20. Novel Idea
20
Novel Idea
DANA FIXED ME another rum and Coke when I set up shop at the bar that afternoon. I’d texted Alice after I realized that Dad’s obituary was coming along about as well as literally everything else in my life, and she was very short in replying that it needed to be done by Wednesday.
Amazing. Another deadline I would probably sail right past.
I stared at the computer screen, and knowing I wouldn’t get anything done today—my head felt like cotton balls—I scrolled over to Google.
Benji Andor
I typed into the search bar.
I was surprised to find that there weren’t any articles dedicated to his funeral, or at least his passing, but then again, hadn’t he said that he didn’t have any living close relatives? Then who was taking care of his goodbyes? I didn’t know much about Ben at all.
Who was in charge of his funeral?
While I didn’t see anything about his death, he
did
have a
social media account. I clicked on it, and went to his page. It was an older photo of him, not quite smiling but not dour, either, leaning against the railing of a cruise ship. And there was a very pretty redhead standing beside him, smiling, with one of those fruity umbrella drinks in her hand. His page was private, so I couldn’t know who she was, or anything else he might’ve divulged, but the photo was enough to make me feel a little uneasy.
“I haven’t updated that page in ages,” Ben said, and I gave a start. He was sitting beside me at the bar, his head resting on his hand, watching me snoop through his life.
I quickly exited out of the internet, my cheeks burning with embarrassment. “Sorry, I wasn’t prying. I wanted to see if—there was any news yet. About your funeral.”
“Is there?”
I shook my head.
He didn’t seem surprised. “I’m sure Laura’s taken the mantle on that. She always liked to be in control of things—not in a bad way. Just in a . . . way.”
“Laura?” I asked. The redhead in the photo?
“She’s my ex-fiancée,” he replied, absently rubbing the wedding ring between his fingers, as if it were a comfort. His ring, I guessed, remembering when he said he had no one to contact about unfinished business. He didn’t include Laura in that. Then again, she was his
ex.
Lee would be the last person I’d want to see after I died, too.
“Can I ask what happened?”
He tilted his head, thoughtful for a moment, trying to find the right words. “I’d gone on a business trip to the Winter Institute,” he finally began, “but I caught a cold and came home early. Didn’t tell her because I thought I’d surprise her with a weekend all to
ourselves. She was always pointing out how I never had time for her. I was always working. I would edit manuscripts at work, and then I would bring them home, and I would edit them there until I fell asleep.” His eyebrows furrowed. “She was in the shower with a coworker of hers. They’d been seeing each other for a few months at that point.”
I sucked in a breath. “Oh, Ben . . .”
“It wasn’t all her fault. She was right—all I did was work. I did little else. We were engaged but I didn’t—I was—” He pursed his lips and trained his eyes on a dark knot in the wooden bar. He scratched at it absently. “What kind of person makes his fiancée resort to someone else for love and affection?”
“
Makes?
” I echoed. “Ben—it wasn’t your fault. You can’t control what other people do. Her cheating was
her
choice—”
“And if I’d been present with her? If I’d been there and loving and—what I should have been?”
“She could’ve communicated with you.”
“She shouldn’t have to—”
“
Yes
, she
should
,” I bit back. “Relationships aren’t perfect all the time. You have to talk to each other. I’m sorry, but your fiancée was a dumbass, and she made a mistake, but that was
her choice
.”
He swallowed thickly and looked away. “She said as much,” he replied. “She asked if we could try again.”
“But you didn’t?”
He shook his head.
I didn’t understand. He was clearly still very much in love with her—or at least unable to forget about her. “Why?”
“Because it was my fault in the first place, Florence, and I loved her too much to cause that pain again. She deserves someone better than me.”
I clenched my hands tightly into fists. If Lee had contacted me once after we’d broken up, if he’d asked to try again, to meet in the middle, I would’ve— “You’re an idiot.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“So—what—you believe in love but just not for
you
? You believe in romance and grand romantic gestures and happily ever afters but you think there is something so fundamentally wrong with
you
that you don’t deserve it?”
“It’s better than not believing in it at all, isn’t it?” he snapped back.
I rolled my eyes and slammed my laptop closed. “I’ve got to go—do something. But for what it’s worth? You’re wrong.” Then I hopped off my stool and stalked out of the bar and up the stairs to my room, and he didn’t follow. Carver texted me a little while later, while I was pacing back and forth in my hotel room, trying to calm down.
Wanna wash some graves?
he asked.
Not really
, I replied.
Too bad, sis.
Ugh, fine. After I’d changed clothes into something I wouldn’t mind sweating in, I came back down and peeked into the bar, but Ben was gone.
Good. I was too angry to deal with him right now, anyway.
Carver and Nicki were waiting outside on the porch when I came out. Nicki was a short and stocky man with an angular face and thick black glasses to match his thick black hair and warm brown skin. His family owned a hotel in Cancún, so he understood the trials and tribulations of a
family business.
I was at least thankful for that—he understood the little nuances in our family, the weight Dad’s death left on us. I was glad Carver had him, especially now.
Carver had always been the one with his heart on his sleeve.
On the front veranda, Carver held up a portable pressure sprayer and a blue bucket filled with sponges and scrapers. “Ready to have some fun?”
“If that’s what you want to call it, sure,” I replied coldly.
He gave a low whistle. “What’s got you all twisted?”
Ben. The fact that he thought it was his fault that—“Nothing. Just work stuff,” I added, not quite lying.
“Well, perk up! Because this is work, too,” he insisted, and then narrowed his eyes. “
Grave
work.”
“That was bad.”
“Dead on arrival?” he asked, scrunching his nose.
I snorted. “Let’s get going, yeah? The sun’s going to set in an hour and I can’t be there after dark.”
“Hell yeah!” Carver pumped his fist into the air, and then turned, grabbing his partner by the wrist, and led him down the path to the sidewalk. “Nicki loves doing this.”
Nicki nodded. “It’s very soothing, and gives your arms a fantastic workout.”
“All the better to squeeze me tighter.”
“You’re my tightest squeeze.”
They kissed, and I made a face. “Ugh, gross. True love.”
“Tastes like a Taylor Swift song,” Carver added, and began to hum “The Story of Us,” which made me just want to throw myself off the nearest bridge. Resisting, I followed them to the cemetery, trying to shove my annoyance with Ben as far down into my gut as possible.
“Should we invite Alice?” Nicki asked.
Carver shook his head. “Nah. I bet she’s about to have a mental breakdown anyway, what with the makeup news from this morning.”
“Poor Alice . . .”
Alice was the only one who didn’t really care to scrub gravestones. When we were little, Dad would sometimes pick us up from school with a bucket in one hand, and a portable pressure sprayer in the other, and tell us that we were going to visit some friends. The friends always turned out to be gravestones in the Mairmont cemetery—the older ones that’d survived through hurricanes and tornadoes and half a century of grime and moss. Their letters half-hidden in time, their dates worn by wind and rain. Dad said they needed love, too, even after everyone who remembered them was dead.
So we spent some afternoons scrubbing gravestones clean. It wasn’t something any of us ever really got out of doing—or wanted to. The cemetery in the afternoon light looked soft and peaceful. In the top left corner, under one of the large oaks, there was a plot taped off. No one had started digging yet, but my throat tightened anyway.
That was where Dad would be.
It looked different in the daylight.
Carver pointed toward the bottom right corner. “Those look pretty grimy. What do you think?”
“I’ll take the one that looks like Madame Leota,” I replied, pointing to one of the older ones that had at least a century of dirt caked on it. Those were more delicate work. I liked that kind of work. The meticulousness of it.
Carver, Nicki, and I grabbed the scrapers out of the bucket, sudsed our sponges, and went to work. I took the scraper and scraped off all of the grime and moss, and soaked it down with the pressure sprayer. After a while, when I’d finally gotten back into the groove, I’d cleaned it well enough to make out the delicate insets of the face’s eyes.
“Remember when you and Alice were playing tag and accidentally broke a headstone and Dad had to glue it back together with Gorilla Glue?” Carver asked, wiping his forehead with the back of his arm.
I laughed at the memory. “Dad was
beside
himself.”
“You could barely tell it was broken. I was more worried about your head. You cracked it good against the headstone.”
“Alice was so worried,” I mused, scrubbing at the name and dates.
Elizabeth Fowl.
“She stayed up all night in my room to make sure I didn’t die or something. She was always like that. Looking after me.”
“She picked fights for you in high school,” Carver added. “Remember when that girl, Heather, tried to cyberbully you, and Al confronted her in the courtyard?”
“Well, I do now,” I replied wryly. I hadn’t thought about Heather in a long, long time.
“She punched Heather so hard that she ended up getting a nose job.”
“I thought Alice was for
sure
going to get suspended for that,” I laughed.
Alice had always been like that. Quick to come to my rescue, quicker to throw a punch. I never liked confrontation, but Alice loved me, and she hated seeing me bullied. We’d been inseparable for years, but then I left the first chance I got. I didn’t stay.
And that was something I just didn’t know how to talk about with her.
“I kind of feel sorry for this Heather girl,” Nicki mused.
“Don’t be, babe, she’s doing quite well,” Carver said dismissively. “Still in town, too.”
“Hope I don’t run into her,” I said, and sat back on the grass as Carver stood, taking the pressure sprayer, and washed down both
his stones and mine. They looked a good century younger. “I would have to eventually if I moved back here.”
Carver gave me a sidelong look. “You’re thinking about it?”
“I mean—I do miss everyone,” I admitted.
New York was a great place to live if you had roots there. If you were part of it. But some people weren’t born for steel jungles and the fast-paced lifestyle and—let’s face it—the cost of living. I used to love that I blended in with the crowd, that I was another face among faces, another writer chasing their dreams in the neighborhood coffee shop. But the longer I lived there, the more gum littered the sidewalk and rust crept in.
I didn’t imagine being there forever, but I didn’t know where I wanted to go, or what felt like home. Nowhere really did, if I was honest with myself. Dad always said it was never about the place, but the people you shared it with. In New York, I had Rose—and for a while I had Lee, and for a while it felt like I finally
had
found home.
Somewhere permanent. Somewhere safe.
Then, in the blink of an eye, I was on the sidewalk with my suitcase in the rain, and Lee was closing the door.
And despite what I told him, if Lee had come to me, asking for a second chance, begging to try again—
I would’ve said yes.
But I wasn’t sure why anymore.
A quiet wind whispered through the dogwood trees. I’d gotten so used to cars and construction and the sounds of people living so close together, I forgot what true silence sounded like. It wasn’t silence at all, but a soft sigh between the gravestones. The steady creak of an old and endless house.
Carver cocked his head. “It would be nice to have you home.
But don’t come home because you think you should. Come home because you want to.”
I didn’t know exactly what I wanted.
But it wasn’t what I had.
“Let’s do a few more stones before the sun goes down,” I said, pushing down the restlessness in my head. Neither Carver nor Nicki pushed back, thankfully, and we managed to do three more tombstones before Officer Saget pulled up at the gates.
He eyed me. “Miss Day. Nice to see you.”
I strained to smile. “Lovely evening, Officer.”
As we left the cemetery, Carver tsked. “You’re not even back a week and you’re already getting Saget antsy. Scandalous! What’ll the neighbors think?”
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” I said dismissively. “I can’t help it that he’s suspicious.”
“You
did
release a rabid possum in the police station.”
“Why does everyone keep bringing that up? Possums usually don’t get rabies. It was a fluke! I don’t see why he can’t just move on.” Never mind the trespassing violations and probably the slew of other things I did as a teenager to help a ghost move on. “I just went for a moonwalk the other night. That’s it!”
My brother laughed. “You should’ve asked me to come with you. I love moonwalks! Nicki, one time when Florence and I were—what? Twelve? Ten?”
“Something like that,” I agreed, already knowing the story he was about to tell.
“Anyway, it was right after a storm and we were all up and pretty wired. The lights had gone out. So Mom and Dad took us for a moonwalk . . .”
I listened as we walked back along the side street to the main
part of town. Most of the shops were emptying out for the evening. Nothing stayed open late here in Mairmont, aside from the Waffle House and Bar None. It was so unlike New York, where everything was busy and frantic all the time. Here it felt like the world was in slow motion. Everything took its time.
I felt like I’d already been here for a year, and it’d only been a few days.
“How’s the obit going?” Carver asked as they dropped me back off at the bed-and-breakfast.
“Great,” I lied. “I should be done soon.”
More lies.
“Can’t wait to read it. Dad’d be glad you wrote it,” he added. “He was proud of everything you wrote.”
“Oh, yeah, the one thing.”
That he knew about
, I added to myself.
Carver opened his mouth to respond, but I turned away before he could—I didn’t
need
consoling—and I walked into the bed-and-breakfast.
Ben wasn’t around, so I took my laptop out of my room and went down to the bar again, and ordered myself another rum and Coke. I slid onto my barstool and opened my laptop.
Deleted the paragraph I’d written. Cracked my knuckles.
And stared at the blank Word document.
I didn’t know how to form the words for what I wanted to write. I didn’t know how to take all the jumbled feelings in my head and put them onto paper. There weren’t words big enough or strong enough or warm enough to encompass Dad. He was untranslatable.
I was sure someone like Ben, who had words for everything—and always seemed to have the
right
ones—wouldn’t have had this
sort of problem. I bet his brain was as neat and orderly as his desk had been, and his thoughts as ironed as his shirts.
Writing Dad’s obit was a different kind of failure than writing Ann’s books.
One had too many words I wanted to say, and one didn’t have any at all.
I moved my mouse over to File > Open Recent, and scrolled down to the first one. Ann_Nichols_4. I never titled the books until I was almost done, and most of the time the titles came directly from the text itself.
The document opened to where I left off.
A year ago.
I remembered, so viscerally, the beginning of the end. When I had looked on his laptop, convincing myself that I
did
trust him, but I wanted to know what his book was about. I remembered that he’d gone out for laundry and left his laptop open to the Word document. I remembered setting down my laptop—opened to this very scene—and crawling across the couch to where he had just sat a few minutes before. The space heater hummed softly.
And as I read, my world began to break apart, piece by piece, like a puzzle coming unglued. When he came back to the apartment, his laundry in tow, he froze in the foyer. I didn’t look up from his computer.
“
When the Dead Sing
,” I read, and finally turned my gaze up to him, refusing to believe what I read. “Babe—is this . . . is it about me?”
“No, of course not,” he said dismissively, dumping the laundry on the ground. He came over, took his laptop from my lap, and closed it. “Your stories gave me inspiration. You’re my muse,” he added, and kissed me swiftly on the lips.
As if it would shut me up.
As if it would make everything good again.
Spoiler alert: It didn’t.
How could I write about two characters, Amelia and Jackson, reconciling, trusting each other again when—when I myself
couldn’t
? One moment I had every grand romantic gesture right at my fingertips, I had faith these two characters would come back together, and I could sow them a happily ever after. But then it felt like the story had been ripped apart at the seams. I didn’t feel them anymore. I didn’t know who they were, this woman who always knew what she wanted, and this world-weary musician with a heart of gold. I didn’t know the kind of love they had, or if they even believed in it.
I knew I didn’t.
Hesitantly, testily, I placed my fingers on the keyboard, feeling the rigid bumps on the F and J keys. It was like stepping back into old, worn shoes that had gone stiff without a partner to dance with.
I took a deep breath.
The only way out was through—
Wait.
I took a big gulp of my drink, and then settled my fingers back into position.
Now I was ready.
“You can do this, Florence,” I muttered, and sank into the scene.
Amelia didn’t want to hear his confessions. About the lies he wove about a life he didn’t live. She knew why he left. Why he abandoned her. The facts stuck to her skin like her wet clothes in the rain. He had lied to her—omitted the story that was most stitched into his
life as though, if she learned about it, she’d look at him differently.
Well, he was right in that regard. She did learn about his ex-wife, and she
did
see him differently. “Were you ever going to tell me?” she asked. “About her?”
He hesitated, rubbing nervously at the scar on his hand that she thought was from one of his wild party nights, but had been from the accident. “I didn’t think you’d understand.”
“Did you give me the choice?”
“I—”
“No, you just made it for me.”
“Amelia, I—” Suddenly, Jackson went pale and dropped dead from all his lies—
“Nope.” I deleted the last sentence.
Suddenly, Jackson went pale and dropped dead from all of his lies.
Amelia didn’t want to hear his explanations. “You lied. You
wanted
to. Why should I trust you now? Why do I still love you?”
“Because the heart wants what it wants.”
“Then my heart’s a motherfucking joke if it wants you.”
“That doesn’t help, Florence.” I sighed, and deleted it again.
I stared at the cursor, but all I could hear was my fight with Lee, our voices growing louder and louder until we were screaming at each other—and I wondered if it was me.
If I had just overreacted. And why couldn’t I get
over
him? Why did it still hurt?
Why was I so weak?
“Because the heart wants what it wants.”
“Then my heart’s a motherfucking joke if it wants you.”
She gave him a sad, defeated look. “But why you?”
“That’s going well.” This time it was not me who said it, but a voice to my side that made me jump. Ben sat on the stool next to me, leaning over just enough to read my screen.
I slammed my laptop shut, cheeks burning. “
Rude!
”
Dana leaned forward over the check-in counter to give me a puzzled look.
I smiled politely at them and said quieter to Ben, angling my face away from them, “It’s rude to look at someone else’s work.”
Especially when it’s as bad as mine.
He sat back with his arms crossed over his chest. “I have a feeling you are writing from a very raw place right now.”
“No shit,” I deadpanned. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
He visibly winced at that one, and looked a little ashamed of himself. “I thought you were working on your father’s obituary. I didn’t mean to spy on your writing.”
I narrowed my eyes.
He held up his hands in defeat. “I promise, darling, nothing more.”
Darling.
A knot caught in my throat and I quickly looked away. I thought I hated all kinds of pet names.
Dear
,
sweetie
,
honey
, but I guessed I hated it when Lee called me
bunny
, because he said I looked like a startled rabbit when something caught me unawares. He said it was endearing.
It wasn’t.
But then why did the word
darling
get my heart racing?
“And,” he added, “I wanted to apologize for earlier. I snapped at you, and I had no right to.”
“I’m sorry, too,” I replied. “I had no right to judge you or your life when mine’s a mess. Clearly,” I added, motioning toward my laptop. “I’m so fucked up I can’t even write a kissing scene.”
He tilted his head, debating quietly. He was choosing his words. I liked that about him, that when words mattered, he thought about them before he said them. “It was . . . nice, actually, to have someone tell me it wasn’t my fault. Even if I don’t agree.”
“I hope you change your mind someday.”
He smiled a little sadly. “I don’t think it matters anymore.” Because he was dead. I opened my mouth to say something, to console him, to tell him it still
did
matter, when he said, “So, what has you stuck? Remember: I said I’d help if I could. I’d like to.”
He didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
I drained my rum and Coke. “Okay, so: Here’s my problem. I haven’t been able to write for about a year now. I don’t see the point anymore. I used to believe in love, but I really don’t now. Every time I try to imagine it, I can only think about how mine ended.”
“One relationship doesn’t—”
“One?” I shook my head with a soft laugh. “If it was
one
, Ben, I’d be lucky. Dad said I had a string of bad luck, but I don’t really think that anymore. Guys just . . . don’t want someone like me. Or maybe they do, but they just don’t want
me
.” My eyebrows furrowed as I stared at the condensation on my glass, but all I could see were the times I’d been dumped, broken up with, left outside in the cold April rain—
literally
. “Maybe I’m the problem.”
He pursed his lips together, not knowing what to say.
But the worst part?
Dana slid me a shot of something clear with a sad sort of nod and said, “I feel you, sister.”
And I realized that they thought I was talking to myself. Commiserating with myself. Throwing my own solo pity party. And what was a party without a shot or two?
“Thanks.” I threw back the shot of—oh god,
vodka.
Straight vodka. I set the glass down with a cringe and swooped my laptop into my satchel.
I needed to go for a walk. Get out of here. Do something—anything—else, because clearly writing wasn’t happening today. No kind of writing.
At all
. I used to write my way out of utter despair, but now I couldn’t even write myself out of a sex scene.
It was embarrassing.
But as I turned to leave, Ben was there.
I jumped.
“I didn’t even startle you!”
“It’s been a long day,” I said, fumbling for my phone. I gave Dana another pleasant nod on my way back up to my room, and Ben followed me like a vulture waiting to pick my carcass clean.
“I have an idea, if you’re willing,” he proposed when we were out of Dana’s earshot.
“Oh, this should be good.”
“It will be.”
I looked him up and down. He was such a conundrum. Too tall and too broad and too neatly organized, he didn’t fit into any of the boxes in my head reserved for
leading man
material. He was doggedly smart, and insistent, and somehow he always ended up being so very polite to me even when he was angry (and I began to tell when he
was
because a muscle in his jaw would twitch).
I unlocked the door to my room and motioned for him to go inside, and I closed the door after him, and pulled off my NYU
pullover. While the night had gotten chilly, the heater in my room definitely worked well.
“Okay, shoot,” I said, turning to him. “Let’s throw all the spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.”
He smiled, and there was a glint in his brown eyes that turned them almost ocher. “Meet me in the town square. Tomorrow at noon. Don’t be late.” Then he turned on his heels, and departed right through the closed door, and I was left in the quiet room, baffled and a little bit—okay, a
lot
—intrigued.
What the hell could Benji Andor be up to?