Chapter Six
It was that no-man’s-land time between lunch and dinner, so the bistro was relatively empty. Merritt had never been there,
and on another day she would have been more conscious of its weathered brick walls, its rattan chairs, and the broad picture
windows so unlike those of the other buildings on the street; there were hanging plants and creeping vines and, along one
wall, a shelf filled with orchids. Here, too, a fire crackled in the grate, and each table was butcher-block thick. Merritt
noticed none of it.
Whit Longacre was staring at her from across a menu, just waiting . . . and waiting. She realized she was looking at his beard,
surprised by its fullness, and avoiding his eyes. She looked further down to his chest, where hair poked out slightly from
the top of his T-shirt, but then she shifted her gaze to the eyes once more, and, well, she was back where she started.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but what makes you think I could help you finish it?”
It. The novel. The final novel of his wife’s series, which he had asked Merritt to help him with in the bookstore. They had
walked almost in silence to the bistro, waiting to go over the details until they sat down.
“You wouldn’t be helping me finish it,” he said now, “so much as helping me start and finish it.”
“Wait, what?”
Her suspicions from the week before were confirmed in a flash. The book wasn’t finished. I’m writing the book for her, he had said, and he had meant it.
Whit glanced down to the menu for a moment, stalling probably, then drew his eyes back to her with some determination. “I
haven’t written much at all.”
“What have you written?”
Whit held his mouth open for several seconds, as if he were hoping words would teleport into it. Then, finally, he spoke,
wincing as he did.
“ ‘Once upon a time.’ ”
Merritt physically recoiled.
“ ‘Once upon a time’?”
He shrugged apologetically.
“ ‘Once upon a time’?” she said again. Her voice was flat.
“Yes.”
“Like the beginning of a fairy tale?”
“Yes.”
“So,” she started, feeling winded by this information. “So . . .”
He laughed a miserable laugh.
“So, that’s not . . .”
“It’s not great, no.”
“It’s really not.”
More shrugging. Merritt’s eyes wandered away from Whit’s face, staring at nothing as her brain did some literary calculus.
“It’s also what you say at the beginning of a story. We’re four books in here—”
“I know!” Whit said, guilty, and then he looked relieved when a white-haired waitress appeared, wearing a denim shirt and
a khaki apron tied at the waist.
“What can I get you two to drink?”
“A beer, please. Whatever IPA you have on tap is fine.”
Merritt recoiled again. Blech.
“And you?”
“Just a water, please.”
“I’m paying,” Whit half-whispered.
“And a cabernet,” she said immediately. The words “Once upon a time” were still ringing in her brain and she needed to rinse them out.
The waitress smiled. “I’ll have them right out, and I’ll bring some bread for the table.”
When she was out of earshot, Merritt leaned forward. “So, you have written—I’m sorry to be blunt—but you have written essentially
nothing.”
“Correct.”
“For a whole year.”
“Yes.”
“What have you been doing for the last twelve months?”
“Well,” he said, dropping his eyes to the menu again, “grieving the loss of my wife and adjusting to the reality of a world
without her.”
Oh, shit. Shit shit shit. This was the second time she had said something like this to him. The second time she had alluded,
accidentally but still very insensitively, to his wife’s death. The first time, in the library, when she so casually suggested
that her mother would die to read the annotated copy of The Door in the Garden Wall, she had decided not to apologize, believing that it was more respectful to treat Whit as a mature person who understood
how idioms worked. But now . . .
“Of course. Of course you have . . . I’m so sorry.”
He rubbed a flat hand over the paper menu, drawing and redrawing a large, meaningless L. But then he lifted his eyes, smiled, and laughed the barest zephyr of a laugh.
“It’s okay. That’s not fair of me to do.”
“No—”
“I mean, it’s not like that’s all I was doing. I got very into ordering different kinds of loose-leaf teas through various subscription services, and an embarrassingly
large portion of my year involved binge-watching Vanderpump Rules, the—”
“Real Housewives spin-off?”
“Yes, exactly,” he said matter-of-factly, before continuing. “And there was also a fair amount of walking and some attempts
at a spin class, which did not help my depression—”
“Wait, I’m sorry,” she said, holding up a hand. “I’m not sure I’m really ready to move on from Vanderpump Rules.”
“That’s fair,” he said, amused.
“I need you to tell me how this happened. Are you all caught up?”
“I’ve watched every season, yes.”
There had been very few times in Merritt’s life when her jaw actually dropped, but this was one of them. “Every season.”
“Listen, I’m not proud of it, but—”
“How?” she demanded. “I mean, how did this happen . . . to you?”
“You make it sound like an affliction.”
She didn’t answer but gave him a pointed look.
He smiled again. “Fine. One day I was trying to write. But I was feeling sad—about Helen, yes, but also just that sort of,
you know, the mindless sadness that creeps in from time to time.”
Merritt nodded, grateful that the mention of Helen had been quick and straightforward. Grateful that leading him to another
unhappy acknowledgment had been relatively painless this time around. But beyond that, she was grateful that she understood
him. Mindless, unasked for, unexplainable sadness was not unfamiliar to her, but no one she knew seemed to talk about it like
that. She didn’t think it was depression. Just a day or week of feeling sad, sad, sad.
“Anyway, I decided to give myself a break, and I did something I never do, which is to turn on the TV in the middle of the
day. And I landed on this show where these people, whom I now know are named Jax and Stassi—that’s Stassi like mossy, not Stacey like Macy—they were arguing in a club in Las Vegas during a birthday party, and then in an instant Jax was in the parking lot physically fighting Stassi’s boyfriend, both of them inexplicably shirtless.
And that episode rolled immediately into another episode, and then another, and I became obsessed. ”
Merritt waited, thinking about how this man was a published author of books that were considered cultured and literary, but
saying nothing.
“I could not look away from these people who essentially talk about absolutely nothing in hour-long increments. It was the most wonderful gift. A true brain-cell-eradicating time suck. Which is what I needed
then, I think, to get through the days. I didn’t want to be thinking or feeling. I wanted to be watching every episode of
Vanderpump Rules in which Stassi has a dramatic birthday party, which happens astonishingly often. It is a terrible show, and it is very dear
to me.”
The drinks came, and Merritt stared at Whit as he accepted the beer and bread, and then they ordered some food, and she watched
again as Whit thanked the waitress kindly, genuinely. She took a sip of her wine, then shook her head. Somehow, somehow, he had made this shocking confession into something sweet and understandable. Somehow she was identifying with a man who
had binge-watched Vanderpump Rules.
“That’s a lot to share with someone who is basically a stranger,” he said, after a long pull from his glass. “But that’s what
I was doing instead of writing.”
Whit watched the woman across from him, this woman whom he did not know, the recipient of his foolhardy proposal. She was
eyeing the basket between them, overflowing with sliced sourdough, the tiny ramekin of honeyed butter at the edge of its gingham
blanket hanging on for dear life.
She held up a piece of bread and examined it as she spoke. “So my question, again, is why do you think I’m the one who can help you with this?”
Whit felt sheepish in a way he typically associated with middle school.
“I googled you,” he admitted. “Eventually. I saw that you did an MFA at a good program, so I know you can at least put pen
to paper, and you’ve been so helpful, so knowledgeable about the books.”
He fidgeted with the silverware, dropping his eyes for a moment. He felt a little like he was trying to keep a skittish woodland
animal calm until help arrived.
“I dunno,” he said. “I just have this sense that you’re the right person to help me.”
When Whit looked up and saw her blank face, a hole opened up beneath him, and he fell into it. Was he crazy? Was he doing
a crazy thing? Every further explanation he could think of seemed thin. He had no solution to his problems, he was as lost
as he’d ever been, and Helen was gone. He couldn’t ask for her help or have her unsolicited feedback laid on him. He had hated
that, the way she’d given advice when he hadn’t asked for it, but now he would give everything to hear her opinion on anything
at all. He would give everything to hear her voice, and he longed to find another of her long red hairs threaded through his
shirt. He was so lost.
And that’s why he’d reached out for help. But he wasn’t a drowning man grabbing whatever passed by him. He knew that he could
have asked someone he knew personally. He was friendly with so many writers, far beyond the bounds of the Whelk Harbor set.
But those writers had also been, to a person, friendly with Helen, and he realized, only now as he considered it after the
fact, that he didn’t need more help thinking about what Helen-the-person would do. He needed someone who knew Helen-the-writer.
He needed someone new.