Chapter Seven #3
“Your things?” he said, and she shook herself out of her musings to hand over her bags.
Whit left her in the kitchen, then took the walk down the hallway as an opportunity to do some deep breathing exercises.
Why, he could not say. He was not a deep breather.
But this was turning into one of the more awkward encounters of his life, despite the early ease he’d felt with Merritt at the bookstore and the bistro.
He could not make heads or tails of that, and now here he was, standing in his study, trying to remember whether you were supposed to breathe in for three seconds or five seconds and what came after that.
“Enough,” he said aloud after a moment, giving himself two small slaps on one cheek. “Be normal.”
When he got back to the kitchen, Merritt was examining the fridge display. Annie’s schoolwork and artwork and a single photo
from a trip to Niagara Falls, the three of them in yellow ponchos on a boat amid the spume, laughing and hugging and happy.
Merritt turned, and Whit felt his hackles rise reflexively in preparation for the pitying smile she would lay on him. Instead,
she offered him a genuine grin and said, “Your daughter’s such an artist.”
“Oh, Annie?” he said, because of course he did, because the two slaps to the face had not been enough to remind him how many
children he had. “Yes, it seems like it comes really naturally to her. And she didn’t get it from her parents, I can tell
you that much.”
“I can hardly draw stick figures,” Merritt said.
“For some reason, I doubt that.”
They stared at each other for a second, both of them trying to figure out what he meant, until the kettle started whistling.
After a painfully protracted discussion of the teas Whit had available, they settled on a pot of green, which Whit privately disliked.
When they moved to the study, Whit saw it, too, through Merritt’s eyes, realizing for the first time that his deep clean had not quite extended this far.
Once, he had watched a video online about Roald Dahl’s writing cottage, in which old Roald said the only time he’d ever vacuumed the space was when a goat broke in and pooped everywhere.
Unfortunately, Whit had unconsciously taken this is as writing advice from a master, and, well, now the desk against the window and the shelves against the walls were covered with piles of loose paper and manila folders and several empty or half-empty coffee mugs.
There were books open everywhere, and the armchair by the space heater was sagging beneath the weight of a year’s worth of unread magazines, which he only now realized was probably an extreme fire hazard.
And why had he never listened to Helen and had this ghastly green rug replaced with something less like the top of a pool table?
“Okay, well . . .” he said. He looked at Merritt to see if she appeared to be making an escape plan, but she was just smiling
kindly, and yes, perhaps a smidge pityingly.
“Well,” she said gamely, “can you show me what you have so far?”
“I’m afraid not much has changed since we last spoke.”
Merritt laughed.
“Sure, but I just mean your notes and outlines, that sort of thing?”
Whit’s face remained unchanged as he waited and a pit in his stomach opened.
“Oh,” Merritt said, reading the signs. “So . . . really, nothing?”
“Please don’t mock me, I will cry.”
It was a joke, but Merritt looked horrified. “I wasn’t mocking—”
“No, no,” Whit laughed, “I’m joking. But I do need this to be a judgment-free zone.”
Merritt held her hands up and nodded. “Roger that.”
She transformed her face into the picture of understanding, but still, something was happening that Whit did not like. Their
awkwardness had been excusable at first; to an outside observer, it might even have been endearing. But now it was merely
uncomfortable, and the fault lay with him. He had invited this woman into his home—had essentially asked her to come in and
judge him—and only now was that fact really dawning on him.
There was a pause, and then Merritt spoke again.
“What about in Helen’s office? Is there anything of value there?”
Whit bit his lip. He did not want to go there. He did not want to bring someone there. That felt . . . no. They would not
be doing that today.
“I really don’t think so,” he said.
Merritt narrowed her eyes, blatantly reading him, then smiled again.
“Okay then. I have some notes.”
“You do?”
“I do.”
She opened one of her bags on the side table where they rested, slipped a single file folder from it, and waved it as evidence.
“Just a few of these and—”
“A few? You’ve been on the job five minutes and already you’ve written exponentially more than I have over the last year?”
Merritt shrugged. “They’re just ideas.”
“Well, let’s see them.”
Whit’s torso expanded, making room for an unfamiliar sensation of hope. Maybe this would work. Maybe this would really work.
“Okay,” Merritt said, biting her own lip.
She waited again, then spoke all at once, as if the words had been Heimliched out of her: “Ijustgotnervous.”
“You what?”
She shrugged. “Suddenly, I am spine-chillingly nervous. What if you hate it all?”
“I will not hate it.”
“You could.”
“Merritt,” Whit said, stepping toward her. He stopped himself just before his raised, conciliatory hand would have touched
her shoulder. “I could not possibly hate whatever you have come up with more than I’ve hated my inability to write anything at all.”
Slowly, she eased her teeth out of her bottom lip.
“Okay,” she said again, half-laughing. She looked around the room. “I hate to say this, but I think we might need to move
back to the kitchen.”
Whit looked around, too. Clearly, she was right. What had he imagined? That the two of them would share the chair at his desk
like kids who’d snuck into a crowded movie?
What was he thinking?
The man was in shambles, that much was obvious. But it was a charming degree of shambles, and Merritt’s repeated thought had
been I am going to be a writer. Though things felt immediately strained between them, the upper hand, it had seemed, was hers, because she was the one behaving
so totally normal. Until this moment, when the two of them sat at the blocky wooden kitchen table, a steaming mug of tea apiece,
her laptop freed from the tote bag and open in front of her, the backpack at her feet.
“So,” she said, hearing an unsteadiness in her voice that she hoped Whit, in his sudden-onset kookiness, had missed. “I’ve
written out briefs for each of the main characters.”
She opened the file folder and began arranging printed sheets of paper in a grid before the two of them.
“There’s concrete stuff like where we last saw them, or where we can expect them to be at the beginning of the story, and
there’s more abstract stuff, too, like where they are on their character arc and the state of their relationships with the
rest of the cast of people.”
Merritt glanced at Whit, who had gone bug-eyed. Oh God, what did that mean? Quickly, she began explaining herself.
“This is all just my interpretation, of course, and we can discuss everything, and maybe you have a different sense of things, and that’s fine, of course, it’s your baby. Or your, what, half-baby? Step-baby? This is not helpful, we can cease and desist with the baby metaphors.”
Whit waved a hand for her to stop.
“You did all this?”
Merritt took a deep breath, ashamed of her presumption.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“You’re what?”
“Sorry.”
Whit lowered his head all the way to the table. She had killed him. He’d died, clearly, of incredulity. But then he raised
up again, a grin shining on his face like a neon marquee. He shook his head with a different kind of incredulity than she
had expected.
“This is amazing—you’re amazing.”
Merritt felt the words in her throat. No one had told her she was amazing for a long time. Since before she started apologizing
all the time. Since before dropping out, before Graydon.
Whit scanned the papers, touching them as if they were priceless treasures, as if to make sure they were really there. He
held one up and began to speed-read it with fluttering lips before slapping it down on the table.
“I . . .” He shrugged. “I can’t believe it. Incredible.”
Merritt’s own grin was threatening to go supernova, and though containing it made her cheeks feel like they were lifting weights,
she managed by returning her attention to the backpack.
“Well,” she said, clearing her throat. “There’s more.”
As she pulled two more file folders from the bag, she shot a glance back at Whit, whose eyes had once again gone praying mantis–shape.
“What?”
She shrugged.
“I had a light day at work yesterday.”
Whit put both hands on his head and said, eyes closed, “You’re a wonder, Merritt Pryor.”
He opened them.
“A true wonder.”
Something about those words said by this man, from that mouth, while those eyes looked at her—this man who was sitting before
her, appreciating the work she had done and the brain she had done them with . . .
Oh no, Merritt thought, in response to the egg-like thing that had just cracked open in her chest.
Oh no, oh no, oh no.