Worth the Wait Read online

  The windows of the Golden Lucky Fortune glowed like a cozy snow globe. Merritt could see Lei-Ling, Lei-Ling’s sister, her baby brother, her parents, and their customers. Soon Iliana would join them. Her broken attempts at Chinese would make everyone laugh. Iliana wouldn’t mind because they all adored her. There had been a moment, when Merritt had woken to see Avery looking at her, that’s she’d felt like Avery was family.

  “Slow down. What happened?” Iliana asked. “Why don’t you want to ruin this girl’s life?”

  Merritt told Iliana about her visit to the set and Avery’s promise that she had nothing to do with the sale.

  “She cried,” Merritt finished. “I’m such a sucker. I still felt sorry for her.”

  Iliana cocked her head. “If she didn’t have anything to do with the sale—”

  “She had everything to do with the sale.”

  “You buy stuff for Hellenic Hardware and I don’t have anything to do with it. Your interns don’t have anything to do with it. What if someone came in and said you stole a bunch of chair rails and it was my fault?”

  Merritt did not want her to be optimistic. The old Iliana would have known that people who screw you over once will do it again. As much as it hurt to be abandoned, it was the only way to guarantee a woman wouldn’t eventually ruin your life.

  “Did she act like she was lying?” Iliana asked.

  “She’s an actor.”

  “It’s reality TV.”

  “It’s all fake.”

  “But why would she bother to fake-cry? She got your building already.”

  “She had this nondisclosure contract. I didn’t sign it, but if I had and I told anyone we’d been together, she’d take Hellenic Hardware too.”

  “Why would a reality television host want an antique hardware store? And Avery Crown wouldn’t sleep with someone for a building. That’s just messed up. She’s too sweet.”

  Merritt was going to say, Please don’t be like Lei-Ling and believe everything you see on TV, but she knew Iliana was right. Lei-Ling was no fool, and it was a terrible thing to accuse Avery of. Her head spun with Iliana’s words and a flicker of hope, which she pushed away.

  “Maybe she’s telling the truth. You have to be open to possibilities,” Iliana said. “I didn’t think Lei-Ling and I would go anywhere. I went into her restaurant a hundred times.”

  It was their origin story, and Iliana loved to tell it. How many times she’d gone into the Golden Lucky Fortune. How Lei-Ling had fashioned sexually suggestive carrot flowers for her kung pao shrimp, until one day Iliana worked up the courage to bring Lei-Ling a book of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings.

  “I didn’t think she wanted me,” Iliana went on. “But her whole family knew how she felt. They were all watching us from the kitchen. Her grandfather said, ‘It is fortuitous. She has given her a book of the vagina flower.’” Iliana was about to launch into a description of their first date.

  Merritt cut her off. “Please don’t tell me about how happy you are.”

  “It could happen for you.”

  Rain hit the window like tears.

  Even if Avery was telling the truth, she had been gone for fifteen years. Fifteen years and then Avery wanted to waltz back into her life like nothing had happened. She hadn’t even looked for her. She had come to Portland on business, run into her by accident, and screwed her, literally and figuratively.

  “I’m done with her.”

  “Merritt, come on,” Iliana said, frustration breaking through her optimism. “You’re always walking around like someone’s going to hit you. Have you ever thought that maybe they won’t?”

  Chapter 12

  A few days later Avery and Alistair were waiting in the van for the start of the Care for Kids Fun-Raiser Bike Ride. Outside the van, the grass between Naito Parkway and the river was packed with vendors. Everything was fluttering leaves and sparkling water, but nothing looked beautiful to Avery. She couldn’t see the quintessential Portland she was supposed to capture in her decorating of the Elysium.

  “Body Biscuit?” Alistair asked meditatively. They were both wearing spandex bicycle suits in the brand-specific green of Global Body Biscuit. Venner wanted King & Crown to be a whole lifestyle brand, which might help with their unexceptional viewership (although it might just sell biscuits).

  “I haven’t ridden a bike in twenty years,” Avery said.

  “You never forget.”

  Wasn’t that the truth? She hadn’t slept since Merritt had arrived on set, and the more tired she became, the more her memories of Merritt tormented her.

  “I got you this.” Alistair held out a paperback book. “It’s a romance. It’s got a happy ending. My mom reads them.”

  Alistair’s mom worked in the front office of a mining company and read books about the Winchester Mystery House. Anytime Alistair had offered to take her there, she’d declined, saying, Oh no. The good Lord gave me all I need right here, which in Stone did not make the Lord look very good. Avery and Alistair’s mom did not have much in common.

  “Thanks,” Avery said.

  “The Untouchable Canyon,” Alistair said, as though the title might cheer her up. “‘Lucy Sunderland was born into wealth, but she pines to run free over the moor.’ You want to run free over a moor, don’t you?”

  Avery looked at Alistair. His blue eyes were full of sympathy, but he never got it quite right. King Cobra for grief. An enormous arrangement of plastic dahlias because he said his love for her would last forever, like plastic, which took four hundred and fifty years to biodegrade. Still, she would take his dahlias over any diamond solitaire.

  “What’s a moor?” Avery asked.

  “It’s a heath. A fen for shooting grouse.”

  “You miss Stone.”

  “Do not.” He took out his phone. “Cheer you up?”

  He cued up a video. The America Wyoming Foundation had put in a swimming pool for the twenty days it was warm enough to swim in Stone. The video made her feel worse. Alistair was good. The world was full of good people, and she wasn’t one of them.

  A loud knock on the van window startled them both. The back doors flew open.

  “Hello, you beautiful Barbie dolls,” DX declared.

  She too was dressed in a bicycle suit, although hers was black and sleek, like the outfit of a superhero.

  “I was going to come up tomorrow, but I called Greg and he said you were riding in this kids’ thing, and I was like, I frickin’ love kids. Here.” She picked up a small cooler she had brought with her and offered it to Avery. “Hi Song sushi. Your favorite. We were in San Francisco for breakfast this morning, so I picked it up. I had to keep it on dry ice. The guy on the helicopter had some problem with that. Something about sublimated CO2. I said fuck yeah! Next time I’m filling a whole fucking bathtub with dry ice and we’re flying overnight to Nepal.”

  “The guy on the helicopter,” Alistair said, shaking his head with a smile. “Would that be the pilot?”

  “No. He was just this guy we picked up in San Fran. I flew! Feminism is flying your own chopper.”

  Of course DX flew. DX probably prepared fugu fish for her entourage, had sex with her boyfriend in the cockpit, and recorded a new song that had gone platinum…all in the time Avery and Alistair had taken to squeeze into their Body Biscuit suits.

  Alistair hopped out of the van and gave DX a full-body hug. “Cheer Avery up for me, will you? She’s blue. I’ll go give out our free biscuits.”

  DX took the seat next to Avery.

  “So, you and this girl?”

  “Me and this girl nothing. She doesn’t want to see me.”

  “Did you break into her house? Tie yourself to her bed?”

  “No!”

  “Don’t you think you should at least try?”

  “To get myself arrested?”

  “To get yourself arrested for love.”

  Greg appeared at the open doors.

  “Sorry, Avery. You’ve got to get out there. Photo op
s. Hi, DX.” He looked wary. DX was not the person you wanted on the set of a well-organized decorating show, especially not with the TKO boss sniffing around like an auditor.

  “We’ll talk more,” DX said. “Let’s go ride the hell out of this race.”

  Avery made her way through the throng of vendors. One hour of hawking Global Body Biscuits and a few of hours of shooting: She could do it. Filming had always exhilarated her. A ten-hour day just made her want a twelve-hour day. But now all she wanted to do was lie in her hotel room and watch reruns of any show but King & Crown.

  Alistair was passing out samples, his charm in overdrive. It took a lot of charm to sell energy bars that tasted like dirt and Body Biscuit’s Around the World Energy Shot, which tasted like turpentine.

  “You want to fly around the world?” Alistair asked a passerby. He tossed the woman a sample. “Now you can.” To Avery he whispered, “Ponza is over there. I swear he doesn’t have a real job. Why isn’t he chasing after someone with a scandalous paternity lawsuit or a nose transplant or something? Anyway, the race starts in an hour. We’ll ditch him.”

  Avery sat down behind Alistair and opened one of the small plastic vials of Around the World. Alistair grinned at the crowd, talking enough to make up for Avery sulking in the back of the vending tent.

  Eventually, the crew arrived for a quick product-placement shot. Venner came up behind Gould, the cameraman.

  “Around-the-world energy. Red Bull’s a 747. This is a rocket,” Venner said. “I just went to China! Bam. Japan! Bam! Paris! Bam! Let’s go again.”

  Avery took another shot. She wasn’t tired anymore, and her heart rate had sped up.

  “Again,” Venner said.

  Gould’s camera sprang at her. Alistair knocked back the same empty bottle four times. One. Two. Three. Four. DX zipped by. Venner called “action.” Avery took another shot.

  “Again. Action. Cut. Bam! Pow! China. Again.”

  Then one of the production assistants was holding the handlebars of a bike in front of her.

  “It’s too big,” Avery said. “I don’t remember how.”

  She felt jumpy energy sear through her body. Everything was vibrating. Maybe there really was something to the Global Body Biscuit line.

  “What’s in those shots?” she asked Alistair.

  “You didn’t actually drink all those, did you?” he asked, suddenly noticing the empty bottles. “You’re supposed to pretend. Here, drink some water. Get it out of your system.”

  “I feel okay,” Avery managed.

  Someone fired a starting pistol.

  “Just take it easy,” Alistair said. “I think it’s legal speed. It’s not good for you.”

  He was wrong, though. The first mile was all uphill, but the shots had kicked in, and she felt light and free. Her bones vibrated. She pedaled faster. She imagined Merritt watching from the sidelines. Merritt would see her moving so fast, so gracefully, her body a flash of green. Merritt would think, She’s so strong and athletic. What a good cause. She loves children! Merritt would be waiting for her at the finish line. Oh, Avery. I was wrong to be so angry. Maybe Merritt would think she looked good in green spandex. Maybe antifreeze green brought out something in her eyes.

  She thought she heard Greg (or maybe it was Gould) calling, “Cut. We got it.”

  She pedaled harder.

  “We’re done,” Alistair yelled.

  Avery wasn’t listening. She was moving fast. They had climbed a hill, and now she was on the downward slope, racing toward a conglomeration of office parks. Faster and faster she pedaled. She was at one with her bike. Forget Pilates. She needed speed.

  “Woo-hoo!” someone yelled.

  Avery saw a flash of superhero suit, then DX’s wiry body bent over the handlebars of a BMX bike.

  Avery thought she heard Alistair yelling behind her, but she couldn’t stop. Stopping meant thinking. Stop and the King & Crown contractor was painting over vintage wallpaper in the beautiful Elysium building. Stop and the only memento she had of Merritt Lessing was a memory. Stop and tomorrow would be—

  “Avery, wait! No! Not that way!” Alistair’s voice was far behind her. “Aves! The road!”

  Alistair didn’t know. Avery needed to follow DX on some wild quest. She needed to fly a helicopter full of dry ice. She needed to kiss Merritt on a busy street and not care who saw.

  She saw DX flying down the road before her. They had left the other riders behind. Everything was a blur. Then, in one beautiful, sweeping movement, DX flew up the side of a concrete embankment. Avery saw her suspended against the blue sky, and then Avery was racing up the same embankment. She was soaring. She could do anything, and she would win Merritt back. She would learn to fly because she was a rocket. Avery looked down. She was airborne. Then, with a crunch of metal and gravel, she was not.

  Chapter 13

  It was eight o’clock that evening, and Merritt sat at the workstation in the back of Hellenic Hardware, polishing a Greenman door knocker. Soaked, polished, and oiled, the door knockers burned with the same luster they must have had when they were first forged. Ordinarily, she would have been delighted. The day before she had learned that Avery would be at the reunion, she had cleaned forty-eight ceramic fuse holders. It had taken all day. She had been perfectly happy…well, maybe not perfectly happy, but she’d enjoyed every fuse. Now everything grated on her. The heat of the day hung in the air. The Pride House interns had been dreaming of the Nostalgia-rom fundraiser they were nominally involved in planning, and they wouldn’t leave. She heard something clatter.

  “What are you still doing here?” Merritt called more sharply than she intended.

  One of the interns bounced over to her, a mop of silky blond hair falling in his eyes. He was nineteen. He’d been homeless for almost two years before Tate Grafton had caught him stealing scones from one of her coffee shops and had brought him to the Pride House. Merritt thought two years on the street would harden anyone, but Alex was enthusiastic, childlike, and incompetent. Usually she found the combination endearing.

  “I told you to go home an hour ago.”

  “I love it here.” Alex bounced on his toes. “Me and Cassie are working on decorations for the Nostalgia-rom, and Cassie was wondering if we could move the windows.”

  Merritt took off the reading glasses she wore for the detail work of restoration. She set them down with a sigh. “The Nostalgia-rom is on September twenty-second. Last day of summer. It’s July. Go home.”

  Alex twisted his hands behind his back as he bounced. “We need room for another bar. I am going to get lit!”

  “You’re not,” Merritt said. “You’re nineteen.”

  “But I’ve got an ID.”

  “And I know who you are. Cut it up, or I’m telling your counselors.” Merritt looked back at her work, tracing the curves of the Greenman’s face with a Q-tip. “Go. It’s late.”

  She had had a fake ID when she was a teenager. She remembered buying whiskey for Avery. They had sat beneath the Saint Johns Bridge—their bridge—drinking out of plastic cups. Merritt had felt embarrassed. All the girls at Vale nipped a little champagne, but the whiskey had suddenly seemed like a ruffian’s choice. Avery looked so debonair in her pink-and-gray argyle sweater. Merritt hadn’t gained any weight since she was sixteen, but she had grown taller and her jeans had exposed an inch of ankle.

  Avery had sipped her whiskey. Do your parents let you drink?

  Peach schnapps in my baby bottle. Merritt had wanted Avery to laugh, but Avery had taken her hand.

  No! Really?

  Merritt conceded that yes. On the yacht before her first boarding school, her mother would pour a little schnapps into a cup of juice and tell her to go play on her own. She hadn’t meant to tell Avery, and she’d tried to laugh it off. Avery had put an arm around her shoulders. That’s child abuse, she’d said very seriously. Do you want me to tell someone? Merritt had breathed in Avery’s perfume. What are they going to do? she’d joked. Take me out
of the home? Then she’d lain down on the grass and nestled her head in Avery’s lap. It had felt self-indulgent, like she was taking advantage. How could kind, concerned Avery say, I’m sorry your parents tried to liquor you up, but your head is awfully close to my crotch. Move! But Avery hadn’t seemed to mind, and she had stroked Merritt’s hair and traced the contours of her face: her eyebrows, her jawline, her lips, until the pleasure of her caresses was too much and Merritt had stood up and paced down to the river.

  But she was never going to see Avery again, so it didn’t make sense to linger in these memories. She would never see her again, except that she kept googling images of Avery Crown. Maybe she had OCD. Compulsions: something you couldn’t not do. One last time, she told herself. Then she was done. Forever.

  Merritt picked up her phone. The images loaded slowly. What was she looking for? Proof that Avery hadn’t stolen the Elysium? Proof that she had? Proof that Merritt herself should have been kinder?

  Go back to Alistair.

  I am not your friend.

  I’ll tell them.

  I don’t want you in my life.

  Her own words had begun to haunt her. She accused Lei-Ling of believing everything on television. There were ten people living in a cave in Nevada who still thought reality TV was real. But maybe Iliana was right. Did reality television hosts actually do any of the things they seemed to do? She’d been mean. She never yelled at women. Iliana would say she wasn’t just yelling at Avery, but she was yelling at her mother and her boarding schools and Uncle Oli for dying.

  She stared at her phone. The images had loaded. She recognized most of them. A hundred glamour shots. A few outtakes. Avery and Alistair sitting on a curb looking tired but happy, Alistair passing a coffee cup to Avery and Avery looking at him as if to say, We can do this.

  Merritt scrolled down, then stopped short. She hadn’t seen the next photograph. It was Avery lying on pavement, blood on her cheek. She kept scrolling. An ambulance. A stretcher. Alistair clasping Avery’s hand as EMTs carried her off. Merritt touched one of the photos and it redirected to a blog called The Ponza Scheme. The text read, Singer-songwriter DX may have mastered the highest jump in the Care for Kids Fun-Raiser Bike Ride, but television hostess with the mostest Avery Crown was not so lucky. Bystanders said it was clear that the Decor Diva couldn’t make the jump and she went for it anyway. Competition with her BFF, DX, or something more?