Will scoffs, rolling his eyes. “Listen—I’m sorry, I don’t mean to doubt you, but comeon. For my mom? I don’t think I ever saw him bring her so much as a bag of chips; they weren’t like that. Not ever.”
Mrs. Cardini wrinkles her nose. “Oh, honey, no. Not for June. Bill and June—well. Nobody ever could have mistakenthatfor a love match, I tell you what. But…Bill never told you, huh? About Lucy?”
“Lucy?” Will says; it comes out slightly laughing, as though he finds this amusing, which he doesn’t. There’s nothing amusing about this at all; it’s that he’s realizing, in real time, that his body and brain have no idea how to react to what Mrs. Cardini is saying. “Uh, no, I—can’t say that I ever heard him mention that name once in my life. His life. Whoever’s, uh, life.”
Mrs. Cardini sighs and shakes her head. “Ah. Well. I guess that isn’t such a surprise—that was your father. He was how he was. He and my Roger were good friends when they were boys, you know, and he was hard-headed from the first, that Bill. All you Robertson men are made that way, that’s my theory. But the way I figure it, Bill opened his heart once in his life, and his daddy couldn’t help but crush it. He was never the same, after that. Neither of them were, I don’t think.”
“Him and…Lucy?” Will isn’t sure why he’s asking. Half of him is entirely certain he doesn’t want to know. “Whoever she was?”
“Bright girl,” Mrs. Cardini says, in the tones of a fond reminiscence. “Bill brought her ’round to the house a few times—think he wanted to show her off to us, since he knew his own father wouldn’t approve. Whip-smart, she was, and out of his league by a mile. It was a shame. She’d have been good for him, steadied out that temper, balanced out his foolish side. I tried totell Old Bill, but he never did take anybody seriously, especially back then. No talking to him.”
“Not to either of them, really,” Will says, a little wryly.
“Oh, Bill wasn’t so bad,” Mrs. Cardini says, waving a hand. Then, at the expression on Will’s face, she says, “All right, all right, I’ll grant you—he wasn’t exactly in the running for Father of the Year. But there were times, when he was young, when he might have gone a different way. I prayed on it, but…oh, you never know, do you? How things’ll work out, or why. That Lucy brought out the lighter side in him, I know that. He and June made each other so unhappy, I think, that they both forgot how to get there for themselves.”
“Why didn’t Old Bill like her?” Will asks. “Lucy, I mean. I think he liked my mother fine, or at least as much as he liked anyone. More than he liked my dad, maybe.”
“I always thought so, too,” Mrs. Cardini says, with a sad little laugh. “The curse of the Robertson men, though, isn’t it? Their own fathers—” She pauses, looking suddenly and uncharacteristically stricken, as the words “don’t like them” seem to hang in the air, for all she hasn’t spoken them aloud. Will offers her a little nod, both acknowledging the truth of this unsaid statement and, though it’s odd to feel like he has this power with her now, allowing it. She lets out a breath, looking relieved, and continues. “Anyway. Lucy was a student in Columbus; I don’t remember now how she met your dad, but they made it work almost a year, kept it real quiet. But they kept it quiet because she’d been accepted early to some fancy graduate program—somewhere New Englandy, if I’m remembering right. Doesn’t matter, anyway; she was going away and Bill wasn’t supposed to. Stupid, since probably she would’ve been willing to come back if he’d stuck it out with her for a few years up north. Old Bill wasn’t a farsighted man, though. He thought Bill should settle down with a nice local girl, grew up here, knew what she was doing, just like he did, and like his father did before him.”
Will feels his eyebrows hit his hairline. “Wait, I’m sorry. So—actually, no, you know what, first: Are yousureyou don’t know what kind of graduate program?”
Mrs. Cardini laughs at this, a hard, hearty cackle that makes her throw back her head, although with the slow, careful pace of the brittle elderly. “Oh, honey, I am glad you came back to town,” she says, shaking her head as she calms down. “It does an old woman good to laugh like that. You might look like your daddy, but you’re your own bucket of fish, and you always were. I should let you get on, but don’t you be a stranger now, you hear me? Just because that bridge’ll be up again today doesn’t mean you can run off for another age.”
That’s a dismissal if ever he’s heard one, so even though he has about a billion more questions, Will nods. “I won’t. Thanks for the, um…update, I guess?”
Mrs. Cardini smiles at him and pats him lightly on the arm. “Any time, William. You say hello to Casey for me, won’t you?” Will feels himself blush bright red, suddenly sure the old woman can see every last thing he and Casey did to one another last night playing out in his eyes. Certainly she’sgrinningat him like she can, looking abruptly twenty years younger. “Ah, Isee. So maybe I don’t have to worry about you being a stranger after all?”
“Goodbye, Mrs. Cardini,” Will says, all in one breath but in a flat, robotic monotone that must tickle her, since her peal of laughter follows him all the way out of the shop.
He must look slightly shell-shocked as he climbs back into the truck, because as Will passes him the maple latte and the turnover, Casey says, in sympathetic tones, “They doing that weird puppet show in there again? I hate the weird puppet show.”
“I—it—what?” Will says, badly wrongfooted by this. “Uh, not…as such. No puppets. More of a ghosts of Christmas past situation.” When Casey slants him an interested look, Willrelates the relevant details of Mrs. Cardini’s story, emphatically neglecting to mention what brought the topic up in the first place. When he’s finished, a strange, half-irritated impulse compels him to add, “He never, uh…said anything about any of that toyou, did he? About Lucy, or—I don’t know, I guess the other path his life might have taken?”
“Can’t say he did.” Casey’s reply is thoughtful, and he taps his thumb against the steering wheel a few times, thinking. Finally, like he’s not totally sure he should be telling Will, he says, “He did mention that name a few times, though. Nottome, exactly, so much as at me? He was—” Casey pauses, his throat working as he swallows. “Especially the last few years, he’d lose track of where he was, when he was. We’d have these arguments where he’d think I was other people. And instead of replying to what I said, he’d reply to what they said. Or what they had said, I guess, when it happened originally.”
“Oh,” Will says, quiet. “Yeah, I—know what you mean, I think. Old Bill used to be like that, towards the end. He and my dad used to have the same arguments over and over, anyway, so half the time they’d already be screaming at each other before Bill realized Gramps was just rerunning a version of it from years before. And God help you if you caught Bill after one of those wrapped up; he’d really let you have it. Probably he just felt guilty or whatever, wanted somewhere to put it, but it was scary, you know, as a kid. Unpredictable.” Will realizes he hasn’t thought about this in a long time, that he’d shoved it into a room in the back of his mind with which he has done more or less what his parents did to his bedroom: filled it with things he can’t bear to look at anymore. “Anyway, sorry you had to deal with it. I know it can get…rough.”
Casey’s face twists into an expression Will can’t quite read, but all he says is, “Sorryyoudid. Probably easier for me; I wasn’t related to him. Or a child.”
“Thanks.” Will’s surprised and more than a littleembarrassed by the way his voice cracks on it, but Casey doesn’t comment, just turns the radio back up and starts singing along.
Maybe it’s that, or that story he told about the song, his name; maybe it’s the way Will can’t stop turning over what Mrs. Cardini told him, the way pieces of that story slot so neatly over his own. Maybe it’s just that Casey’s rich, warm voice seems to seep into Will’s cracks and crevices like so much wet clay, hardening as he sips his coffee into something not unlike resolve.
Whatever it is, when they’re about halfway back to the farmhouse, something in Will that has been splintering for years now finally, finally cracks. A bough, perhaps, on the scarred, complicated tree of his life, that he’s cut and grafted together mostly by himself, and grown out of spite half the time—it hurts, feeling it break at last, but not as much as the blow that first cracked it did. That blow was the first piece of a story that led him here, to this car and this man and this moment, wondering how on earth to begin telling it; Will had thought it was, anyway. Now he thinks maybe the first blow was years earlier, before he was even alive. Before his own father was alive, maybe. Perhaps it had been the very first Bill who had first lifted the axe, and all of them, ever since, have been telling that same old story he started for the sport of it, handing it down like an heirloom, or a curse.
And none of them, Will realizes, would ever have talked about it. None of them ever had; it was as obvious as anything else about them, that they couldn’t or wouldn’t engage that way, when the emotional chips were down. It wasn’t their way—it Wasn’t What Robertson Men Did.
But Will thinks he’s had just about enough of being a Robertson man. He takes a breath, and starts talking.
FOURTEEN
It’s easy enough to tell Casey the first parts of the story. He thinks, based on the way Casey nods and mumbles, “Mmm,” and “Yep,” that over the last two weeks, Casey’s maybe put a lot of what Will tells him together from context clues. He doesn’t seem surprised when Will says that his childhood was less than idyllic, his parents far from warm, which, honestly, is a relief. In spite of everything that’s shifted between them, Will had been more than a little afraid that Casey might jump to Bill’s defense, tell Will he should have been less selfish, cared more about family and farm. There’s part of him expecting that even as he tells Casey the broad strokes of what life was like for him as a kid; that’s why he’s doing it. He wants Casey to have a grip on that, at least a little, before Will gets into the specifics of The Final Night.
Will’s thought a lot about his childhood, over the years. He hasn’t talked about it much, though, and most of the talking he has done has been either at the behest of mental health professionals, or while he hasn’t been entirely sober. It’s harder, by a long shot, to spit the words out here in this truck with Casey than it ever was at the bar with Selma after too much tequila, oreven in a therapist’s office. At least, in a therapist’s office, you knew you could simply leave and never come back.
Not that Will couldn’t leave and never come back here, of course. It’s his entire plan, and it has been the whole time. It’s just that Will so desperately doesn’t want it to be the plan anymore that he’s ripping his heart from his chest piece by agonizing piece to place on the dashboard in front of Casey, that’s all. Nothing to get worked up about.
It helps more than Will would have guessed, that Casey knew Bill. He’d expected it to go the other way, that Casey’s relationship with Bill would complicate this story the way it’s complicated so much else between them. Instead, Casey’s understanding of Bill, if later in life and from an utterly different vantage point, allows Will to shorthand a lot of things he would have had to explain to someone else—that hehas, in point of fact, had to explain to everyone else he’s ever discussed this with. But to Casey, he can say, “So you know how my father could be when he really had something in his craw, right?” or “You know how Bill could reallyyellwhen he wanted to yell?” And Casey raises his eyebrows, making it clear that hedoesknow even before he nods, which he always does, and…
