“YOU INHERITED THE FARM?!” Selma shrieks this so loudly that one of the rental car’s speakers refuses to render it, spitting out static before settling down again. “The farm you—that your dad… But you…When?”
“Uh, I mean, technically when he died,” Will admits, “but I, um…missed some phone calls and letters and stuff, so I didn’t find out until two weeks ago? And…” Will swallows hard but then forces himself ahead on the theory that he might as well rip the whole Band-Aid off in one go. “I’m going back to Ohio because there’s someone who wants to, uh…buy it? So I wanted to give you a heads-up since you are—technically, you understand—my lawyer. Since I will, uh…want you to look over the paperwork, and everything. If you don’t mind.”
There’s a pause. In this pause, Will passes below yet another utterly absurd billboard—he has to wonder how much this Catherine Rose woman is spending on billboards. This one doesn’t have her slogan or her eyeballs or her face on it: It’sjustthe outline of her cat-eye glasses against a completely white backdrop, hovering huge over the highway. Will’s slightly horrified to even recognize them as an ad for this woman, but he has to admit, he does.
Then a series of odd, breathy noises begins on the other end of the line, the sound slightly reminiscent of Darth Vader.
“Sel?” Will says, a little concerned in spite of himself. “Did I actually kill you here? Why are you breathing like that?”
“I am…Lamaze breathing,” Selma says, through what sounds like gritted teeth. “It’s helpful…for stress relief.”
“Why do you know Lamaze breathing?”
“Because I dated a pregnant woman in 2014,” Selma snaps,all traces of Lamaze breathing abruptly abandoned. “Youwouldn’tremember this, because you were lost to me in studying for one of the stupid letters after your name, but she was wonderful. For three months, anyway. After that she tragically rolled right on back to Terrible George, who we can all agree deserves fate’s cruelest agonies?—”
“Oh, sure, death and ruination to Terrible George,” Will agrees readily, despite, indeed, remembering almost nothing about the year in question beyond winning the university record for “Most Often Found Asleep in the Library.”
Selma takes a deep breath, and then picks up her sentence as though Will hadn’t spoken at all. “—and because he was never around, I used to take her to Lamaze class, and also itdoesn’t matter, because the Lamaze breathing isn’thelping, because what do youmeanyouinherited an enormous piece of propertyand you are on your way to make aland dealand yourfatherdiedand I haven’t looked overanythingand?—”
“Look, Sel, I’m sorry, I know you’re going to hate this,” Will says, and makes an unhappy face out at the road. “But I did, uh, mostly make this call to loop you in, so you wouldn’t, um, kill me? For not telling you about it? But I think—I think this is one of those things I just sort of have to handle…myself?” As he expected, Selma makes a furious, wordless noise of disagreement. Hastily, before she can start talking and inevitably, as she always does when she puts her mind to it, convince him to see it her way, Will continues, “But you know what’s so wild, is that if you look in your mailbox when you get home from work, some lunatic will have left you a gift card for a spa weekend! On him! To apologize for dropping all this on you last minute! At that stupid expensive place you like so much even though he’s told you a thousand times that you can get a better, cheaper massage athisfavorite spot across town! Crazy, that guy. No impulse control at all. Speaking of crazy, service out here is nuts, sorry about thisand, uh, me. Call you later?” He hangs up on the sound of her outraged squawk.
Will doesn’t relax until his phone stops buzzing with calls and messages from her, which takes about fifteen minutes. Only when a full sixty seconds has passed without a remonstrative rattle from the cupholder does he let out a long breath and turn up the radio. He and Selma have been friends a long time, and she knows he has a tendency to isolate and withdraw when things get intense. She doesn’tlikeit, but she’ll forgive him, the way he forgives her for what she tends to do when things get intense, which is usually more along the lines of getting into a fight at a Cubs game.
A thin tendril of guilt reminds Will that thereasonSelma doesn’t like it when he does this is because she cares about him, and wants to help. He pushes it down and lets himself sink back into the drive.
He’s always liked to drive, from the very first time he learned. He must have been—oh, ten or eleven, probably. It hadn’t been a real car, just the farm’s old tractor, barely clinging to life and only going about fifteen miles per hour on its best day. Still, the principles were roughly the same, and the first time he got behind the wheel of an actual car, he’d known that it was for him. His father’s worn-down old pickup had complained every mile of every drive, but Will had loved it anyway: When he was behind the wheel, he was briefly but beautifully in control of the world around him.
Will doesn’t need a car in the city; he chose his current place quite carefully, about seven years ago. He walks to work, which is six blocks from his apartment, and to the grocery store, which is four blocks from his apartment, and, in theory, to the gym, which is nine blocks from his apartment, although he almost never bothers to go. Selma’s apartment is about three minutes from his, and most of their favorite bars and restaurants are within easy walking distance. Anywhere else Will goes, hetakes public transportation, or, if he has to, calls a taxi, and it’s not like he goes that many other places, anyway. His life is small, with limited variables and little, at least outside of his upsettingly poor taste in men, that can upset his equilibrium. That’s the way he likes it.
But it’s nice, now, to turn up the country station that broadcasts across the top half of the state and drive the long and only semi-familiar run of Route 90, catching occasional glimpses of a distant Lake Erie through the tree line. Though it’s only barely October, still weeks to go before the very last green leaf gives it up and blushes, all the trees have at very least begun to flirt with their autumn colors. The golds and oranges and maroons rush past Will in a blur, tugging at a thread in his chest he does his best to keep clipped short and covered. There’d been a time when it meant something to him, this part of the year, that was deeper and more complicated than an appreciation for the beauty of the season. There’d been a time when Will thought his life would, in one way or another, revolve around it, and it aches more than he would have expected to be here, a few weeks shy of thirty-five, decades into a very different existence.
In spite of this Will’s glad, as he guides the car through the labyrinthine highway system that skirts the edges of downtown Cleveland, that he decided to drive. Will doesn’t relish the idea of being stuck in Glenriver, Ohio any longer than is necessary, and when he’d had to face down the reality of visiting, the thought of being at the mercy of an airplane, or a taxi driver, oranythingbut his own whims and urges to flee…rankled. But now, even after he merges onto the yawning gray sprawl of Route 77, one of America’s most boring highways, Will is glad to have a steering wheel under his hands, an engine purring in front of him.
The ongoing onslaught of Catherine Rose billboards tempers the relaxation somewhat, but only somewhat. Very much in spite of himself, they start to grow on him. When hehits a run clearly inspired by Burma-Shave, a series of billboards all in a row, each printed with one word (Need—To—Close?—Call—Catherine—Rose) until the final one, which is again that extreme close-up of her face—Will has to admit, he laughs. He can’t help it. And credit where it’s due: While her marketing has not given him any real sense of what she does, it’s made him upsettingly interested in finding out.
Of course, there’s quite a lot he’s interested in finding out. He’s realizing only now, in the tail end of the drive, that he’s not even sure what the plan is once he gets to the farm. Someone named Zane had set it all up through a relentless series of phone calls, always identifying himself with some long title that boiled down to “Important, High-Ranking Assistant To Someone You’re Supposed To Have Heard Of.” Whoever it was, Will hadn’t heard of them, nor of the company Zane mentioned as the party interested in buying his father’s farm, which had some silly name that sounded like something out of a nursery rhyme. He’d been glad someone was interested in buying—no, that’s not the truth. If he’s honest, he’d been glad someone else was steering the decision-making process. When Zane gave him a date and time for a meeting at the property, sent over information on the hotel reservation and car rental, Will had agreed, even though the date was a Friday, and it would mean taking time off work. He’d marked his calendar, and let the necessary people know, and packed a bag that sat by his front door for a week and a half before being scooped up, at last, this morning. But it’s dawning on him right now that while he knows he’s meetingsomeoneat the farm at three, and that the goal of that meeting is Will selling, that’s…about all he knows. Zane told him more, he’s sure, he just, well…hasn’t retained much of it.
He considers calling Zane, and decides not to. The thought of confessing to that intense, tightly wound man that he hasn’t been listening to at least five phone calls is a bit much for Willto take, just now. He’ll have to hope whoever it is does the polite thing and introduces themselves.
Once he’s made it past the Cleveland suburbs, Will abruptly finds himself in better-known territory, highway exit signs changing from half-familiar to grounded in specific memories. There’s the Akron exit, where Will’s father had blown a flat on the way back from the county fair and screamed blue murder the whole time he was changing it; there’s the sign for North Canton, next to which Will had forced his mother to pull over so he could be violently sick at age fifteen, after which he had been relentlessly accused of underage drinking right up until the moment he ended up in the hospital with acute appendicitis. He smiles, not entirely happily, when he passes Canton proper—in high school Will used to end up there on weekend nights, sneaking out after his parents were asleep to meet up with guys who were probably too old for him in bars that probably should have turned him away. He’s not far from Glenriver now, and the peace he’d found in driving abruptly abandons Will, leaving him instead with what feels like a writhing ball of snakes in the pit of his stomach.
He turns off on the exit that will eventually lead him to the farm, even the muscles in his forehead tensing as he drives down the objectively picturesque road. The trees are showing off, towering and brilliantly colorful, alive with trilling birds and chittering wildlife busily preparing for winter; Will should be happy, really. He should feel some connection to this place, the various ways in which its beauty is singular and sewn into the very core of who he is.
He doesn’t. He feels like he should have stayed in Chicago, but it’s a bit late for all that now.
As he reaches the bridge over the Glen River, Will has to pull over briefly to the side of the road. It’s… He’s fine, of course he’s fine. He’s anadultand this is just avisitand it’s his farm now, anyway, at least for a few more days. Everyone who couldtell him otherwise is dead and buried and there’s no reason to be feeling this way at all.
Still. “Okay, Will,” Will says to himself, a little embarrassed at needing to hear it out loud. “It’s just a couple days, right? It’s just a couple of days. You’re going to go to the farm, and Dad’s not going to be there, and Mom’s not going to be there, and it’s going to be fine. Okay? It’s going to be fine, and you’re going to be fine, and all you have to do iskeep it togetherand notfreak out. You can do that, can’t you? Keep it together for a few days? You have to meet with this person, and walk around a little, and send the paperwork to Selma, and sign it. That’s it. Okay, Will? Okay.”
As personal speeches to the self go, this is not one of Will’s more rousing efforts. But it’s enough, at least, to force him to put the car back into drive and pull it over the bridge, into the place where he was born.
Glenriver isn’t a particularly intimidating town. That’s part of what makes it so galling for Will to be afraid of it; it’s like being afraid of a basket of kittens, or a little old woman showing off her quilting collection. Surrounded by the Glen River on three sides and a large, privately owned forest on the fourth, it’s the sort of place that belongs on the front of a postcard. The houses are far apart but quaintly old-fashioned, with the heart of the town centered around a white, high-steepled church that’s also the town hall and community center, and as Will drives down the main drag, he finds he can hardly see what is for whatwas. He’s here, now, driving his tetchy little rental car, but he’s four and ten and sixteen, too, skinning his knee on that patch of sidewalk and picking up a splinter off that wooden fence, making a hash of a variety of sports in that large, open field.
When he reaches the turnoff for Robertson Family Farms, the bizarre, off-kilter sense of déjà vu is so intense that Will feels as though he might choke on it. The sign marking the routeto the farm is new, but Will blinks and it’s replaced by the ancient wooden one his great-grandfather constructed. That thing had been a hazard, more than half-rotted, always harboring bees or wasps under its peeling blue-and-white paint, but Will’s mind can’t quite seem to accept that it isn’t there anymore. It seems impossible that it could have fallen without the whole place falling, too—as though the farm should have crumbled up in the absence of this defining piece, the way a whole building can go if the wrong support beam buckles.
Will pulls into a parking spot and tries to get a grip on himself. It’s just a place! A location! It doesn’t have to be all this—this—thisother stuff, not if Will doesn’t want it to be. This can just be a quick weekend getaway to make, as Selma put it, a land deal. That sounds professional, doesn’t it? Like something someone with his life together would do? So that’s what Will’s doing, and nothing else. He definitely isn’t, for example, sitting in the parking lot of the family farm, near tears over a sign he once harbored very real fantasies of burning to the ground. That would be ridiculous, and pathetic, and not logical at all.
Holding firm to this thought as his guiding principle, Will gets out of the car and takes a deep breath. The air that rushes into his lungs might as well be laced with some sort of drug; he feels a sharp spike of euphoria as he drags it in, clean and crisp and scented with the faint, grassy sweetness of fresh-cut hay. Maybe hecanhack this, unwieldy sign-based emotions aside. He’ll take a moment to appreciate it, toenjoysomething about being in this godforsaken place, and then he’ll be able to?—
