AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Merrick doesn’t bother to try to stop me—he’s well aware that I like working with my hands as much as he does. He passes me a pair of gardening gloves, and we work in companionable silence for the first hour, the only sounds the soft cadence of our grunts, shuffles, and dripping sweat.
Merrick seems slower than usual, sweat pouring down his back, hands shaking as he tears up another deep-rooted weed.
Even so, by the time the sun dips toward the fence, we’ve cleared out the entire pool.
“Are you going to refinish it?” I ask. “Actually put some water in?”
“Would you and Sully go swimming if I do?”
“Of course!”
“Then I will.” He leans on the handle of his shovel, wiping his forehead with the back of his arm. The golden streaks in his hair glint in the late sun. The hair on his arms is golden, too, against his nut-brown tan. His chest and arms look a little fuller than they did a week ago, a little less depleted. His blue eyes are clear.
His face, though…his face is full of sorrow.
Quietly, Merrick says, “I should have done this a long time ago.”
“The second-best time to do it is today.”
“No, it’s not.” He shakes his head, shamefaced. “The second-best time would have been a little less long ago.”
He gazes around at the yard and house that still need an immense amount of work—the walls stained, the roof missingshingles, ivy and kudzu growing everywhere, swallowing the pool house.
“I have no excuse,” he says miserably. “I’m a fucking disgrace. Stella would be ashamed of me. She never would have believed I’d let this happen. That I’d do this to the boys…”
My heart is breaking, and I don’t know what to say, so I say what I know for certain is true:
“Those boys love you. Sullivanlovesyou. He’d never be ashamed of you.”
“Sully…” Merrick says his son’s name with such a painful level of love that tears spring into my eyes though I blink hard to hold them back. “Sully deserves so much better.”
His hands grip the handle of the shovel until his knuckles go white and his shoulders shake with emotion, with the thing he’s trying so desperately to hold inside.
“It all fell on Sully. I should have been there for my boys—I’ll never forgive myself for that.”
Merrick drops his head and drops the shovel, too, his hands covering his face. Without thinking, without even knowing what he’s talking about, I put my arms around him, and Merrick falls apart.
He sinks to the cement, and I sink down, too, still holding onto him like I can somehow hold him together through sobs so wracking they feel like they’ll shake him apart.
“I’ll never, never forgive myself for what I did. They needed me. They shouldn’t have lost us both. And when I came home, the evidence of how hard it had been, how awful it was…I could see it everywhere, all around me, and it was overwhelming. The idea of trying to fix this place, trying to make it like it was…it seemed impossible, and wrong, even. Because it can never be like it was, not without her. To even try to fix it was a lie. But I should have, I should have…why did I let them live like this?”
I hold Merrick, smelling the smoky scent of his skin, a little bit like Sullivan’s and a little bit like my dad’s because of the faint hint of bourbon.
“It’s okay,” I murmur, rubbing his back. “It’s going to be okay.”
Through the bits and pieces I make out, coupled with the smeared tattoos on his knuckles, I gather that Merrick spent some time in prison after his wife’s death, and he feels guilty as hell about it.
“Stella meant everything to me…but I lost control…I can’t imagine what it was like for my boys, here alone…”
Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but I have to know. “What happened?”
His voice comes out hoarse and choked from the hollow of his arms. “I chased him down, strangled the life out of him…for taking Stella from me.”
Now I understand…the stalker at the door. Merrick must have killed him.
Which means that Sully lost his momandhis dad for a time when he was only eighteen.
I hug Merrick with all my might. “You didn’t want to leave. You came home as soon as you could. My dad never came home. He was an alcoholic. He’d cheat on my mom, break her heart. He’d lie to me and let me down. And after all of that, what I really hate him for is leaving. He abandoned us, he didn’t care. I would have rather had him there, the terrible man that he was, than the rejection of him leaving me, knowing that he didn’t love me.”
