And it’s arelief, Will realizes as he skates over being seven and eleven and fifteen, Casey following him easily as he sets this scene with half a dozen smaller ones. It’s such an insane, absurd relief to talk about this with someone whoknewhim, let alone to talk about it without being cut off, shut up, told he’s wrong. He wants to cackle with glee as he works his way through grim memories, which is an incongruous, almost sick feeling that becomes solely and exclusively a sick feeling when, as they’re pulling into the farm parking lot, Will reaches the summer he was eighteen, directly after high school.
“I…met a guy,” Will says, and flinches when it comes out, evennow, in the tones of anadmission. He tries again: “I met a guy! At a club up in Cleveland that’sdefinitelyclosed now.” Will sighs, still a little forlorn to think of the whole thing, although it makes him feel more than a little bit stupid. “His name was Brandon, and he was my age,andhad a car,andhis parents were a little homophobic, and, obviously,myparents were a little homophobic, so, you know, for a while, it was perfect. We’d meet up in out-of-the-way little places, or he’d pick me up outside of town and we’d hang out in his car, or whatever.”
“Oh, sure,” Casey says easily, waving a hand in acceptance of this. “I had a few boyfriends like that back in the day myself, although I was always the one with the car.”
“Increasingly, I’d believe you started driving as a toddler,” Will says, smiling slightly in spite of himself. “Sitting on a large pile of dictionaries to see over the steering wheel?—”
“Yep, that was me,” Casey confirms with a lazy grin. He’s put the car in park, and he turns to look at Will, his voice very dry, as he says, “I was on the news and everything. ‘Local driving savant, age three, towers over citizens on the freakishly long legs that allow him to reach the pedals?—’”
Will snorts, and then lets out a big laugh, and it, too, is a relief. A relief to pause for a moment and feel something good before he plunges into the past, and all the thrashing, dangerous emotion that lives within it. For a moment, he is as a dolphin on a clear, still night, poised on the dark lip of the ocean’s surface, pulling in one last long, blissful sip of air before slipping back down to the depths.
“How was Bill about you being gay?” Will asks the question abruptly, like he’s pulling off a Band-Aid, and then realizes too late that it’s presumptive, even offensive. “Or, sorry—not to just, like, assume that you’re gay. You could be bi, or, uh, God, what’s the other one?—”
“Pansexual is the word you’re looking for there,” Casey says, with an easy smile that spills into a laugh when Will grimaces at having not been able to think of it when it’s, quite clearly, theway Casey does, in fact, identify. “Don’t sweat it, man—took me a long time to figure it out. I came out as every other damn thing under the sun first, and honestly, even pan doesn’t feel quite right and usually I just say ‘queer.’ Didn’t come up with your dad much; the one time it did, I got the sense he wasn’t exactlycomfortable, but he shrugged and said it wasn’t any of his business. ‘Live and let live,’ I think is how he put it.” Perhaps in response to the suddenly thunderous expression on Will’s face, he adds, hurriedly, “Most of the time, though, I’m pretty sure he just, uh, forgot. So I wouldn’t read into that too much or anything.”
“Live and let live,” Will mutters bitterly to himself, so far under his breath he’s not sure Casey can even hear it over the purr of the still-running truck motor. “Guess that figures.” Louder, and maybe a little too sharply, he says, “Well, I’m gay. Known it about as long as I’ve known anything. I think Bill knew it, too, on some deep level he didn’t want to look at too hard.” Will swallows, and looks out the passenger window on old habit, his body hoping to see the soothing blur of passing trees even though his brain knows the car is in park. Instead, he’s hit with nothing less than a perfect view of the Robertson Family Farms market, and he cringes as he fixes his eyes on the yellow door.
“I was never the son I was supposed to be.” Will says this to the cheerful new market door every bit as much as to Casey, as though the wood and glass and paint can hear him, as though it can apply some of the magic it used to change itself to change him, make what he’s confessing less true, or at least less painful. “Or…I was never the son he wanted me to be, or he wasn’t the father I was supposed to have, or something. We weren’t suited; it wasn’t a good fit. He wanted Bill Robertson IV, another strong, strapping, outdoor-oriented man to carry on his legacy?—”
Will pauses, the words to this old story suddenly alien in hismouth, like when you repeat a phrase so often it loses its meaning and breaks down into a scattered mire of syllables. What legacy, exactly, did Bill have to carry on? Drummed out of the army, never happy in his marriage or in his work on the farm, constantly suffering the disappointment of his own hard-mouthed, disappointed father, and, if Mrs. Cardini is to be believed, heartbroken over a sacrifice he made at that disappointed father’s insistence—wasthat a legacy? Could anyone, even Bill, want his son to follow inthosefootsteps? And if that hadn’t been what Bill wanted, then…
“God, you know what, it was never about any of that,” Will says, his voice dropping to a point barely over a whisper in shock. “All this time, I thought that I just didn’t cut it, that I wasn’t good enough—but ultimately, Ididdo everything he wanted me to do, all those years, didn’t I? Even if I did it a little more slowly, or more thoughtfully, or moredelicatelythan he would have, I did it all. As achild, I did it. But it wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t ever going to be enough, because he didn’t just want me to be him. He wanted me to bebetterthan him, but if it ever looked for a second like I actually was, then…God. Then he hated me for it.” Will shakes his head, hardly seeing the yellow door anymore, his mouth twisting. “Mrs. Cardini said it this morning, or she almost did, anyway—that it was the curse of the Robertson men, to be disliked by their own fathers. And hedidn’tlike me: That’s the truth. He didn’t like the ways I struggled, but he didn’t like the ways I succeeded, either. He didn’t like my personality, or my sense of humor, or the way I did almost anything, even if it was exactly how he’d told me to do it.” Remembering it at the last moment as relevant, but feeling it almost incidental, he adds, “Oh, and I mean. He didn’t like that I was gay, either, obviously. He never came out and said that, but I never came out and…well, came out, I guess, at least to him or my mother. So, you know, it was all a lot of heavy implication, but there was no missing it.”
“Jesus.” Casey’s voice is low, sorrowful; Will, embarrassed, jolts a little and whips his head around. He almost forgot he was talkingtosomeone, let alone to Casey, and he feels a little prickle of anxiety in his stomach to think of how much he’s revealed, but it fades at the expression on Casey’s face. Casey looks sad, and fascinated, and like he means it when he says, “I’m sorry, Will. That sounds like a…really rough way to grow up.”
“Oh,youknow,” Will says, waving a hand, unable to let this land but so grateful for it he thinks his skin will fall off if he doesn’t acknowledge it. “It wasn’t the best, but we get on with things, right? What else is there?” He swallows hard and then, before Casey can answer, pushes ahead, suddenly eager to be on the other side of this whole discussion. “That’s what I did, anyway. With Brandon, that guy I met. I got on with things. And for a while, it was good. Fun. The first time I’d ever been with someone who wasn’t…” Will pauses, and allows a delicate little moment to stand in for the broad sentiment “A much older sleazebag, the memory of whom should be left in the early 2000s, where it didn’t really belong in the first place, but very emphatically was even so.” Casey inclines his head, seeming to indicate, “I, too, participated in club culture during a similar era of the human experience, and we can agree: yikes.”
Will allows himself a small, rueful smile before continuing. “Anyhow, like I said, Brandon and I met in secret for a while, but then it got to be August, and he was going off to college in a week—Purdue, I think, though I honestly only half remember now. Anyway, he was leaving and I wasn’t going. Hadn’t enrolled anywhere.”
Casey’s brow furrows. “Wait—you didn’t go to college? But I thought—the PhD?—”
“Oh, I went to college,” Will says, shifting abruptly into the wearied tenor of the seasoned academic. “And then grad school, and then even more grad school, and you could honestly makethe argument even now that my life isstill grad school, since it involves teaching and socializing with so many grad students. But all that was after I left; Bill didn’t want me to go at all, wouldn’t pay the application fees or fill out the forms. Got into a bunch of fights with my teachers about it and everything, it was a whole mess.”
“Jesus,” Casey says again, shaking his head. “He never said.”
Will thinks,No, I bet he didn’t!quite sharply indeed, but he doesn’t say it. It’s not Casey’s fault, especially since: “Yeah, he was like that, my dad. Everything was need-to-know with everybody, all the time. God forbid he communicate like a normal person even once; the world might have ended, don’t you know.” Casey’s soft snort of laughter is gratifying, and it helps Will take a breath and say: “Anyway, the night I left, I had Brandon meet me here at the farm, because it was his last night and my last chance to see him and I figured it would be fine, my parents would be asleep, it was just the one time. But in the end Bill, um…caught us? In Brandon’s car? And the position was, uh… Well. Let’s say it would have been incredibly difficult to come up with a heterosexual explanation.”
“I see,” Casey says, and grimaces a little. “I’m a little afraid to ask how that went, but?—”
“Oh, you know,” Will says, vague now, far away. He’s remembering it as it happened—the edge of the cornfield, the shriek of Brandon’s tires as he peeled away, the clear moonlight under the broad canopy of stars. Everything had been so beautiful, this picturesque background like something out of a painting, set against Bill’s twisted, red face and hard eyes. “He was angry. He wanted to know why I didn’t understand my duty to my farm, and to my family. He said a lot of stuff about how being a man was about doing what was right instead of what you wanted, which at the time I thought was homophobia with like a weirdly religious curveball thrown in, but now I don’t know. After what Mrs. Cardini told me—maybe that’s reallywhat hethought, you know? That being part of a family meant putting everything else to one side, whatever it meant to you, or however miserable it made you to let it go. After all, that’s whathedid, although personally I think he should have told my grandpa to shove it where the sun didn’t shine, but what do I know?”
“Is that what you did, then?” Casey asks, the curiosity evident in his voice. “That night? Told Bill to shove it?”
“Oh, well.” Will pauses, and then nods. “I mean. More or less. I said it was my life, and he’d been mean to me pretty much for all of it, and why should I listen to him if he never listened to me? And he said that Iknewwhy, that I’d watched my grandfather die the same way he had, that I didn’t have time to go galivanting around doing whatever I pleased becausehedidn’t have the time to wait.”
And for a moment Will’s eighteen again, the wind whipping his hair back away from his face, sending flecks of Bill’s scream-borne spittle hurtling towards him at punishing speeds. He’s eighteen, and his throat is raw from yelling, and every part of him feels sliced open, on display for his furious father to see. He’s thinking of all the years he’s spent attempting to please this man, and all the brutal, excoriating failures. He’s crying, “So that’s it, then, huh? That’s your big plan for your only son? I’ll just spend my whole life here, trying to doing whatever you say, and getting it wrong, and being punished for getting it wrong, and my reward for that, for never doinganythingfor myself, will be—what? To take care ofyouwhile you lose it like Gramps did?”
And Bill’s face is turning purple, and he’s screaming, “You ungrateful little—that’s what it means to be someone’s son! That’s being part of a family!”
“No!” God, Will’s replayed this in his mind so many times over the years; it shouldn’t still have such power over him. It shouldn’t still feel so fresh. He shouldn’t still be able to feel thewords, “That’s being part of atragedy,” scraping against the back of his throat.
“Anyway, he hit me,” Will says now, in the present, to Casey. It’s flat, matter-of-fact, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less to say. “I mean, not—it wasn’t totally unprovoked, I said some stuff that was below the belt, for sure. And it wasn’t like it was his best swing or anything. He could really fight, when he wanted to; I saw him do it a few times when I was a kid, and he always said he’d get around to teaching me. Probably if he ever had, I would have known how to duck or dodge or whatever, but. He didn’t, so I didn’t, so he hit me. Not hard enough to do any real damage, but his class ring broke the skin, left an infection that took weeks to clear up. You can still see the scar.”
“Christ,” Casey says, his eyes wide. “Will—God. I’m so sorry.”
Will sighs, touches the little sliver of scar tissue briefly as he says, “Oh, thanks, it—I don’t know. I’m not sure either one of us meant it to go as far as it did, and I didn’t exactly comport myself well, either.” Grimacing, he adds, “For example, at that point, I believe I told him I’d rather be anything but a Robertson, and would be better off with no family than this one. Which wasn’t even how I felt, not really; I was just hurt, and sad, and upset, and eighteen, and I wanted to say something that would makehimfeel as bad as he’d mademefeel. And, I mean, it worked, as least as far as I can tell. After that, he said if I felt that way, I might as well leave, because I was dead to him, anyway, so. That’s what I did.”
There’s a beat. Then, his voice smooth and carefully even, Casey says, “You’re a stronger person than he was, then. Good for you.”
