Chapter Seventeen
Merritt had been lying, of course. Kathleen did have a doctor’s appointment, but not the kind she needed a ride to. Some small
part of Merritt felt a twinge of guilt, trotting out her mother in this way and implying that she was older and more fragile
than she was, but as she typed out the text message Merritt had been mainly focusing her energy on making sense of her own
choices. She had delayed seeing Whit because of her confession about Graydon and because of the almost-kiss. Everything suddenly
felt complicated.
Now, on Tuesday, Whit was at his writing group, and she was an hour away from finishing her long shift at Goodenough Books.
It was the actual day of Halloween, and she had chosen manual labor in an effort to exhaust herself too much to worry about
how she had put her wonderful new job at risk. She had unloaded boxes, rearranged the furniture by the fireplace, and, in
the break room, organized the boxes to which decorations would be returned tomorrow, on November 1. She’d also brought the
“General Fall” decoration crate out of storage and sifted through it to arrange its insides by type: turkey-based, cornucopian,
vaguely pilgrim, leafy. Now she was reshelving books, dusting as she went, and intermittently helping customers while Huong
worked the register.
When the bell above the door rang as she was crouching behind a shelf of manga, she had a vision of Whit entering with his sister.
Merritt imagined her to be a beardless, more prototypically feminine version of her brother, and she wondered what he’d told her.
In Merritt’s mind, Whit had been the one about to do the kissing, but with the passage of time since the party, things felt fuzzier.
What would the sister think? That Merritt was making a move on her grieving, single-dad brother?
Or worse, what if Whit hadn’t mentioned her at all?
She was annoyed by how embarrassed the thought made her, and she scolded herself into remaining cautious and holding her chin high in defiance.
“There you are,” said a man who was not Whit.
Ian Hoult, dressed today in a gray sweater with chartreuse stripes and faded green corduroys that clashed horribly.
“I knew I recognized you from somewhere,” he continued as he walked in her direction, “but I couldn’t put my finger on what
it was until I got home and slept on it. Isn’t that the way of things?”
Ian leaned on the chest-high shelf Merritt stood behind, peering at her with a troubling level of interest.
“Merritt, isn’t it?”
“Yes. And your name was . . . ?”
He let only the vaguest look of surprise trace itself over his face.
“Ian Hoult. You have some of my books over there.”
He nodded nonchalantly toward the fiction section.
“Oh,” Merritt said in her falsely cheerful customer service tone, “do we have some books on hold for you? I can grab them
from the back, and then Huong will get you checked out.”
She pointed over his shoulder, and Huong, who had been openly watching the interaction, raised her hand in a gleeful wave.
“I—well, no, I’m actually a novelist.”
“Oh,” Merritt said, as if perplexed. “I thought you wrote for, um, was it Newsweek? And I think you said you were an adjunct somewhere?”
Ian’s eyes bulged as if he’d been shocked.
“For the Atlantic,” he corrected her, his voice clipped. Then he seemed to remember himself. “And yes, I was also invited to teach some courses at Plymouth College. But my primary thing is fiction.”
Merritt nodded like she would if Ian were a child announcing grand, unrealistic plans for when he grew up.
“How neat.”
Again, Ian looked physically pained. “Yes. Neat. Well.”
He stood up straight.
“Well, I’m actually here on a mission,” he said, as if Merritt were the one keeping him talking. “I think I told you I’m writing
an exposé about Graydon Lyons and his newest book, Serious Games?”
An electric bolt shot out from Merritt’s gut to the end of each extremity. He had figured it out. This was the final moment
before she was exposed once and for all.
“Yes,” she said, softly.
“Well, I realized something.”
Merritt’s body was one large heartbeat.
“Yes?”
“I have misplaced all my copies of Lyons’s earlier works, and I can’t write about this new book unless I also reckon with
his backlist.”
He shrugged in a way he must have thought was endearing—and in that moment, it almost was. The weight on Merritt dissipated,
and she nearly laughed. She was safe.
“Oh, okay. Did you want to see what we have available?”
“That would be lovely.”
Merritt felt positively aerodynamic as she guided him through the store.
“So,” she explained without looking back at Ian, “in most bookstores, including ours, the fiction section is organized alphabetically by author.”
“Yes,” he said, his voice once again clipped, “I am aware.”
“Oh, I just thought, since you seemed to need . . . well, anyway, here’s the section with the L’s. And here are the Lyonses.”
Merritt pointed to a row of books, mentally checking them off in her head: Mission, the revisionist history of the Alamo; Saint Joseph, which imagined that the bullets meant to kill Joseph Smith missed, turning the man into a proto–Billy Graham and reshaping
the next century of American religion; Blanche & Buck, about two lesser-known members of the Bonnie and Clyde gang.
There were others, along with the few stray copies of Serious Games that had not fit on the special dais, and looking at them together made her angry more than anything else. She had loved
these books, had read Mission even before meeting Graydon, and the man had ruined those memories, like all those directors and producers whose films had
been tainted by their loathsome treatment of women. Graydon was not Harvey Weinstein, not even close, but she didn’t hate
the idea of him doing a stint in prison.
Ian hmm-ed.
“I don’t believe I see his short story collection here—the first thing he published?”
This was starting to feel like déjà vu. Merritt knew the book: Down in Texas with the Rodeo, its title taken from lyrics in a Bob Dylan song she’d listened to only once, and then only to say she’d heard it. But she
played dumb now rather than further reveal her intimate knowledge of the man in question.
“Oh, is that right? Let’s go see if we can order it for you.”
“No,” Ian said, shaking his head. “I’ll need it faster than that.”
“It’ll only take a week at most.”
Ian clicked his tongue, as if deeply regretful. “No, it looks like I’ll have to resort to the dreaded .”
He waved his fingers next to his face, as if describing a scary monster.
“Ah,” Merritt said, “well, if you need it that badly.”
“I do, I do. But these”—he held up a stack of Graydon’s other books—“I’ll purchase here.”
“How generous of you,” Merritt said, under her breath.
“What was that?”
“Huong will help you.”
“Ah, yes.”
Ian lingered where he stood.
“One more question for you, Merritt, although this one is a little more fun.”
Oh God. From the look in his eyes, she knew what was coming.
“I was actually wondering whether you’d like to—”
A crash interrupted Ian, causing both of them to turn toward the register. On the floor in front of the desk lay the rotating
display stand that normally stood on the counter. Complimentary bookmarks were scattered all over the floor.
“Oh shoot,” Huong said in an exaggerated tone Merritt had never heard her use before. “I am such a klutz.”
“Oh gosh,” Merritt said as she walked toward the front of the store. “Here, let me help you with that. In fact, why don’t I clean
it up while you get Ian here sorted.”
Merritt dropped to her knees and began slowly gathering bookmarks. She sensed Ian move behind her to hand his books over to
Huong, who immediately began talking at a rapid clip about how she’d overheard him mentioning , and was he sure he didn’t want her to place the order for him here? It would only take a minute, and he’d be supporting his local bookstore
rather than a mega-capitalistic enterprise bent on denying its warehouse workers basic rights.
She jabbered on in that way until the man left with a haphazard “Thank you.” Merritt made short work of the remaining bookmarks
and popped up to look at Huong.
“You saved my life.”
Huong laughed aloud—a rare occurrence.
“You had suffered enough.”
“Seriously.” Merritt stared up at the ceiling. “I think he was about to ask me out.”
“Not on my watch.”
Merritt smiled gratefully at Huong before she returned to the cart with the go-backs, thinking about the difference between
Graydon and this man. His barely hidden condescension made picturing his classes at the college easy. She took pleasure in
imagining the course catalog listing classes with names like “Cormac McCarthy and Friends” and “Norman Mailer Was Good Actually.”
Graydon, on the other hand, exuded natural, authentic modesty and championed the work of women and minority writers, whether
they were his students or authors whose books were to be used as mentor texts. It was a quality that had kept Merritt in love with him, even when the cracks (his self-centeredness, his wandering eye, the way he mocked her when she
mentioned the possibility of writing a children’s book) began to show. Standing in science fiction now with an Octavia Butler book in her hands, she felt the familiar pang of shame for her blind spots. At least Ian was transparent
in his efforts to turn her life into content and profit.
She shook away her thoughts and moved with the empty cart back to the register, where Huong was packing up.
“Where are you headed after work?” Merritt asked, more to distract herself than because she thought Huong would have an interesting
answer. “Some fun Halloween party?”
“I’m taking an art class. At the Whelk Harbor Art Collective.”
“Oh,” Merritt said, then immediately realized her mistake. Of course the girl somehow looking cool in an overall dress and
tights was on her way somewhere noteworthy.
“What?”
“Nothing, I just—”
Huong narrowed her eyes.
“Do you want to come?”
Merritt smiled, appreciative, as an idea solidified in her mind.
“No,” she said, “but thank you. I have something else I need to do.”
But Huong wouldn’t let her off that easy. The bell tinkled at the entrance of Moishe, their evening replacement, and after
their hellos, he walked off to drop his things in the break room, and Huong still waited.
“Well?” she said. “What is it?”
“What?”
“The something else?”
“Oh,” Merritt said, now packing her own bag in the space where Huong had stood. “You’ve inspired me. I’m going to go write.”
“With that sad dad you work for?”
“No,” Merritt said, a little too intensely. She softened her tone. “With myself. For myself.”
Huong smiled.
“Good.”
“Yeah. It is.”
From where Merritt sat writing in Carafe, she could see the street slowly begin to fill with costumed kids and their parents,
all on their way, she knew, to trick-or-treat. She wondered if Whit and Annie were out there, with his sister, and then she
went back to typing.
The document she was working in was so old that she’d almost expected moths to scatter from behind the file name after she double-clicked it.
It was her unfinished manuscript. The words came surprisingly easily after so many stagnant months of doing things that were decidedly not writing.
Writing with Whit, she realized, had been good practice.
As she wrote now and sipped her decaf coffee, she felt herself opening up, like a stubbornly coiled peony that has finally
agreed to bloom. Whatever else had happened or not happened, this was who she was. A writer. And though Graydon had nearly
crushed this part of her, and she had nearly let him, and though she had no idea what was next for her in nearly any category
of importance, she was writing. For herself. And she was happier than she’d been in weeks, happier even than in those first
days with Whit.
And another strange thing happened: writing like this, on her own, made her want to go back to writing with Whit again. To
remind him that she was good, that he needed her, and that no amount of chemistry or the awkwardness it generated could change
that.
She pulled out her phone.
Hey Whit. My mom’s friend offered to take her to the doctor. See you tomorrow?
The man texted back with uncharacteristic alacrity.
Great, he said. Looking forward to it.
Merritt flipped her phone face down on the table.
She smiled to herself.
Me too.