The Perfect Letter

by Chris Harrison

  He met her at the door, helped her carry her bags downstairs, then drove east over the Queensboro Bridge following a delivery truck with a bad muffler, the rising sun in their eyes, the noise drowning out any possibility of conversation.

  After the fiasco at the launch party and the second one in the bedroom, Leigh had been up all night, trying to think of something to say. But then the truck with the bad muffler moved over a lane, and the air cleared a little. Joseph was the first to speak. “I hope you know, my offer still stands,” he was saying. “About getting married, I mean. If what you really need is more time, take it. I’m not in a rush. It’s just . . . I always thought maybe you didn’t want to move in together because we weren’t married. That maybe you were old-fashioned that way, and if I proposed, you’d know I was serious about you.”

  She reached over and took his hand, rubbing her palm against his, soft and cool. “I know you’re serious,” she said. “And I’m thinking about it. Really. I’m not saying no.” She took a breath. “Maybe I need some time to think it over. You know, clear my head. It’s a big decision, Joseph—I don’t want to rush into anything. That wouldn’t be fair to either of us.”

  “Maybe.” He went silent, concentrating on the early-morning traffic. She watched him put his hands back on the steering wheel—ten and two—but they weren’t strangling it, not exactly. By the time they pulled up to the curb at LaGuardia, he seemed to have lightened somewhat. Perhaps he finally believed her when she said she was thinking about it, she just needed a bit more time.

  He put the car in park, turning to her while the traffic around them surged, the business travelers and families with small children, the security forces eyeing everyone with suspicion. “I’m going to miss you,” he said. “A week suddenly feels like a long time.”

  “I’ll miss you, too. I’ll see you a week from tomorrow.” She was seized with a sudden fear that when she came back, he might not be here. That, too, was something she was afraid of. “You’re still going to pick me up?”

  “Yes, of course I’m picking you up.” He said it like it hurt him that she would even think otherwise. Then he got out and walked around to the trunk to help her with her bags. He was so much taller than she was, naturally thin and elegant looking in a very New York, masculine kind of way. Bits of pollen stuck to his lashes and his close-cropped dark hair, the soft gray wool of the expensive sweater she’d bought him at Christmas. “Take this week to think. Maybe go see some old friends, let your hair down, figure some things out. Maybe it will do us both some good.”

  “I will.” Leigh kissed his smooth cheek, wrapped her arms around his neck, and said, “Thank you.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you, too,” she whispered, and meant it. She knew he’d never hurt her; she knew he’d always look out for her. She knew he would always be the same kind, careful, considerate man he was. She knew he could give her the one thing she’d always wanted: a family of her own. She pictured Christmases in Vermont, summers at the beach. Joseph in swim trunks, swinging a six-year-old daughter up on his high shoulders. She knew that, with him, she would never be afraid.

  “Stay out of trouble,” he said. He brushed her hands with his fingers, then walked back around the car and got in.

  When he pulled away, she blew out a deep breath and picked up her bags. Maybe going home for a week would really do her some good. Give her time to sort out how she really felt about Joseph, New York. Her future, all of it. She could say good-bye to Texas, to her past, once and for all.

  When they were first dating, first learning about each other’s history, Joseph had somehow gotten the impression that Leigh’s family was a broken, dysfunctional thing with some kind of dark secret at the center of it. There had to be a reason she hadn’t gone back to Texas all those years. She’d tried to tell him nothing could be further from the truth, that she’d had a happy childhood, more or less. Sure, her mother had died when Leigh was ten, leaving her to be raised by her grandfather, but what girl wouldn’t love to live on her grandfather’s horse ranch, learning to ride, to race, reading in the hayloft on cool afternoons? Her grandfather had been good to her, spoiled her even. She’d been crazy about the old man, and though certainly she’d missed her mother, she had nothing to complain about, not really.

  Her grandfather had been a true Texan, one who believed in hard work and self-determination. The fact that Eugene Merrill also happened to be the biggest Thoroughbred breeder this side of Kentucky just meant that anything Leigh had wanted, she got: a car when she was sixteen, yearly trips to the Kentucky Derby, even her own foal, a white colt named Blizzard, for her tenth birthday. It was privilege, just a different kind of privilege from the citified version Joseph had grown up with. Not better or worse. Different.

  Joseph knew all this, but still he had a thing for introducing Leigh to his friends and family as an orphan, one of the few habits of his that really irritated her, because when other people learned about the Thoroughbreds, the ranch, the colt, they always felt lied to, even tricked. Even Joseph’s family had, for a while, been under the impression that Leigh had been passed from home to home like a human carpetbag, and when she had to disabuse them of that notion she was met with nothing less than shock. “Who gets a horse for their birthday?” said Joseph’s sister, Bennett, one Sunday during Leigh’s getting-to-know-you period with Joseph’s family when the two of them were having brunch alone. “It sounds like such a cliché. Like Caroline Kennedy on the White House lawn.”

  Leigh had taken a sip of her mimosa and given her boyfriend’s sister a crooked smile. “It wasn’t like that. Blizzard was one more head on a farm with three or four dozen horses. I think my grandfather figured if he pretended one of them belonged to me, I’d show some interest in learning the business.”

  “Did you?”

  “For a little while maybe, but I guess I’m more of a bookworm at heart. Instead of training Blizzard, I spent all my afternoons reading Marguerite Henry novels. My grandfather was less than thrilled.”

  Bennett laughed. “Still, I always thought you were one of those Dickens characters. You know, ‘Please, miss, may I have some more?’ And here you were some high-class belle the whole time. You probably even had a coming-out.”

  Leigh actually laughed that time. “Not exactly. My grandfather wasn’t the debutante sort. More the mucking-stalls sort.”

  Bennett, an aristocratic-looking brunette who was as outgoing as her brother was reserved, gave a toss of her hair and attacked her Cobb salad. “So did all the horses race?”

  “No. Some were breeding stock. That’s where the real money is—breeding. My grandfather was the best breeder on the Colorado. He did pretty well for himself, enough to buy four hundred acres in Texas Hill Country, outside of Austin. A big white house with a columned front porch. You know, the whole Southern-charm thing.”

  Bennett was shaking her head. “That was not the impression Joseph gave us at Christmas. He said you grew up on a farm in Texas, but he made it sound like a two-room shack surrounded by cactus and rattlesnakes. Scratching your way out of the desert and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to get into Harvard, all grit and determination.”

  Leigh grimaced. It was the kind of remark that would have made her grandfather furious if he’d been alive to hear it. He had little patience for what he used to call “Eastern piffle” about Texas in general and horsemen in particular. “It would make a better story, maybe, if we were poor. But my granddad was the biggest breeder of Thoroughbreds in the country at one time. One of his top horses sold for fifteen million.”

  “Fifteen million dollars? For a single horse?”

  “A stallion, yes. His stud fee was half a million a pop. Two of his foals won the Derby, and another took the Preakness.”

  Bennett nearly dropped her drink. “Joseph certainly never told us that. Clearly he has the wrong idea about your family history.”

  Leigh cut herself a bite of eggs Benedict. “I’ve told him a
ll this before, but I think he likes the reactions he gets when he lets people think I lived in deprivation. I think he finds it all terribly exotic.”

  “It’s the way we grew up,” said Bennett. “Our mother thought anyplace that wasn’t Manhattan must be a third-world backwater. Don’t take it personally.”

  “I don’t. Since in all other ways your brother is a perfect gentleman, I have to assume this is a minor character flaw. I can live with it. I’ve known men with worse, believe me.”

  “So,” said Bennett, “you’ve never been back to Texas, in all this time?”

  “My grandfather died my freshman year of college, and though he left me some money, he willed the property and the horse business to my uncle and his family, who moved into the place not long after the funeral to keep things running. I always got along with my uncle Sonny and aunt Becky and my cousins, but I never wanted to be an imposition, show up like I thought I owned the place. I send Christmas cards and call on birthdays, that kind of thing, but with my grandfather gone, it was always easier to stay in Boston over the school breaks. I wasn’t dying to go back anyway.”

  “And you have your life here,” said Bennett. “Your friends, your career.”

  Leigh grinned. “That, too. You can take the girl out of New York, but . . .”

  Bennett held up her glass for a toast. “Well,” she said, “I’m glad to find out my Oliver Twist assumptions were all wrong. I hated to think of you begging for gruel and walking barefoot through the snow.”

  “There’s no snow in Texas,” Leigh said.

  “In my imagination there was.” Bennett smiled. “It did make for a good story, though, didn’t it?”

  “Please, miss, may I have some more?” Leigh said, and she held out her champagne flute for the waitress to fill.

  It wasn’t until the flight attendant woke her twenty minutes outside of Austin, asking Leigh to return her seat back and tray table to their full upright positions, that she started to feel the first real stirrings of dread. Outside the window she could see the gray waters of Lake Austin tucked between the dark green hills of East Texas, the rough shape of the city center, the golden dome of the capitol glinting in the sunlight. Austin had gone through something of a renaissance in the years she’d been away, and now it was the cultural capital of the Southwest, epicenter of a thriving music, art, and lit scene. The People’s Republic of Austin, some called it. She hadn’t laid eyes on the place since that miserable day in February when she’d taken the late flight back to Boston after burying her grandfather. Ten years. She’d always assumed she’d come back sooner than this. Funny how time got away from you. Time . . . and guilt.

  Leigh wouldn’t let herself think about that—not yet. She was Scarlett O’Hara, back at Tara. She’d think about it all tomorrow.

  By the time the plane pulled up to the gate and she was able to turn on her phone, she had four text messages from her best friend, Chloe Barrett. THE SECURITY GUYS AT THE AIRPORT ARE HOTTT!!! wrote her friend, and afterward WHEN ARE YOU GETTING HERE? I’M RUNNING OUT OF LIQUOR, followed by WHAT, COULDN’T SPRING FOR WI-FI ON YOUR SALARY? and finally I’M YOUR BAGGAGE. COME CLAIM ME. CAROUSEL 4.

  This last made Leigh snort out loud, so that the passengers all standing around her waiting for the plane door to open stopped to stare at her—at the young woman in the designer-label jeans and bag, her long, dark hair cascading in perfect waves to her shoulders—who’d made such an inelegant sound. No matter how long it had been since they’d seen each other, Leigh and Chloe always managed to pick up right where they’d left off. Like high school all over again. More than anything or anyone else, it was Chloe whom Leigh had come to see. Her friend had been begging for years for her to come home, but there was always something holding her back. An exam to take. An internship to complete. A book to launch. When the invitation came from the Austin Writers’ Conference a few months ago, Chloe told Leigh she’d officially run out of excuses to stay away, that she’d better get her butt on a plane and come home, for once.

  Leigh stepped off the plane into immediate Texas heat; she could feel it radiating off the jetway, which she tottered up in heels that suddenly seemed too high, too citified, too painful. By the time she got down to Carousel Four in baggage claim, her feet were killing her. Only pride was keeping her from reaching down and pulling off her shoes.

  In baggage claim Leigh didn’t see Chloe anywhere, not at first. There was a church youth group gathered around Carousel Two in matching neon-yellow T-shirts proclaiming DISNEY OR BUST, several sets of beaming elderly grandparents holding stuffed animals or toy trucks, a few scrawny musicians in knit caps and long beards carrying heavy instrument cases, and a couple of middle-aged women hugging and smearing each other’s lipstick. But no Chloe. Leigh sighed.

  She was about to text WHERE ARE YOU? when at last she caught a glimpse of jagged-cut pink hair and bright red cowboy boots under a short flowered dress of the kind favored by cute hippie girls from Brooklyn to Portland. Only Chloe could pull off such a look so effortlessly, though—she’d have been as much at home singing the blues onstage at a hipster bar in Williamsburg as in East Austin. Out of the corner of her eye Chloe spotted Leigh, turned her back on the disappointed security guard she’d been chatting up, and immediately they were both eighteen again, squealing and throwing their arms around each other and making a spectacle of themselves. All around them, the passengers stopped to watch them embrace, the Texas hippie chick and the cool New York brunette.

  “Holy shit, look at you!” Chloe drawled, dragging it out like ho-leeeee-sheee-it. She stood back to admire Leigh’s outfit. “Miss Fancy Pants. I almost didn’t recognize you. You’ve gone uptown, baby!”

  Leigh shook her head and laughed. “I look like a hog raised on concrete. I’d recognize those boots from fifteen miles away, though. And the hair! I like the pink. It suits you. Kind of cheery, really.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess it was time for me to outgrow my Goth stage.”

  “It had to happen sooner or later.”

  “Damn, you look good enough to eat. Look at those heels,” Chloe said. “I can’t believe you can walk in those things.”

  “Well, walking might be an overstatement,” Leigh said, bending down to slip them off at last. She carried them loosely on two fingers, standing on the linoleum in her bare feet. “Oh my God, I’ve been dying to do that since Fifty-seventh Street.”

  “Now, that looks like the Leigh Merrill I remember. Barefoot at the airport. You should have left those torture devices at home.”

  “Agreed. I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said. “I’m starving. There’s no good Tex-Mex in New York. I’m thinking I want the biggest, greasiest burrito in town. You know a good place?”

  Chloe grinned and said, “Don’t I always?”

  They headed for a sawdust-and-roses bar not far from downtown that swirled with music, a touch of country, a touch of blues, a woman’s low voice singing sweetly about heartbreak, enough twang in her voice to remind Leigh that she was really in Texas again, a moment both welcome and surreal. Austin had changed more than she’d thought: the downtown was nearly unrecognizable to her, crammed with shiny new high-rises that nearly crowded out the old tower at One Congress Parkway. New Vietnamese and Thai places had sprung up in East Austin, and the old Town Lake had been renamed Ladybird Lake, but it still looked the same, crammed with kayakers and dogs chasing Frisbees onshore. They crossed the Congress Avenue Bridge, a favorite landmark from their high-school days, in Chloe’s rusting old Ford, and Leigh craned her neck to see if she could get a glimpse of the famous colony of bats that lived beneath the bridge. Nothing. It was early for bats—too sunny, too bright.

  It was too early for lunch as well, so the two of them had the restaurant nearly to themselves. They ordered drinks—a beer for Chloe, a margarita on the rocks for Leigh—not caring about the hour. They chatted about Chloe’s band, a few old friends, Leigh’s job. The waitress was putting down the fattest carne asada burrito Le
igh had ever seen when Chloe asked, “So how’s Joseph lately?”

  Leigh was midbite, her mouth so filled with steak she couldn’t answer right away. She chewed slowly, buying herself time. “He’s fine. His mother’s been in and out of the hospital, but he’s holding up. Excited about the new summer books. He’s got some big meeting today with Randall about the future of the company. I expect he’ll be getting a promotion.”

  “That’s nice, but you know I wasn’t asking about his career. Or his mother.”

  In the background the waitress was singing along with the music, an old Robert Earl Keen song called “Feelin’ Good Again,” and Leigh watched her, chewing for a moment and swallowing. “He asked me to marry him yesterday.”

  Chloe nearly dropped her fork. “He did what?”

  “At the launch party last night. In front of everyone, even Randall.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I’d have to think about it. I couldn’t answer him right there.”

  Chloe rubbed a hand over her eyes and said, “And are you thinking about it? I mean, for real?”

  “Sure. I mean, why wouldn’t I?” said Leigh. The grains of salt on the rim of her drink looked like little shards of glass, like they’d cut her if she tried to take a drink. “He’s probably the best thing that ever happened to me. Certainly the most stable.”

  “But you said you weren’t serious about him. That it was just a fling.”

  “That was two years ago! Things change. I mean, would I be crazy to marry him? Of course not. He’s successful. He loves me and treats me well. I could do a lot worse, that’s for sure.”

  “‘I could do worse’? Did you seriously just say that?”

  “Don’t look at me like that. We’ve been together awhile now. We see each other every day. He means a lot to me, Chloe. I owe him my whole career, my whole life in New York.”

  Chloe waved the waitress over for another beer. “I’m going to need more alcohol for this conversation. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Leigh Merrill is settling.”