Chapter Eight
Growing up, Merritt had been a teacher’s pet, though not by choice. People were just constantly making her into one. She excelled
at school and was well mannered and always game for a class discussion, and teachers loved that sort of thing. It had not
been good, at first, for Merritt’s ability to do hard work, because every time she stood at the front of the room to give
a book report on her most recent Madeleine L’Engle experience or explain the primary imports and exports of Brazil, her teacher
would breathe a sigh of relief, immediately committed to being impressed by whatever it was she had to offer.
This moment with Whit felt a bit like that. He was dazzled by her preparedness, which in his eyes constituted quite a bit
of work. The truth was, for a Greenwood Castle fan like herself, these documents essentially wrote themselves. She knew this
world like she knew the complete lore of the Baby-Sitters Club, the history of most American Girl dolls, and the comprehensive
soundtracks of the movie musicals she’d grown up loving: she had immediate, encyclopedic recall when it came to these imaginary
people, places, and things. All she’d had to do was write it all down.
And now Whit was looking at her like that, like she was something special, and she was desperate for him to look absolutely
anywhere else.
“So I think we should make an outline—do you outline?”
“I outline,” he said, and she nodded, and then that’s what they did.
They talked about possibilities for the ending of this final installment, what it would need, what people were expecting, what they were not expecting but might appreciate, what could be surprising but still satisfying.
They talked about the beginning, and then the middle, and .
. . some more on the middle . . . still talking about the middle . . .
“Maybe we should take a break on the middle,” Merritt said, and Whit agreed immediately.
“It’s almost time for me to pick up Annie from our nanny share, anyway.”
Merritt’s primary feeling at these words was relief. She felt like she’d been running a marathon where the mile markers had
labels like have impressive ideas and project confidence and be normal. But there was the barest wisp of regret, too. She scolded herself. What had she imagined? That after a hard day’s work they
would pop open a bottle of champagne to celebrate?
“But here, hold on a second.” Whit disappeared again into his sad what-the-cops-would-find-on-a-welfare-check study and returned
with a piece of paper.
“My brother-in-law is a lawyer, and he drew this up for us.”
He slid the paper across the table and then collected their empty tea mugs, politely busying himself in the kitchen while
she looked it over.
“If anything seems off or unfair or one-sided, just let me know,” he was saying, but she wasn’t really listening. “And of
course feel free to have your own lawyer review it.”
The deal was this: she would be an uncredited ghostwriter, which she was not to publicize. Fine. But the money. Half of the
advance was to be paid out to her in installments while they wrote, with the second half paid out in full on the completion
of the manuscript, plus 10 percent of the estate’s royalties on the book.
She sat in silence for so long that Whit started wiping down the counters with a spray bottle and towel.
“Does it look okay?” he said eventually, with some of the same sheepishness he’d shown in the bistro.
Merritt was staring at the largest sum of money that she had ever been offered in any context.
“I’ll let you know.”
Whit smiled from behind the counter. “Great, look it over and bring it back next time with any notes.”
She agreed, trying not to look like she was rapidly ticking off items on a list of things she would do with the money. Pay
off student loans, fix the rattly sound in her car, quit her job at the bookstore (once the manuscript was finished). Be an
adult.
She packed her things, hardly noticing their weight in her various bags, and Whit led her out.
“Thank you,” he said, from the front door, looking out at her on the gravel path. “Really can’t believe how much we did today.
I could never have . . . just, thank you.”
“We’ve hardly started,” she said, almost harshly, because he was getting earnest, and that was puncturing her daydream of
a Scrooge McDuck money swimming pool.
“Exactly,” Whit said with a shrug. “Imagine where I’d be without you.”
Merritt touched her neck.
“Okay then,” she said. “Same time tomorrow?”
“Well, Tuesdays I have writing group.”
Merritt waited, a sharp hope piercing her chest at the thought that he might invite her. Then he looked apologetic.
“So Wednesday?” he said.
Merritt smiled widely, maniacally. “Yes! Wednesday. See you then.”
Back in her car, Merritt stared at the old gray stone house where her life was going to change. It was encircled by a farm
fence and shadowed on three sides by a wooded hill, on the other side of which was the sea.
“No,” she said aloud to herself.
She had been here before.
“No,” she said again. She would do her job, she would make some money, and she would use this experience as a stepping-stone
to writing again. That was it.
She turned on the car. The brassy theme song for All Things Considered was playing on the radio. She slapped at the dial and drove home to her mother’s in silence.
Whit walked into writing group that Tuesday like a man on a red carpet. He was this close to shielding his eyes from imaginary camera flashes and waving magnanimously at imaginary fans. Because he had written.
Or prewritten. Outlined, if he were splitting hairs.
But that was semantics and beside the point: he had something to report, something to celebrate.
He had made progress, and a vision had begun to take shape, and if he opened his inbox today to a flurry of emails from Joan the agent and Shreya the editor,
then his and Merritt’s skeleton of an outline would be enough to stand between him and despair like Gandalf on that tiny rock
bridge in the dwarf caves.
See? He was even thinking in fantasy terms now. That was progress, and there was no other word for it.
“Well, you’re looking very smirky today,” Willa said as he settled down next to her.
“I should be. You are looking at someone who wrote.”
Her face opened up in a look of real surprise that he could have taken offense to. But he was too relieved at having put words
down on paper to be hurt.
“Your own work,” Willa asked, “or Helen’s?”
“Helen’s.”
He grinned, really satisfied.
“That’s great,” Willa said in a relieved way just this side of patronizing. Still, Whit didn’t care. The Monumental Task was at least an inch less monumental.
Willa closed her laptop to give Whit her full attention. “What changed?”
Whit’s mouth hung open, and for a moment, he considered keeping Merritt a secret. The contract had stated that they would
not publicize their arrangement, but this was his friend—his closest writerly confidant. And still . . .
“I asked someone for help,” he said, all vagueness.
“That’s very mature of you.”
“Well, when you’ve exhausted all your options—staring at the computer screen, deep-cleaning the house, et cetera.”
“As one does,” Willa said with a laugh. “Who’d you ask?”
Whit gripped the chair below him as he spoke, unable to name the reason for his timidity.
“Merritt Pryor. Kathleen—”
“Kathleen Pryor’s daughter?” Willa interrupted. Her son was a middle schooler at the Foothills School.
“Yeah. You know her?”
“No, but Kathleen always updates me on her when I volunteer in the library. I thought she was in Texas getting an MFA?”
Whit nodded. “She was.”
He hesitated. Dropping out was Merritt’s story to tell, and she hadn’t even told him. The silence was heavy, and it needed to be addressed, but after a moment of nodding and thinking, Willa spoke first.
“You know, her mother did say she was having a hard time last year. Some boyfriend she didn’t like the sound of. She was a
little worried this would happen.”
Why did Whit feel nervous?
“What would happen?” he asked.
“That she would drop out. Is that what happened?”
“I really don’t know the details . . .”
“She was at Barton, wasn’t she? The same school as Graydon Lyons? He has that new book coming out.”
Whit considered this. Graydon Lyons was a big deal. He had the sort of story people told when Whit was in his own MFA program:
Lyons had been mentored by Philip Roth, had a short story explode in The New Yorker, and burst onto the national scene with his first novel, which imagined what would have happened had Texas not lost the Battle
of the Alamo in 1836. His works were lauded for their progressive themes, their complex female characters, and their unflinching
critiques of American exceptionalism. Just last year he’d been asked to write the preface to a new edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which Whit had read and enjoyed.
“Was she one of his students?” Willa asked.
“I don’t know,” Whit said again.
She raised a single finger. “I think I remember Kathleen mentioning that she was— Oh goodness.”
She placed her hand on the table.
“Merritt wasn’t the one in his new book, was she?”
Whit looked hard at her hazel eyes, searching for meaning. “I don’t know what you’re talking about?”
Willa laughed. “I forgot you live under a rock.”
He bristled but pushed it down.
Willa continued. “Lyons’s new book. It’s ‘new ground’ for him.” She rolled her eyes and did ironic air quotes. “It’s about
a grad student in a creative writing program, and everyone is speculating it’s autofiction, or at least semi-autofiction.”
“They always say that.”
She shrugged. “Sure, but how often do creative writing professors write about creative writing students who fall in love with
creative writing professors?”
Whit shrugged back and looked away, as if suddenly interested in the chalkboard menu across the room.
“Well, I highly doubt it’s about her. Or anyone else for that matter. It’s fiction.”
He cleared his throat.
“Right,” Willa said, nodding. “There are some psychological thriller elements, I think, as the book goes on and the relationship
gets more twisted. Probably too crazy to be anything real.”
Bad breakup, Merritt had said.
If Merritt was the inspiration, then her ex-boyfriend was a prick—and, unfortunately, the kind of prick who ended up on NPR’s “Books We
Love” list. Oh, poor Merritt.
Or maybe not poor Merritt. He didn’t know. He supposed he could always ask.
Whit almost laughed out loud. The man could hardly offer Merritt a cup of tea without saying something crushingly stupid.
He would not be asking her if her ex-boyfriend had written an unflattering, sure-to-be-critically-acclaimed novel about their
life together.
But that didn’t mean he’d stop thinking about it.
New books come out on Tuesdays. This is something all booksellers know, and Merritt was now a bookseller. Her more senior
bookseller, Diana of the Sweater Sets, had come in that morning before opening with the sole purpose of telling Merritt which
displays should be set up where. She wanted a Halloween table with spooky stories old and new; she wanted a selection of books
by writers from New England; there was to be an endcap display of autumnal texts (“think beach reads but to be perused in a bed of leaves”); and she asked for a small dais at the center of the new-release table dedicated to Graydon Lyons’s newest book, Serious Games.
“Why?” Merritt had asked, and Diana had looked at her the way George W. Bush looked at that man who threw the shoe.
“Why?” Diana repeated. “Because it’s all the rage. It’s going to fly off the shelves in the cities, and I have a feeling it
might not do too badly here, either.”
Now the display was all but finished, and the empty dais stared back at her. It was made to look like a Grecian column that
had been sawn down to the size of a serving platter. The crate full of copies of Serious Games sat at her feet, and when Merritt finally leaned over to lift it, she felt like she might die. She plopped the box atop the
newest Colson Whiteheads and Elizabeth Strouts and slowly reached for the box cutter in her apron pocket. As she clicked the
blade up a few notches, she had a vision of herself stabbing the box, using the same the force with which Norman Bates would
approach shower curtains. Oops, Diana, she would say, something must have happened in transit.
Instead, Merritt gently pierced the packing tape and slid the knife across the length of the box. When the folds opened, she
saw, beneath slips of paper and bubble wrap, a cover of royal blue.
It was simple and sleek, unadorned but for the words serious games in a sensible white font and, only slightly smaller, the words graydon lyons and a novel.
She lifted a copy from the box and cringed.
It had that sandpapery texture that made her skin crawl.
She stared for a long time before managing to turn it over.
The back was covered with “Advanced Praise” from writers whom she knew to be Graydon’s friends: people she had met at his side while attending parties and readings, and one token woman who had once joined them with her husband for a weekend at Graydon’s lake house.
“A stunning, unflinching, often hilarious portrait of modern academic life,” she called the book, and Merritt deeply wished that she had not been so humiliatingly polite to her in all those conversations on the boat dock and around the kitchen island.
Merritt had pretended to care about that woman’s bichon frise, enduring dozens of cell-phone photos of the thing with pink bows on its ears, and now that woman was treating this book as if it weren’t a send-up of someone she knew.
What horrible things had she read and possibly believed before blurbing this book?
The worst part was that Merritt could find out if she wanted. She could crack the thing open and discover the answer herself,
and she wouldn’t even have to worry about padding Graydon’s pockets with her own money, because here she was with the book
in hand. She could read it during her breaks. Hell, she could steal a copy if she really wanted to—and she did want to, with
the same desire you can have to touch something that might burn you.
Merritt placed the book on the dais, keeping it closed. Then she placed another on top of it, and another on top of that one,
until she had succeeded in creating the least appealing display in the store.
She walked back to the cash register. The books watched her from their toddlerish pile.
“Dammit,” she muttered as she walked back to the table to arrange it properly.
Well, at least she wasn’t petty.