spot for wintry strolls
(a paper cup of hot cocoa in hand) or, in summer, swimsuited bike rides (towels draped over necks and hanging from beach bags).
Today the trees were shifting, in a gentle October way, from green to orange, yellow, and red, and every doorstep and staircase
was crowded with warty pumpkins and elongated gourds.
Carafe even had a scarecrow out front. The shop, a relatively new addition to town, had taken over a former sunglasses store, which had taken over a former video rental store, which had once, somewhere far down the line, belonged to a blacksmith.
There was some talk at first, among the locals, about how a coffee shop was simply an attempt to please tourists, how the bistro and bakery already functioned in much the same way that a coffee shop would.
The town’s first selectman had even tried to mount a protest at the grand opening, but the owners, who turned out to be lovely, lifelong New Englanders, provided the paltry group of activists with coffee as well as scones sourced from the bakery and breakfast sandwiches from the bistro, all gratis.
Needless to say, the protest ended in a lot of well-fed, contented sighs.
And now, with its flagstone floors and ever-warm fireplace, its constant hum of Chet Baker standbys and the orderly shelves of small-batch single-origin offerings, the coffee shop had become a symbiotic partner in the town’s ecosystem.
Willa was waiting for Whit at the banquette in their usual corner, wearing a thick turtleneck sweaterdress the color of burlap,
with her dark hair in Bantu knots. Their writing group had gotten smaller and smaller over the years, until just the two of
them remained.
“Hello, Whitacre,” she said, using a nickname he hated. His full name was Whitman, not Whitacre, obviously, he would say, because could you imagine? Whitacre Longacre?
He nodded at the barista, who knew him and would soon pop over with his usual drink. Whit squeezed in across from Willa.
“Hello, Wilhelmina,” he said, using her actual full name, which she also hated. “How’s it going?”
“Oh, you know,” she said, lifting her fingers from her laptop to stretch them, interlocked, high above her head. “It’s torturous
and bleak, and I feel as if I have never written anything good in my life and never will again. So, the usual.”
She smiled. Willa had won many awards for her literary fiction. She was both critically and financially more successful than
Whit had ever been. But it was nice to know they both struggled, even if her struggles apparently ended with six-figure book
deals and second editions bearing shiny medallions on their front covers while his struggles just . . . kept on.
Whit opened his laptop and logged in. But when he saw that the number of unread emails in his inbox was closer to his age
than his shoe size, he reached up and closed it immediately. Willa laughed.
“Emails?”
“Emails,” Whit sighed, dragging his hand through his beard, “and emails and emails.”
“Helen’s people or yours?”
Whit laughed.
“Helen’s, of course.” Her agent, her editor, even superfans, whose devotion to Helen bordered on the obsessive and deranged.
“Did you take your email off your website yet?”
“I did, but the fans are still emailing. I’m worried it’s on Reddit or something.” Whit sighed.
Helen’s fans were very kind usually, and very sad. Most of them were still sending condolences, but some of them did a thing
Whit found repellant: implicitly comparing their grief to his.
“I don’t usually mind. It’s just when they act like we’ve both experienced the same level of loss—as if reading some books
is the same thing as really knowing someone.”
Whit heard the words coming out and was surprised by how clinical they sounded and felt. No breaking down today—that was good.
Willa nodded. She had heard him say this before.
Whit shrugged in acknowledgment. It was nice to be understood.
“And what do the publishing people want?”
Whit closed his eyes. “What else?”
“An ETA on the book?”
“Always the book.”
After she died, Helen had shocked everyone, including Whit, by “leaving” her book to him, if it could be called that, in her
will. It was one of her last wishes (alongside the scholarship fund for the Foothills School) that Whit be the one to finish
the fifth and final book in her famous series. Helen’s books were fantasies set in a complex, diverse world full of magic
and palace intrigue. Whit was a mystery novelist; the closest thing to fantasy in his books was the high success rate of his
detective. Helen’s books were about three half-magical children: a half-elf, a half-giant, and a half-fairy. The children
in Whit’s books were usually murder victims.
That Whit would be the executor of Helen’s will had been a given, and he’d expected its contents to be standard, unexciting.
They’d agreed long ago to keep their wills and bank accounts separate, because they were practical and because things like copyrights could get complicated.
But they’d also agreed that Helen would get all of Whit’s assets and vice versa.
In any case, reading a will whose contents he already more or less knew had not been top of mind in the days after losing Helen.
Annie had wanted to return to school as soon as possible, and so Whit had been in the car after dropping her off, driving
like an automaton following its programming. He’d been listening to Steely Dan on the satellite radio and thinking of nothing—he’d
been thinking of nothing for what seemed like forever—and the call had startled him. It was Helen’s lawyer, asking him to
stop by when he got the chance.
He drove straight there, and the details of the meeting were hazy now. He remembered being walked through his duties with
the scholarship fund and a financial gift for the MFA program where they’d met. The annotated book wasn’t mentioned, having
been a spur-of-the-moment idea from Helen’s hospital bed. And when the lawyer finally said the words “literary estate,” Whit
had not expected much beyond details of royalties and who held what copyright. But there had been a bombshell. In the early
days of Helen’s sickness, she had amended her publishing contract so that it said, in legalese, that the fifth book would
be written by Helen if she were able, and that her estate would decide her successor if she were not.
She had not been able to complete the book, and Whit knew this, of course he did. But he knew it in the same way he’d known
she wouldn’t be able to see Annie graduate, or to celebrate their twentieth anniversary. It had not been something he could
fix, but then here came the will, where it was mentioned alongside the ring she’d left to Whit’s sister and the heirlooms
she’d left to her cousins: I leave the completion of the fifth and final novel in the Greenwood Castle Saga to my husband, Whitman Howard Longacre, using whatever means he deems necessary and appropriate.
After that, it seemed to Whit that he had teleported from the office to the car, and he suddenly found himself back on the
road home, pulling into a grassy alcove in the trees used mostly as a parking lot for hikers and mountain bikers. His clearest
memory was the way his head fell to the steering wheel of its own accord, and how all of it—the grief of Helen’s absence,
the crushing heaviness and total exhaustion of single parenting, and now this new thing—seemed to pull him downwards, like
a million tiny weights eager to drag him through the floor of the car and into the soil below.
This was the Monumental Task that weighed on him, at all times and in all places. It was up to him to finish a beloved series
that he had had no hand in writing; it was his job now to surprise, delight, and satisfy millions of readers, sticking an
impossible-to-stick landing, for the sake of the fans, yes, but for Helen, too. Helen’s editor would send him overly enthusiastic,