Chapter Nineteen #2
extent, she felt relief. It was done now, and anyway, things were going well. For the first time in—what was it? a year?—Merritt
felt like she awoke each day with a purpose. It reminded her of those early months of grad school, when she was visited by
a total certainty that she had made the right decision, that she was right where she should be, that her future would work
out in the right way. She had written so freely and fearlessly back then. She’d been prolific and inventive. Now as then,
she felt in control, like each day she was choosing to do the things that mattered, writing with Whit by daylight and then,
in the hours before bed, writing at the little desk in her room while the sun set over the park beyond her window.
She loved writing with Whit—loved both being with Whit and doing the work itself. The two of them were good partners, making
something she felt proud of, and even if she was a little confused about where things stood between them, she was allowing
herself to enjoy the time she spent at the Longacre house. And it wasn’t just that. Her work at the bookstore felt more fulfilling,
and her own writing was compelling again in a way that hadn’t been true since Graydon had called writing for children “trite
and easy.” She was feeling early-in-a-project momentum, but here she was, almost finished with the manuscript.
Things were going well. Really well. And people were starting to notice.
“There’s my radiant daughter,” Kathleen said one morning. She liked to do this—to pretend she and Merritt were the cheesy mother-daughter duo
in a bad Netflix movie.
Sometimes Merritt would play along, but today she was too focused on reading Whit’s third book as she waited for water to
boil in the kitchen. (She had flown through A Liturgy for Mourning, and Whit, it turned out, had been right: the books did get better as she went on.)
When Kathleen, standing in the arched doorway, spotted the oatmeal packet in Merritt’s hand, she pointed as if it were a shocking
wound.
“Yuck. It’s Saturday. Let’s go get breakfast instead.”
Merritt was not hard to convince. She switched off the burner, and in ten minutes, two of which were spent debating over wearing
a scarf, they were walking down Cork Street. Other people were out, too, as the morning was mild and the farmers’ market would
be happening on the village green. Watching kids in beanies holding their parents’ hands and noting the steam rising from
people’s coffee cups, Merritt liked how fully fall it all felt. Her feet continually found crunchy leaves to step on, and her hair lifted gently in the perfectly cool breeze.
A couple approached them, holding hands, and Merritt and her mother naturally split to give way to them.
“You know,” Kathleen said, as she and Merritt rejoined each other farther down the sidewalk, “you are in a markedly better
mood than I’ve seen you in weeks. I was joking about you being radiant, but it’s also true.”
Merritt felt the blush in her neck and cheeks, and she wished she’d worn the scarf.
She could feel her mother looking at her as a dozen ways of answering the implied question stacked up in her mind.
Kathleen knew about Whit and the kiss that wasn’t, and she knew about Graydon—not everything, but enough to hate the man and rejoice at Merritt’s freedom.
She knew a bit less about Merritt’s dashed writing dreams, at least from the source, but Merritt realized that her mother had probably intuited quite a lot.
After too long, Kathleen spoke again.
“Well, now you’re just being obvious, dear.”
“Mom.”
Kathleen finally looked away. “I’m just saying, a quick, short response could have forestalled me, but you look as if you’re
playing 20 Questions with yourself.”
Merritt sighed and looked across the street, where people were standing in line for doughnuts.
“No, you know what you look like? Sherlock Holmes when he’s thinking through all the possibilities. Please, Merritt, answer
me, you look like a cocaine-addled Victorian detective.”
“Speaking of, did you finish your book?” Merritt asked, leaning heavily on the barest trace of a segue—from general nineteenth-century
detective fiction to the specific nineteenth-century political novel her mother had been reading.
“I did,” Kathleen said. “I loved it in the end, as is my way. But I will not be diverted.”
Merritt sighed again, hating the petulance rising up in her. “Mom, please.”
“I am just happy that you’re happy. Because you are happy, yes?”
It was a simple question, but of course, it opened a chasm in the sidewalk that Merritt felt herself peering into. A month
ago, she would have said no. Or, she would have said yes, of course, and been lying. A year and a half ago, she’d have replied, Yes, yes, I’m deliriously happy!, but now, in hindsight, that felt false, too. Perhaps she was deliriously happy, “deliriously” being the operative word.
Maybe now she should just say yes and spare her mother from fretting.
For all of Kathleen’s discernment and keen insights, there were times when Merritt thought her mother’s primary desire was to assuage her own worries about her daughter—the only person she had left to worry about—as quickly and easily as possible.
“I’m in a good place, Mom,” she said, nudging her with her shoulder. “Really.”
Kathleen smiled at that, easily pleased, and then Merritt’s hopes that she had put a stop to this line of questioning were
immediately deflated.
“I’m so glad, Merritt. Truly. And may I ask why you’re in such a good place?”
Internally, Merritt bristled at both the question and the addition of the word “such,” which pushed the description she’d
applied to herself into the realm of exaggeration.
Outwardly, Merritt lifted her hands. “I like my job, Mom. Jobs. I’m finding them fulfilling right now.”
Kathleen nodded, as if this information were obvious. “But which job in particular, dear?”
“The writing one, obviously. Because I’m getting paid to write.”
“Which you’ve always wanted.”
“Yes.”
“And I suppose you’ve forgiven Whit for almost kissing you?”
Merritt nodded.
“Nothing to forgive. It was dumb of him, and he knows it.”
“My favorite kind of man.”
Merritt laughed. They paused their conversation for a few steps. They could see the bistro now, and she hoped this landmark
would provide a natural endpoint to the conversation. It did not.
“Though maybe it wasn’t that dumb of him—”
“Mom,” Merritt groaned, stopping right there on the sidewalk. “I told you. We agreed to move on, and we haven’t talked about
it since. It would be stupid to ruin things.”
“Yes, but something must have happened. You were so high-strung and serious after that party, and now, look at you.” She shrugged at her daughter with her whole upper body. “Radiant, like I said.”
Merritt allowed her feet to begin moving again, primarily because Kathleen had only slowed rather than stopping completely,
and Merritt refused to revert to anything resembling the strategies of an adolescent temper tantrum.
The door to the bistro was ten paces away when Merritt said, “I don’t know, Mom. He apologized, and it was nice. I think he
really respects my position and my contributions. And that just feels . . . good.”
“Well, good,” Kathleen said, pausing with her hand on the door pull. “And you know I abhor violence, darling, but I do need
to tell you that the world will be down one mystery novelist if Whit Longacre fucks this up.”
“Mom!”
Kathleen grinned, shrugged again, then opened the door.
“Table for two, please,” she told the host, and it was several seconds before Merritt recovered enough from her mother’s threat
of violence, and what must have been her first use of the F-word in the last twenty years, to follow her to the table.
Over a breakfast of pecan coffee, crusty rye toast with strawberry-sumac jam, peppery bacon, and eggs Benedict, Merritt’s
mother mercifully relented. Instead of Whit, they discussed Thanksgiving, which was the following Thursday.
Merritt had spent the holiday in Texas the year prior, helping Graydon host an elaborate dinner party that would go down as
one of the most stressful evenings of her life. Besides several professors and local authors, Graydon’s teenage daughters
were also in attendance, as was his ex-wife, Leonora, and her boyfriend, a man ten years older than Graydon.
“It’s the holidays,” Graydon had said, as if this explained the unconventional guest list, and Merritt had of course understood about the twins. But she had never met Leonora, who scared her a bit.
Merritt did very little in the way of cooking, as Graydon had the day catered by the same operation he apparently used annually.
She did make her mother’s citrusy cranberry sauce, which made her feel a little less guilty about leaving Kathleen alone in
cold New England, and she watched eagerly during the meal to see which guests enjoyed it. In the end, she felt it was woefully
neglected in favor of a prosaic brown gravy.
Before the meal, however, she had finally met Leonora, and that went even worse than expected. Horribly, the woman was nice. She seemed perfectly unfazed by Merritt’s existence, entirely unthreatened, and she was funny, much to Merritt’s dismay.
And Graydon laughed at her jokes incessantly, and he touched her frequently, on the elbow, the shoulder, and once with a jaunty
little hip-to-hip movement she’d never seen him do before.
It was miserable. Merritt was on the whole time, desperate to impress the Orange Prize and Lambda Award winners, to be cool in front of the twins, and to
make Leonora like her, at the same time that she was pathetically, heartbreakingly desperate to feel like Graydon was even
slightly aware of her presence.
She missed her mother terribly the whole time, and even worse, she missed her late father, who loved Thanksgiving and would
have hated Graydon. As it turned out, that evening had been the beginning of the end for them. Merritt confronted Graydon