And One Last Thing... (18 page)

22 • Flashing the Harvest Moon

************************************************************************************************

The Harvest Moon Festival was the only truly community-oriented event in which the citizens of Buford participated. There were plenty of summer events for the tourists: the Strawberry Festival, the Fourth of July Jamboree, the Annual Redneck Regatta. But the Harvest Moon party, held on the second Saturday of October, was something the locals did just for themselves. I suspected it was to celebrate the departure of the annoying summer people.

The festival stemmed from an annual effort to help the community’s poor prepare for winter. Only now, instead of hunting deer and turkeys to stock underprivileged pantries, local residents helped charities by funneling them cash through carnival games, rides, and truly unhealthy food.

One silence-filled week after our disastrous dinner, Monroe stuck the flyer for the festival on my screen door as a sort of apology gesture, along with my own little pocket recorder for taking notes while I ran. I know that a crumpled, badly formatted sheet of neon orange paper and an electronic gadget shouldn’t bring a grown woman to tears, but being released from my own personal guilt-hell was so much better than getting flowers or jewelry.

When I speculated that the world wouldn’t end just because someone was mad at me, I was wrong. It did feel like the end of the world knowing that Monroe was angry with me. I was more depressed, more emotional, than I had been after leaving Mike. Food had no taste. Nothing I read, nothing on TV appealed to me. All I could do was write and sleep. I wrote pages and pages about Laurie’s heartbreak, her hope at meeting Mac, the sheriff of the tiny town where she settled. I felt like I had damaged something important, and somehow writing it down would keep me from losing it entirely.

I must have started for my front door a hundred times, holding the knob and trying to find exactly the right words to tell Monroe that I was sorry. But some unlikely combination of shame and pride kept me from opening it. Yes, I felt bad for making Monroe feel unappreciated or cheap. But I couldn’t help but resent the idea that he was practically commanding me not to write the newsletters, even if he thought he had my best interests in mind. I’d fought too hard to start making my own decisions. I wasn’t ready to hand over proxy votes just yet. I was afraid of ending up right back where I started.

That ugly orange flyer was like a pardon from prison. The minute I found it, I practically ran across the yard, even though I had no idea what I was going to say. How exactly did this work? Did I speak first? Did he? How did you apologize for half of an argument? Before I could knock, Monroe opened the door.

He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.”

Well, that was easy.

“I’m sorry, too,” I said. “I shouldn’t have -”

“I’ll go first,” Monroe said.

“No, I should go -”

“Lacey, just let me,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come down so hard on you. I can’t tell you what to do. I want you to find your voice as a writer and … I guess I took it a little too personally when you started working on something else. I still think the newsletters are a horrible idea and that you could do so much more with your talents. But I could have said so without hurting your feelings -”

“Well, you had a point and sometimes, obviously, I don’t see things unless I’m smacked over the head with them,” I admitted. “I’m going to rethink the whole letter thing. If it’s going to cause problems between us … I think I just got overexcited at the prospect of something I could do well. There aren’t a whole lot of tangible things that I’m good at -”

“I don’t want you to think that way,” Monroe said, interrupting me. “I’m sorry if I’ve been coming off as condescending or overbearing -”

“I’m sorry I called you all those horrible, vile names,” I told him.

His brow furrowed. “You didn’t call me names.”

“Well, you weren’t here for it, but, trust me, I did. And I’m sorry. Right now, besides my brother, you’re the best friend I have.”

“Same for me. If sex is going to complicate that, maybe we can cool down for a while.”

“Whoa, whoa,” I exclaimed, holding my hands up. “Let’s not get crazy.”

A wide grin split Monroe’s face, his relief palpable. “Oh, thank God, because I was totally bluffing.”

We spent most of the evening apologizing. In a baby step toward a more normal relationship, Monroe suggested we go to the festival. He said it combined his two great loves, deep-fried Twinkies and Tilt-A-Whirls.

He was a deep and complex man.

The truth was, I needed to get out of the cabin. Even without the Monroe-based guilt weighing on me, I was spending so much time on the computer, I was starting to get a laptop-shaped burn mark across my thighs. It wasn’t just the manuscript marathons. Despite my assertions that I would rethink the letters, I was still tinkering with Maya’s case studies. She sent me a new batch every few days, each time offering me increasingly attractive salary packages.

The stories made my experience seem like a particularly bland episode of The Brady Bunch. There was a woman named Alice whose husband had moved out of their house one T-shirt at a time for a month until there was almost nothing left of him in their home. He’d moved in with a co-worker who he’d been working on “projects” with for the last six months. Alice had even called her his work wife. What embarrassed Alice the most was that she hadn’t noticed anything was wrong. Her husband had removed everything that was important to him out of the house, and she’d missed it. So I wrote a “change of address” announcement for the husband.

Please forward all mail to Carl Finley at his new residence at 3379 Jackson Street, where he will be living with Robin, the woman he’s been sleeping with for the last six months. Most of you will be relieved to know that you don’t have to help Carl move because he slowly but surely moved his stuff out of the house over the last month so his darling wife wouldn’t notice anything was amiss. While Alice was busy calling hospitals to see f her husband had been injured in a car accident, Carl sent his mother to tell Alice that her marriage was over … and that she wanted her heirloom china back.

On an unrelated note, Alice will be hosting a bonfire this weekend.

Carl left behind his precious collection of Elvis memorabilia.

I’m not going to say the money wasn’t a motivating factor or me. But frankly, it was easier to vent on unfaithful husbands than to keep building my story. And it made me feel helpful, I guess. Like I was doing some sort of service for these women, helping them. And it made me feel a little less crazy for doing what I’d done.

On the other side of my professional conundrum, Monroe was already preparing me for “selling myself” as a writer, which sounded uncomfortably similar to prostitution. He said the most important step in getting published was finding a good agent. He’d offered to send my stuff to people from his agency, but that made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want people in the publishing industry doing me favors just because I happened to be sleeping with a bestselling author. That felt like something Beebee would do. I wanted to know that my writing was genuinely good, that it might sell. So I refused his help. Monroe lovingly called me “a stubborn pain in the ass,” but he also gave me the address of an internet database of literary agencies so I could find my own. He said it took him a year and forty-nine rejections before he found an agent. I hadn’t even finished the damn thing yet and it seemed like it was going to be more work to sell it than it was to write it. The thought of it exhausted me. And I just wasn’t sure if I was up to being rejected again and again.

Monroe talked about writing as if it were something that just happened, like he sat down at the computer and the words just appeared somehow. He acted like he didn’t have anything to do with it.

“It’s like these people are living in my head, telling me their stories,” he said as we traversed the festival fairway.

“Some people consider that a mental illness,” I told him, sipping homemade apple cider, which I suspected might have been made in an old oil drum.

As much as I enjoyed my little hermit’s retreat, it was nice to be out among people, even if most of them were five-year-olds whining for balloons. I liked walking through the crowd with Monroe, his hand at the small of my back, making me feel linked, but not led. Nobody seemed to recognize me with my Wildcats cap pulled low over my face, and if they did, they didn’t care enough to say anything. The air had just enough nip to it to make me appreciate the smell of churning peanut oil and wood-smoke. I had eaten my weight in kettle corn, lost five dollars at the dart booth, and had bought a ridiculous frog-shaped paperweight made of painted rocks. Overall, I considered that a productive afternoon.

“And lately, my antagonist doesn’t seem to be speaking to me,” he said. “I want the reader to be creeped out by her actions, but I don’t want to make her a caricature. I want her to be human, but not sympathetic.”

“So basically you’re afraid of alienating your female readers with psycho crushes on you,” I mused.

He nodded. “Yes.”

“Well, the best way to get a woman to dislike a character would be to give your cop a nice, normal girlfriend, then have your crazy girl do something that endangers her, but doesn’t actually hurt her. Girlfriend is separated from cop either because she’s afraid or he breaks up with her to protect her, then by chapter twenty, they’re reunited.”

“You’re trying to make me into a romance writer, aren’t you?” he said, narrowing his eyes at me.

“It wouldn’t hurt to chick-ify your books by about ten percent.”

“I’ll take that into consideration,” he said.

“It’s flattering that my opinion matters to you, despite the fact that I’ve only read one of your books,” I told him.

“Wait, I thought you were reading Drunk Tank Duets?”

“I knew you’d catch that.” I grinned.

“You’re not nearly as funny as you think you are,” he told me. “Well, what about you? How goes Laurie’s search for personal-fulfillment-slash-personal-renewal?”

“It’s progressing. I’m still having a hard time reconciling the idea that other people might read this. There are things that I want to say about marriage, about husbands, about sex, but I keep editing myself because I’m afraid of offending people or grossing them out.”

“Lacey, I’m pretty sure you’ve already crossed that bridge,” Monroe said. “I don’t think there’s much you can write at this point that would shock people.”

“Good point,” I admitted, frowning at him when he dug his hand. into my kettle corn. “Hey, hey, popcorn thief!”

“You need to learn to share,” he said, popping the oversweet popcorn into his mouth.

“You need to learn to ask,” I told him, giggling as he reached around my back to take another handful from the bag.

Over his shoulder, I saw Hap Borchard coming our way, sipping from a large blue bottle of homemade root beer. He saw me, smiled, and waved.

“Okay,” I breathed and tried to talk without moving my lips as we approached. “Be polite, but not your normal engaging self. If he starts to tell a story, I will fake an anaphylactic reaction to the cider and you carry me to the infirmary tent.”

“You’re assuming I can carry you after all that kettle corn,” Monroe muttered, dodging when I reached out to smack him.

“Nice to see you out and about, Miz Lacey,” Hap Borchard said.

“Mr. Borchard!” I exclaimed in a sweet tone that had Monroe double-taking. “It’s nice to see you, too. Is Mrs. Borchard here with you today?”

“She’s over at the craft booths, buying some geegaw for the yard. Lord knows we don’t have near enough concrete critters on our lawn.”

“Well, the good news is you don’t have to clean up after them,” Monroe said.

Mr. Borchard gave a loud, hooting laugh. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

An awkward silence fell over the three of us. Mr. Borchard was looking at me, expectantly. Clearly, I was supposed to say something here, but what? It had been so long since I’d socialized with anyone but Monroe, I felt out of practice. I wracked my brain, trying to think of the appropriate conversational volley. What would my mother say in a situation like this?

“Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell how much I appreciate you finishing the dock so quickly,” I told him. “It’s just as solid as the old one. I’m really very happy with it. And the benches are great. Gammy would have loved them. I’ve told everyone I’ve seen what a great job you’ve done.”

Okay, the only person I’d told was Monroe, but he was the only person I’d seen for a while. So it was just a small lie, necessary to maintain the delicately balanced scales of small-town politics.

“Good to have something to keep my hands busy,” Mr. Borchard said in a pleased, proud tone. “Have you thought about those other improvements to the cabin?”

“Improvements?” Monroe asked.

Mr. Borchard smiled beatifically at me. “Yeah, she’s thinking about staying up here for the winter, becoming a local. If she’s going to do that, she’s going to need some new windows, some new insulation. We don’t want her freezing to death, do we?”

Monroe shot me a speculative look. “No, we don’t.”

“Then again, from what I can see, you two do what you can to keep each other warmed up,” Mr. Borchard said, winking at us. Before either of us could respond or protest, he raised his hands like he was making a benediction and said, “The missus and I think it’s a good thing. We couldn’t be happier for you, Miz Lacey. Never took much to your husband. If this fella here treats you right, he won’t have to worry.”

“Is that a not-too-subtle threat?” Monroe asked, grinning good-naturedly.

Mr. Borchard shook his head, all innocence. “Not from me. I meant, if you treat her right, she won’t send an e-mail to all and sundry, calling you everything but a nice Christian boy. You’ve got your hands full, I’d say.” My eyes must have looked like saucers, because Mr. Borchard winked at me again and said, “The missus just got a copy from one of the gals in her quilting group. We laughed our heads off. Always knew you had your granny’s backbone.”