Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Hi, Joan.”
Whit’s own literary agent hardly ever called, preferring to email him back three to six weeks after he reached out. But dear
old Joan was used to frying bigger fish than Whit Longacre, and so she had been able to sneak-attack him at this particularly
low moment.
He was lying on the floor of his bedroom, partially because his back had been hurting (injury) and partially because he felt
like pure shit, undeserving of a bed or couch (insult). Annie was at school, thankfully, and thus unable to witness this choice
bit of self-abasement.
It had been a week since Merritt walked out on him. It had taken hearing her car on the gravel road to shake him from his
state, and he had hurried to the door in hopes of flagging her down, apologizing, saying, “Let’s work something out.” And
it had taken his hand hitting the doorknob for a second, stronger impulse to overpower him. Merritt had made herself clear.
Helen had made herself clear. There was nothing more to be done.
For a week now he had tried not to think about Merritt while muscling through a task that had once again become monumental
and overwhelming. He had been reading and rereading Helen’s journals and trying to Rumpelstiltskin them into something literary
and lovely. And he had failed. Abjectly.
It was as if Peter Jackson had handed him a script and said, Go, good luck, and then Whit had tried to make The Lord of the Rings in his backyard with a 1980s camcorder.
Everything he wrote felt lifeless and hollow.
Helen’s intentions were so clear, and his inability to shape something from them was making him more insecure than he’d been in years.
Had she been the master and he the pretender? What was he even doing in this career?
He found himself once again spending his days in excruciating inactivity, watching clips of singing competitions and falling
prey to more than one Vanderpump Rules marathon. He learned, too, that there were entire spin-off series, and their siren call was very strong indeed. He skipped
his writing group for the second time in two weeks, which he hated almost as much as he hated having to tell Willa why he was missing it.
Even Annie noticed something was off.
“Where’s Merritt?” she asked one morning over waffles. Whit was rushing from room to room, looking for her shoes and backpack
and the folder where they were supposed to be keeping track of her daily reading minutes, for which he usually just made up
numbers that sounded about right.
“What?” he called back from the living room, stalling for time.
“Where’s Merritt?” she said in the drawn-out voice she always used when she had to repeat herself.
Whit snagged a second sneaker from under the couch and stared at it. Well.
He walked back into the kitchen and dropped the pair of shoes at Annie’s feet, before pulling a chair out for himself. They
were just going to have to be late to school today.
“I don’t Merritt think will be coming around here much anymore.”
Annie’s face fell with her fork. “What?”
Whit shrugged. He was determined to be honest in this already belated conversation. Annie deserved that.
“We aren’t working together anymore. We had a disagreement, and—”
“But you’re still together, right?”
The words sped like arrows through his chest.
“What?”
Annie gave him the most grown-up look he’d ever seen her make.
“You two are together. I know Evie said you weren’t, but you are.”
Whit made a noise almost like a laugh.
“You’re right. We were. Um . . . how did you feel about that?”
Annie ignored his question to ask one of her own. “So you aren’t together anymore?”
“No, sweetie,” he said gently, unsure what this news would mean to her.
Annie stared at her plate. She poked at a triangle of waffle and then slid it around in syrup before dropping it and sliding
the plate away from her. She looked at the empty table as she spoke.
“Is it my fault?”
“No,” Whit said instantly. “I’m glad you showed me Mom’s journals.”
“No,” Annie said, dismissing his last sentence. “Is it my fault she’s not your girlfriend anymore?”
Whit pulled back slightly, confused. “Why would it be—”
“Sometimes you act like I’m sad,” she said forcefully, “and you’re weird about Merritt.”
“Are you sad?” he asked, ignoring the “weird” comment.
Annie looked away, scrunching up her face like she did when she was about to cry.
“Yes,” she said tersely. “Sometimes. I miss Mom.”
Whit got up and moved to kneel next to her, holding her hand in his.
“That’s okay,” he said, and she was crying now, her forehead on his shoulder. He brushed hair from her face, rubbed her back,
and his own tears came then. “I miss her, too. And it’s okay to be sad. It’s good. It means Mom was special to you. It means
she was a good mom.”
Whit let them both cry for a moment, then asked the question that had been bothering him in vague and not-so-vague ways for months.
“Did Merritt ever make you sad about Mom?”
Why had he waited so long to state it plainly? Was he a terrible father?
Annie sniffed and looked at him. She really thought about her answer, and he felt an unexpected surge of pride in her then.
“Um,” she started, still thinking carefully, “I don’t know.”
“It’s probably kind of hard to see your dad with someone who isn’t Mom. Right?”
She shrugged. “Yeah. But I like her, too.”
“And that’s confusing.”
She gave a single hearty nod, and then her face twisted once again.
“And now she’s gone?”
Her voice went up at the end, and the hope he heard in the question—hope that she was mistaken—nearly broke him. Now they
were both gone.
“She’s not gone,” Whit said, his voice quavering. “She’s just . . . we’re just not together anymore. And it’s no one’s fault.
It’s just over now.”
Annie nodded again, but he could see that she was not finished feeling. She pulled her plate back toward her and ate, somberly
and thoughtfully, and Whit was this close to calling Evie and pleading with her to come back right that instant. He probably would have done it, too, except
that Christmas was in less than two weeks (God help him), and he had (idiotically) agreed to their father’s absurd, bachelor-in-his-early-sixties
plan to spend the holidays in the Cayman Islands. Evie would be there, of course, and another trip to Whelk Harbor was simply
too much to ask when he and Annie would be seeing her again so soon.
At drop-off, he told her, “I love you more than ice cream.”
“I know,” was her only response.
When Joan called later that day, she was enthusiastic and warm and all the other qualities Whit knew he did not deserve to
be met with. “How are you? How’s Annie? How was your Thanksgiving?”
Whit answered the latter two questions with the same canned responses he would have used with Wet-Looking Curly Hair Woman
and Woman with the Extensive Neck Scarf Collection at Annie’s school. He hardly knew what he was saying, but Joan seemed satisfied,
as well as blithely unaware that he had avoided the first question—how are you?—entirely.
“That’s great,” she said, “that’s really great. Well, I’m sure you know why I’m calling. Just wanted to check in on how things
are going. We’re about to close up shop for the holidays, and you know how publishing is—everyone will go radio silent until
at least a week after the New Year. Then that January deadline is going to come fast.”
“Mm-hmm, time flies,” Whit said, wondering if he sounded like a man who was speaking from the depths of despair while lying
prone on the floor of his bedroom.
Joan let out a fake laugh, obviously filling the silence. Whit willed himself to speak.
“It’s—it’s good, yeah. It’s good. It’s really close to being finished. I think late January should be no problem.”
What the fuck, you moron?
“What about January 15? That’s the deadline, on paper I mean.”
“January 15, no problem.”
What the fuck?!
“Oh, that’s great. That is so good to hear.”
Joan’s relief was palpable. And worse, it threw Whit’s misery into sharp contrast. He was a disaster. He was doomed, and a damned liar.
Joan hung up shortly after, as if she were trying to escape before the people from a television prank show could bang on her
office door and say, Psych! Whit Longacre is a pathetic joke, and you should be embarrassed for believing in him!
Whit stayed there on the floor, half-dozing, for a full hour more, only getting up when the cold wood had chilled him enough
to make a batch of hot tea an absolute necessity. It was only after the kettle was boiling that he remembered he needed just
enough water for one cup.
Despite her now-free afternoons, Merritt’s days were as regimented as ever. She worked every morning at the bookshop, taking
up extra shifts on the weekend, ostensibly to help Diana manage the holiday shoppers but in actuality trying, impossibly,
to make up the money she’d lost when she quit working for Whit. She had gone back to eating lunch in her car, usually listening
to an audiobook or watching a mindless half-hour comedy on her phone. She would check The Atlantic’s website, just to make sure the cease-and-desist letter that édouard had sent was still doing its work. Then she drove to
Carafe, where she wrote feverishly—except on Tuesdays, when she knew Whit’s writing group met there. She did not acknowledge
this even to herself, choosing instead to believe that Tuesdays could be a perfectly normal day of rest for the nonreligious.
She wrote reams and reams. The words surged out of her now, and occasionally, she did think of Whit, wishing he could help her once more with her pacing and plotting.
But then she would craft something, a little gem of a phrase, an image that seemed to pull at her heart from within the computer screen, and she would think, Forget him, and stumble onward.
Merritt was invigorated. She was writing, for the first time, entirely for herself, according to a private purpose. She did
not spare a thought for what people like Graydon Lyons or her writing professors might think. She did not consider agents,
editors, or publishers. She did not paint by numbers, and she did not waste time missing Whit.
Her writing was all hers.
She felt alive again.
Whit’s time in the Cayman Islands, to put it mildly, blew. They stayed at an all-inclusive resort that had seen better days.
Whit’s father, who greeted his children and granddaughter in the hotel lobby wearing a white Tony Soprano–style shirt, told
them he had “a surprise” for them. That surprise was named Sherry Hatzilakos, a bleached-blond, wire-thin woman whom Ned Longacre
had met in the waiting room at the dermatologist’s office four months earlier. She wore a floral wrap dress with a plunging
neckline, and when she held out her left engagement-ring-ed hand for them to shake, Evie’s throat made a guttural warning
noise that would have brought tears to the eyes of the person who did sound mixing for the Predator film franchise.
Things did not get better. Their rooms were cramped and felt constantly damp. The food was plentiful but mediocre. The drinks
were weak. And they spent their days on a beach that, it turned out, was really more suited for launching boats full of scuba
divers than for swimming with an eight-year-old. Meanwhile, Ned and Sherry, who sold crystals on Facebook Marketplace, giggled
and canoodled like teenagers.
Whit was furious with his father for springing a surprise stepmom and stepgrandmother on them, and that made him grumpy around everyone else.
édouard got food poisoning on the first night, so Evie was busy tending to him for forty-eight hours, while Whit, somehow depressed and antsy and lethargic all at once, alternated between watching Annie swim alone in the ocean and watching Annie swim alone in the pool.
The worst part came after Annie was asleep, when Whit would slide open their glass balcony door with meticulous, squeak-avoidant
slowness, then step out to sit on the world’s most uncomfortable patio furniture. His goal every night was to write, but he
was sun-tired and irritable, and usually he ended up watching the ocean and thinking about how much he wished Merritt was
there. She would have made the Sherry situation funny. She would have delighted Annie with conversations about books and,
he imagined, really good sandcastles and games to play in the surf. She would have been helpful to Evie during édouard’s illness,
she would have charmed Ned Longacre’s socks off, and she would have been kind to Sherry, toward whom Whit could not help but
be cold.
Merritt would have helped him finish the book, too, but he thought of that only once and then not again.
On the fourth day of their six-day trip, Evie and édouard were finally back in commission. Evie and Whit were alone at the
beach, lounging under two umbrellas, while édouard and Annie attempted to snorkel.
After a long-time-coming and utterly brutal debrief about their dad’s idiocy, with a deep dive into Sherry’s crystal-centric
Facebook posts, Evie began to needle her brother.
“Anything you want to tell me?”
She was watching the waves, but still it felt as though she was glaring at him.
“Something tells me you already know.”
She nodded. “I have a source on the inside.”
“How did she seem to you?” he asked, meaning Annie.
Evie understood. “She’s okay. She’ll be just fine.”
“Okay,” Whit sighed, saying no more.
“So it’s just over then?” Evie continued. “Professionally and romantically?”
“It is.”
He explained about the journals and the disagreement, impossible to be surmounted.
Evie sighed, clearly disappointed. “I’m sorry, Whit. What are you going to do?”
“About the book?” he asked. “I really don’t know.”
“Well, allow me to change the subject. Here’s this.”
Evie reached in her bag and tossed Whit something. His stomach dropped. Serious Games stared up at him from his lap, its book jacket a little worse for wear.
“What did you think?”
“Well.” Whit couldn’t see Evie’s eyes behind her big round sunglasses, and he waited eagerly for her next words. “From the
first page, I was prepared for it to be some joyless, humorless, crude thing with an insufferably stupid narrator, and honestly,
it sort of is some of those things.”
Whit found that he was smiling.
“But then—”
Oh.
“—I don’t know, it just sort of won me over. It’s really funny, and the narrator is stupid on purpose. Every character is
like the last person you’d ever want to hang out with in real life, but it’s satirical, I think, and it’s really hard to put
down.”
“I didn’t think you’d like it so much.”
She shrugged.
“I did. And if I can enjoy it over the sound of édouard’s retching, it must be pretty good.”
Later that night, on the balcony, Whit kept the overhead light off for Annie’s sake as she slept, but he did pull out his
phone flashlight.
He began to read.