Chapter 14 #2
"You don't get credit for knowing what you did," Erin said.
"That's what I have to tell you, and it's the last useful thing I've got.
You're the most articulate man I've ever met about your own failures and you always have been.
You could give a seminar. And every single time in six years that you've named the thing exactly right, I have felt it land, and I have felt myself start to give you something for it, and — Graham, naming it is not the work. It's the cheapest thing you do."
He took that.
"Yes," he said. "That's right."
"Then don't do it again."
"Okay."
"April," she said. "Buy it in a shop."
The pressure started within a week, from all sides, exactly as she had known it would.
Bev moved the publication date up to March and then wanted to talk about a photograph.
An actual author photograph. Of an actual face.
Erin said yes on the phone in about a second and a half, briskly, like a professional, and then hung up and went down and got in her car and sat in it in the lot behind the shop for twenty minutes.
Because there was no version of this she had ever pictured.
Four books. Six years. There had never been a face — that had been the entire architecture of Elle Winters, a name and four white spines and a woman who had never done an event or a panel or been in a room.
Bev had told publishers it was a strategy and they had admired it enormously, and it had not been a strategy, it had been a woman with a small lamp.
And in March there was going to be a photograph of her on the back of a book about her marriage, in the window of the shop she lived above, in a town where Dot at the market had once told Shannon that the poor thing had only just found out.
Erin sat in the car with her hands in her lap.
It was not fear, and she was careful with herself about that, the way she was careful about everything.
It was that she had spent thirty-six years being extremely good at not being looked at.
That was the actual skill. Not the writing — the writing was the second thing.
The first thing was a childhood with nobody in it, then a house where nothing was said directly, and thirty-six years of a woman getting so good at going still that the entire Lockwood family had watched her do it for five years and had genuinely believed she did nothing all day.
She was about to stop. On purpose. In a photograph, with her name printed under it.
She went back up and told Shannon that night, in the kitchen, and Shannon put down the dish she was drying.
"Your name on it."
"My name on it."
"And the folder's in it."
"The folder's in it."
Shannon stood there for a second.
"They're going to come for you," she said. "Not him — that lot. There's people in Camden who'll — Erin, they've got money and they've got lawyers and they've got a hundred and fifty years of everybody being pleasant, and you are about to walk into that with a paperback."
"Yes."
"You know that and you're doing it."
"Yes."
"Okay." Shannon picked the dish back up. "Then I'm going to need about forty copies for the boat and I'm not paying for one of them."
A columnist in Boston who had run four sentences about a Lockwood separation a year earlier called Ninebark's registered agent asking, quite politely, whether Erin Brooks was represented, and Bev told him a flat and beautiful lie and then called Erin and said, "That's started. That doesn't stop now."
And on the second of October a letter came in an old woman's handwriting.
Erin. Graham has told me nothing, which I take to mean a great deal, and Bev Kaplan's assistant has been extremely careful with a woman in my book group, which tells me the rest. So I know there is a book and I can guess what is in it.
I am not going to ask you not to. I would like that written down somewhere, because I am seventy-four and I have spent my life asking people not to, and it is the only useful thing I have ever done to stop.
I will ask you one thing instead. When it comes out, will you let me buy it myself, in a shop, like anybody? I should like once in my life to find out what happened in my own family the same way the rest of the world does.
A.
Erin read it standing up at the counter.
Then she sat down and wrote back, by hand, four lines, and posted it that afternoon:
Adelaide. Yes. March, and don't let anyone give you a copy — make them charge you for it.
There's a passage about a woman in a morning room who runs out of not being willing. It's the best thing in the book and it isn't in the acknowledgments and it never will be.
E.
Fourteen days to the sixteenth.
She had the date on the refrigerator and a manuscript delivered and a man who had said yes without thinking about it, and every single thing she had asked for since a September morning was arriving on schedule.
And at the end of the first week in October, Colleen called and said, "It's done. He's signed."
"Signed what?"
"All of it. Everything. Came through this morning with Rennick's cover note." A pause, and something odd in it. "Erin, he's signed the decree as well. In advance. There was no need — it's uncontested, he could have done it in the room on the sixteenth in front of the judge like everybody does."
Erin stood in her kitchen.
"Why would he do that?"
"I don't know," Colleen said. "It means he doesn't have to be there."
Erin looked at the calendar on the side of the refrigerator. October the sixteenth, in her own handwriting, between the swimming and the dentist.
"He's always been there," she said. "Every date, every conference, every single one. He came to the disclosure. He drove up from Boston for a twenty-minute status hearing in February that Rennick could have covered on the phone."
"I know he did."
"So why not this one."
Colleen was quiet for a moment.
"Erin," she said, "I've had a great deal of experience with men who sign early, and it is nearly always one of two things. Either he's had enough and wants it over without having to look at you." A pause. "Or he's decided you shouldn't have to sit in a room and watch him not want it."
"Which one."
"I've been wrong about that man since June," said Colleen Hendricks. "Ask me anything else."
After she hung up Erin stood at the counter for a long while.
Then she took the phone back out and opened the thread — the one with Yes in it, from a Tuesday morning in June, still the last thing either of them had sent — and started typing, and got four words in.
Are you coming on
She deleted it.
Because she knew, standing there, exactly what that message was. It was a woman asking a man to be somewhere, which was the first thing she had asked him for in six years that was not a boundary.
And if she sent it, then the sixteenth stopped being a date on a refrigerator and became something else entirely, and she would have been the one who changed it.
She put the phone face down.
Then she turned it back over, because she was doing that now.
And left it, and went in to read to her son.