This wasn’t what Will was expecting to hear to such a degree that he can feel his own eyes bug out of his head; it must be entertaining to look at, because Casey cracks a smile, but not a happy one. It slips away, though, into an unhappy littleexpression, when Will says, “I mean, that’s… No. He was…and I’m?—”
“Look, I spent my own time with Bill,” Casey says, his voice firm. “And I’ve spent enough time with you, I think, to get a sense of who you are. I’m usually pretty quick off the draw with that sort of thing; in this case, I…let circumstances get the better of me. At first.” He gives Will a brief glance under low lashes that Will could, if he wanted to be optimistic, assume communicates certain rather carnal intentions. Will’s never been the optimistic type, but it’s harder to reach for his usual pessimism after last night, especially when Casey adds, “Anyway, I stand by it. It takes a small person to treat a kid like that—to treat anyone like that, really—and a big one to walk away. It’s hard, you know? To walk away.” The unhappy smile slips back onto his face, wry this time, as he adds, “I think for a lot of people, it’s easier to just live with what hurts than face the effort of trying to change it. They’d rather do what they know, even if all they know is suffering.”
Will groans. “I know what you mean,” he admits, a little uncomfortably. “Sometimes I feel like I’m—I don’t know. Seeking it out, right? Situations that make me feel—well, situations that suck for me, I guess. Just… because it’s familiar? Comfortable? Like, okay, a few months ago, I was dating this guy and he had this, God. Just, listen, don’t judge metoomuch, but…”
He begins, somewhat relieved to turn the subject to lighter territory for a moment, to tell Casey the story of Anthony and the iguana. Casey’s a good audience, better even than Selma—Will loves telling Selma a story, but sometimes she grimaces in a moment that makes him incredibly self-conscious, or raises an eyebrow in response to some action Will took in a way that lets him know, to his bones, that it wasn’t the call she would have made. She’s not doing it on purpose and Will doesn’t blame her for it, but it does mean he holds back details that he thinksSelma would find particularly egregious. Casey, on the other hand, is incensed for Will and entertained by turns, somehow tuned into every moment of the tale Will is hoping to hear a laugh, or a gasp, or see a horrified shake of the head. For this reason, Will shares details that even Selma doesn’t know, like the fact that by the end, the iguana was responsible for roughly a third of Will’s grocery expenses, and had peed, at least once, in every pair of dress shoes he owned.
“Only the dress shoes,” Will complains, as they climb out of the truck, mostly because it’s high time they did; there’s only so long two men can sit in a truck in a parking lot before it starts to look like maybe it’s a drug deal. At least, that’s why Will assumes they’re doing it; honestly, he mostly is following Casey, who, laughing at the exploits of the lizard, turned off the engine and hopped out of the driver’s seat a minute ago.
“Sounds like that lizard had very expensive taste in toilets,” Casey says, with a shrug, as he rounds to the rear of the truck. “Probably he was trying to tell you he wanted you to buy him a lizard bidet.” He flips the pickup’s back gate down, hops up to sit on it, and then, legs dangling, says, “Come on, come chill with me for a second. I was starting to feel like an idiot, sitting in the cab when it’s such a nice day out.”
“You’re not wrong,” Will admits, and hops up next to him. Lifting his arm to block the glare of the sun, he adds, “Ithasalways been beautiful here; I missed it. I didn’t want to, but I did.”
Casey murmurs an assent, and as Will’s legs kick back and forth in the air, he’s swamped for the second time this morning in a thick cloud of memory. This one is briefer, but older and more weathered, less recently unearthed. To be honest, Will’s not sure he’s looked at it since it happened, it’s so early, and unremarkable, and commonplace.
He was young, young enough to be picked up, and his father had lifted him and plopped him down onto the back ofhis old pickup, the one he drove when Will was small. It had been daytime, and they’d been parked in some family friend’s driveway, attending a block party for some holiday or another—Memorial Day, maybe, or Fourth of July—but Will thinks he must have been too little to know, even then. All he remembers is that for once, everyone was in a good mood. June was smiling and laughing, and Old Bill was having as cheerful a conversation as he ever did with some old friend, and Will’s father brought him a Rocket Pop, which was so delicious that Will didn’t care that it left behind a sticky red, white and blue residue as it melted down his hand. Thinking of it now, Will wonders if it isn’t a glimpse into what they would have been like if any of them, Bill or June or even Old Bill, even thefirstBill, had been a little happier with themselves, or with each other. Maybe what had made it all so hard was the ways in which they’d chosen to make it hard, or, at least, refused to try to make it any easier. Refused to do the necessary work, to share the necessary truth, to express the necessary emotion to make “less difficult” even an option.
“I never wanted to come back here,” Will says. He’s afraid it’s going to come out sounding choked, thick with feeling. Instead, he’s surprised to hear an edge of weary, raw amusement to it, like some part of him he’s not yet ready to face thinks this is all a pretty solid joke. “That night, I packed up my duffel bag with everything that could fit, and I took all my savings from my summer jobs, and I thought:I’m never coming back. And I never did come back, Casey. I never did. I found an apartment, and then a job, and then I applied to college, and got in, and found another apartment, and other jobs, and built a whole life without this place. By myself! My mother died and I went to her funeral, up in Canton, but I didn’t drive a single mile further south. I told myself it was what I wanted, you know? That I was better off not seeing it; that coming back here would hurt my feelings, and make me feel guilty. I never thought… I mean, I was dead to him, that’s what he said, so. Might as well be a ghost, right? I never thought there’d be anyreasonto come back.”
“And now?” Casey’s voice is mild, inquisitive. When Will looks at him, he’s looking away, his gaze fixed on something far in the distance. Will follows his eyeline to the tops of the third orchard apple trees, leaves still green in a sea of autumn oranges and maroons, rippling like the surface of a strange, otherworldly ocean.
“Now…” Will chews the edge of his lip, shakes his head, sighs. “I guess I just. I didn’t know. I hadn’t realized that it could be like this. The way you’ve made the farm so different from what it was, and so much closer to the place I used to like to dream it was, to tell you the truth. When I was small.” He swallows hard,feelingsmall, not able to look at Casey or the apple trees or, if he’s honest, himself, as he runs a hand through his hair and, voice raw, adds, “And the longer I stay, the less sure I am that I know what Bill meant by leaving it to me at all, or even, Christ. Even what he meant that night I left. I’m not even sure I know whatIwant anymore—isselling the right decision?Isgoing back to Chicago the right decision? Who knows! What does it matter! It’s not like there’s anyone else left alive to keep score!” He presses his knuckles against his forehead briefly, trying to push off a sharp spike of stress-induced anguish, and finishes, “Sorry, just. I never wanted to get you, oranyone, involved inanyof this. I wanted to leave it behind me and walk away clean, but.”
Will takes a breath, his eyes fixed on the rolling sea of apple trees, the blurred vista of gold and burgundy beyond. This time, hedoesnearly choke on it, noticing how each word comes out unmistakably and heavily weighted, like pieces of laundry pulled, still dripping, from the bucket. Still, he makes himself say it: “If I’m honest? I neverdidreally get clean. Not ever. I think part of me stayed here, when the rest of me went. It neverleft—not the farm, not even that specific night, that stupid pull-off from the road next to the fence by the back field. It stayed right here, where I left it, wandering around like a stupidghost, and I’ve…” Will stops, and swallows, and steadies himself before he shakes his head, forces himself to finish: “God. I’ve felt it pulling at me,screamingsometimes, all these years in Chicago.”
FIFTEEN
Casey is silent for a long time. It’s a long enough silence that Will starts to edge into feeling awkward about it, wondering if perhaps he’s crossed a line. What line he isn’t sure, and it would be maddening to try to guess, but he tries a little, anyway, combing frantically through the last few minutes for anything potentially offensive as his lack of reply stretches away from being a pause and towards being a genuine crisis. Should Will say something? Do something? Selma told him once that the first person who speaks in any interaction, or after any weighted pause, is automatically the loser, but she’d been several drinks deep at the time. And, now that Will thinks of it, several drinks later, she had told him it was something her own dreadful parents used to say, before weepily insisting that he shouldn’t listen to her at all, and then that he wasn’t truly a friend to her if he did not have, on his person, a taco.
For the second and hopefully final time in his life, Will finds himself wondering if the situation he’s in would be improved by his having, at some earlier point in the day, made the decision to put a taco in his pocket. If nothing else, being able to say, “Hey, you want a taco?” would be distracting rightnow, as would, honestly, just pulling one out from nowhere and eating it himself. Will would find that distracting, certainly, if someone else did it in front of him. And distraction is obviously the name of the game, since if Will sits here in silence for too long with Casey, he’s all too likely to tip into nervous, semi-coherent babbling. Either that, or his sheer proximity to Casey will overwhelm logic and reason and thoughts like,Is this moment, in the direct aftermath of dropping all your childhood trauma in the man’s lap, really the right one for attempting to jump his bones? Do you not think he might find it a bit jarring if you were, just for example, to launch yourself at him, shove your tongue down his throat, and push him back across the pickup truck’s bed with decidedly filthy intent?It’s a convincing argument; it’s just that it’s not doing a great job of convincingWill. He should, of course, feel terrible right now, after digging up all that old history. But something about the way Casey justlistenedto him, and didn’t take Bill’s side, and said Will was astrong person—it did something to him, fanned what was already a fairly dangerous fire into one he suspects will leave him utterly changed, unrecognizable, when it stops. Or maybe it will never stop: Will’s starting to grow concerned that he might spend his remaining years burning, like that coal town in Pennsylvania that’s been on fire since the ’60s. It’s simply not fair, Will decides, for someone so hot and so built and so capable of fireman-carrying him to the nearest mattress to also be sokindto him. It should be illegal. There should be a law.
“You know what’s weird?” Casey says, in the very final seconds before Will’s mouth opens to release some version of this thought, which would have been a disaster. His tone is thoughtful, and he, thankfully, doesn’t seem to notice when Will deflates like an untied balloon in relief as he continues. “I know the opposite of nearly all of that. I mean some parts were a little too familiar, but others… In some places, it was like seeing the negative of my own life. Not in the sense that it was negative, just—like with film, you know? It’s not showing the picture, and it’s not quite the reverse.” He runs one hand through his thick blond hair, and Will’s eyes can’t help but follow the motion, the way the sun subtly shifts the shade of each strand as it slides over them. He’s so absorbed in staring at it that he almost misses it when Casey sighs heavily and says, “I do know one thing, though. God. I owe you a hell of an apology.”
Will blinks, trying to process this. He blinks again. Confused, he says, “Wait,youowemean?—”
“Apology,” Casey says, nodding, “yes. And an explanation. For why I was the way I was. When you got here, and…before.”
“Oh,” Will says, not remotely sure how to reply to this. “I mean, you don’t have to?—”
Casey holds up a hand, but it’s less that than the pained expression on his face that dries up the words on Will’s tongue. “The thing is, man, I do. After the story you just told me? If I want to live with myself, anyway. There’re rules.”
“Sorry,” Will says again, even more confused than before, “there arerules?”
“Oh, I don’t mean foryou.” Casey makes a frustrated little noise, and then says: “Look, okay. I try to live by a certain code. I didn’t have a lot when I was a kid that was…consistent, right? Or mine.” He clears his throat, kicks his feet, and reaches a hand around to scrabble next to him in the truck bed. When he turns up a few twigs and pebbles, he starts tossing them towards the end of the parking spot; it seems to relax him as he continues, “I grew up on the festival circuit with my mom; she got pregnant on the road, had me on the road, just kept on going. And because I was always hopping from state to state, no permanent address, it took everyone a long time to cotton on that I wasn’t, you know, going to school, for example.” He catches Will’s slightly stricken expression, and laughs. “Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Two of the people in thegroup we traveled with were ex-Montessori teachers; they made sure I learned to read before the window closed and everything. It wasn’t like I was in the forest with wolves.”
“Still,” Will says, with a sympathetic grimace. “Sounds like it wasn’t an optimal growing environment.”
Something about this seems to amuse Casey; his expression softens after a second into one that warms Will, for all he hesitates to let himself believe what he sees in it. Then Casey shrugs, and looks away, and says, “Eh, it could have been worse. Parts of it were fun, you know? I ate a lot more pizza and ice cream than the average kid gets to, I’ll tell you that, and genuinely saw some musical history happen in real time. That’s unreal, you know? And I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But parts of it…” He frowns, his eyes going a little hollow. “Some of the stuff that happens at those shows isn’t for kids. What people get up to when they’re really wasted, or on a lot of drugs, or what happens to them when they’ve had too much—I shouldn’t have been managing that. I should have been…somewhere else.”
“I think,” Will says, very carefully, “that is maybe abitof an understatement, but: true. I’ll give it to you. No doubt there.”
Casey shrugs, like he can’t quite look this sentence in the face, and changes the subject. “Anyway, around my twelfth birthday, somebody must’ve cottoned on, or CPS caught up with Mom, or whatever really happened; nobody wanted to talk about it. After that, I lived with my aunt until I finished high school. She was fine, but my uncle was a jerk, and he was never around much, anyway. I never knew my dad—I’m not even sure my mom knows who he was. Anyway, I’m not trying to give you my whole sob story or anything. I’m… Ugh.” Casey makes a low, frustrated sound, and then says, “I’m trying to explain why, when I got here, Bill was… God. This is all going to sound so stupid to you, you’re hisson?—”
“I mean, right,” Will says, and offers Casey a crookedgrin. “I’m Bill’s son, so youknowI have to be fairly comfortable with stupid ideas.”
Casey stares at him for a second. Then, covering his mouth with his hand, he lets a few snickers escape before he shakes his head and, obviously trying not to be mirthful at all, says, “I feel bad, I shouldn’t laugh, it’s just—Christ. The man really did have some godawful ideas, didn’t he?”
“Some of the worst,” Will says cheerfully. “I once watched him try to light a firework with a road flare. So whatever you’re going to say, probably, by my standards, it’s going to be fine.”
