Page 11 of The Hundred Loves of Juliet
Dana clucks her tongue. “You’re supposed to usegoodwine, not bargain barrel dregs.”
“We drank all the good stuff from Napa, babe.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I say with a smile. “I’m sure this is just as lucky. We’ll break it open first thing in the morning.”
HELENE
Everything in Alaska is waymore expensive than I thought it would be. And my nerves are completely fried from having to drive in the snow. I skidded in the Walmart parking lot and almost hit a family with young children. Then when I got back to my cottage, the driveway had iced over, and I nearly smashed the car through the garage wall.
After unloading my groceries (Reginald the Refrigerator is grateful to have a full belly), I decide that what I need is cake. Thank goodness I can just walk down the street to the coffee shop in the picturesque little downtown. Driving to Walmart had been a necessity, because it was in the next, bigger city. But I’m not getting in that car again unless I absolutely have to.
After The Frosty Otter, the interior of Moose Crossing, thecoffee shop, is a little disappointing. It’s kind of a Starbucks knockoff, with the same layout and similar utilitarian furniture. The store’s sign is even the same shade of Starbucks green, although it’s not a mermaid but a moose on the logo.
Still, the café smells like fresh roasted coffee beans and the pastry case is well stocked, which is good enough for me.
I order a latte and a fat slice of lingonberry pecan fruitcake that boasts a Handmade Locally sign, along with a note that declares: “Try it. I promise it’s nothing like the doorstop fruitcakes everyone makes fun of.”
There’s only one other patron in the shop, hammering away at a laptop, so I head toward one of the many empty tables. But as I get closer to him and catch a glimpse of his silhouette, I stop short, and my cake almost slides off its plate onto my boots.
Fuck fuck fuck. Is that Merrick?
I can barely see his profile under the waves of blond hair, but the sharp jawline and perfect posture look exactly like my ex-husband.Soon-to-beex-husband, who refuses to sign the divorce papers. Who calls and texts several times a day, asking me to reconsider.Demandingme to.
Has Merrick tracked me down and followed me here?
My stomach crawls up my throat. And he must feel my presence, because he looks up.
But…he has brown eyes, not green. Not Merrick!
“Uh, hi,” the man says, unsure what to do with me just staring at him. First Sebastien, now him. If I’m not careful, I’m going to start getting a reputation: California Tourist Who Gawks Awkwardly at Local Men.
“Sorry, thought you were someone else.” I laugh stupidly and hurry to the farthest table in the room.
Real smooth, Helene,I chastise myself as I cram a huge chunk of fruitcake into my mouth.
But even though that wasn’t Merrick, now I can’t get him out of my head.
When I first met Merrick Sauer, we were undergrads at Pomona College, and later, we went to journalism grad school together at Northwestern. What he lacked in brawn, he made up forin whip-sharp intelligence, and his charisma and mild arrogance at twenty was raffish in a nerdy, devil-may-care way. Everyone loved him—his professors, our dormmates, and especially me. He had ambition and talent in spades, and his future as a superstar was plain for all to see.
I loved basking in the golden light that seemed to follow him everywhere. I was an excellent writer, too, winning accolades like the Dean’s Award for Exceptional Journalism. Merrick and I were a young power couple back then, Northwestern’s most promising grad students, who would go out and conquer the world together.
But even then, he was changing subtly, without me noticing. Maybe I couldn’t see the warning flags because optimism is coded into my DNA—from both the way my mom looks at the world, and my dad’s broken watch that serves as a constant reminder that life is too short to waste on wallowing. So when Merrick and his greasy friend Aaron Gonchar were kicked off the university newspaper for ethics violations, Merrick wove a believable tale about the editorial board’s jealousy and incompetence. And I didn’t question otherwise. He was so charming and persuasive, and I was blindly in love with our potential, so I couldn’t see the alternate possibility: that maybe Merrick and Aaron had actually been in the wrong.
I didn’t realize that, over time, too much success and praise would irretrievably warp Merrick. I followed him from promotion to promotion, always putting my own career on hold. I turned down plum job offers overseas—assignments in Europe, where I longed to live—because Merrick and I had agreed to take turns, and his turn kept coming first.
Meanwhile, his charismatic confidence evolved into a condescending disdain toward not only those who worked for him, but also me, his wife. As brilliant as he was, he was horribly insecure—terrified that someone would discover he wasn’t all he was cracked up to be—and so he built armor around himself with insults and scorn.
Which was also why, as his professional reputation grew, he kept cheating with interns. They would look up to him with stars in their eyes despite his arrogance, awed by the fact that he was the youngest bureau chief in the history ofThe Wall Street Journal.Their reverence buoyed his ego, and apparently other, more physical body parts, and inevitably he’d stay late for work or go on long business trips with that intern in tow, forgetting to call or even text me the entire week he was gone.
I tear off a piece of the fruitcake and realize how lucky I am to escape him.
For a long time, I was actually oblivious to Merrick’s cheating, even though apparently everyone else at theJournalgossiped about him and his latest conquest whenever I was out of earshot. When you’re deep inside a relationship, you don’t see the stumbling blocks, the fatal flaws. Sometimes, you don’twantto see them,so you willfully put on your blinders and continue telling yourself that everything is great.
Maybe that was a flaw I took on when I adopted my dad’s interpretation ofRomeo and Juliet,that the bumps in life don’t matter as much as love does. I overlooked Merrick’s glaring defects because I was too focused on the love story I wanted out of it.
But when I didn’t get promoted to columnist, I was done. Especially since I deserved the promotion, and my husband was the bureau chief, for god’s sake—he could have made it happen.
Or maybe the last straw was that I caught Merrick in the act of cheating and I couldn’tnotsee the intern on her knees, his pants around his ankles.
