“That’s oddly comforting,” Casey admits, and takes a breath. “Okay. I just, I never really had a father, or anything. Obviously, Billwasn’tmy father, he wasyour father,this isn’t like—stolen father valor, which, Jesus, is a sentence I never thought I’d say.” He runs a hand over his face and laughs, briefly and not very happily. “God. This is ridiculous, the whole thing isridiculous,but I wasn’t from anywhere, you know? And didn’t have any people. My aunt and uncle are whatever, it’s fine but not exactly warm and fuzzy there. After high school, I started—driving around, and then I ended up here?—”
“Wait,” Will says, blinking, “hold on, you skipped a bit, I think. Unless—you didn’t end up hererightout of high school, did you?”
Casey makes an incredulous face, then laughs. “Are you kidding? No, God. I waswaytoo jumpy to settle for even a year or two back then. I couldn’t make myself stay anywhere longer than a couple of months. I’ve been here—God, six years now? Wild.” Distantly, and in a hollow tone of voice that makes Will wonder if it’s only occurring to him now, he adds, “Longest I’ve ever lived anywhere. Beats my aunt and uncle’s by a year.”
“I…see,” Will says, doing the math in his head. “And you’re in your thirties, so, I mean—must have been at least six or seven years on the road, right? Unless you took a detour for college somewhere in there?—”
Casey whistles, but offers Will what seems to be a genuine grin. “No college, but I’m not in my thirties.” When Will’s mouth drops open, he laughs. “People always look so scandalized; you’re not the first person to make that mistake, and I’m sure you won’t be the last. Don’t sweat it. I’m twenty-eight, so the big 3-0 isn’tfaroff or anything, buttechnically…”
“God,” Will says, abruptly embarrassed on a few different levels. “I mean, sorry for uh, thinking you were older—it’s not that youlookold, that’s not?—”
Casey laughs again. “I didn’t take it that way, man. Chill. I’ve always heard it—that I seem a little older than I am. My theory is I had to grow up young, and it confuses the vibe.”
“Huh,” Will says. He’s always thought ofhimselfas someone who had to grow up young, but: “When I was twenty-eight, I wasn’t capable of much of anything, outside of very specific academic parameters. I certainly couldn’t have done allthis,everything you’ve managed here—I could have kept it how it was before, if that,maybe, but improved it? Brought it back to turning a real profit? No way. Maybe because college sort of didn’t end for me until I was older than you are now, but I didn’t really have a lot of the, like, basic personhood stuff down? Not until I was at least thirty-one, and, honestly, it’s still a work in progress. I was kind of… I mean, okay, so first imagine your average totally useless undergrad was bitten by a radioactive textbook?—”
Snorting, Casey says, “Sorry, sorry. Just—youdosometimes sound like you’ve been bitten by a radioactive textbook.”
“I wish,” Will mutters. “All the powers of a textbook? I’d be unstoppable. Plus, it would get me out of the aging process, because the written word is forever?—”
“You’re not getting out of it that easy,” Casey says, amused, shaking his head. “Not enough time to find a radioactive textbook, for one thing: It’s your birthday next week, right? Daphne told me—the town’s spooky Halloween baby.”
Will, abruptly distracted from absolutely everything, stares at him. “What?”
“Sorry, should she not have said anything?” Casey grimaces, and, hastily, says, “Don’t rat me out, okay, if I wasn’t supposed to know. She scares the living daylights out of me when she gets into a mood. A person shouldn’t be able to zero in on someone else’s insecurities like that, it’s not fair.”
“No,” Will says, and shakes his head, torn between surprise and amusement. On the one hand, it’s honestly nice, after watching Casey cheerfully drive around like the devil himself was chasing him, and catch and release no less than ten spiders from the house in the last two weeks, to know that there’ssomethingthat freaks him out. On the other hand: “I just didn’t know anyone thought of me that way. As a…spooky Halloween baby?” He pauses, and, wryly, adds, “Although I guess it is a pretty small town, and itwouldexplain a couple of weird conversations over the years. Honestly, though, I’m surprised Daph even remembered my birthday, let alone told you about it.”
“Oh, well, it was that first day you got here,” Casey says, casually, like it’s nothing. “After you left. And I was, not to put too fine a point on it,realmad at you, and I think she was trying to—I don’t know, humanize you, a little. She kept saying if you were anything like she remembered, I might not mind you so much with a little time to get to know you. Said you were the type to grow on someone, like a fungus.”
“Like a fungus,” Will repeats, faintly. “Incredible. Just what I’ve always hoped to hear about myself. The word in the very center of the vision board for my life? It is, in fact, fungus.”
Casey laughs, and then cuts Will a sidelong glance and says, “Fungus or not, she was right,” which warms Will enough that he sits in happy silence for a minute, glowing internally from the compliment.
Finally, though, curiosity gets the better of him, and he says, “Okay, right, but—we were talking aboutyou, and how you got here. Were you living out of your car, then?”
“Oh, God, right. Yeah, sometimes, in that first year or two after high school,” Casey says, with a little shrug. “But it just depended. Sometimes, I’d stay with friends, or with a partner, or get a motel room for a while, or sublet from a coworker, whatever. It never mattered that much to me, so long as I had something interesting to do, and somewhere comfortable enough to sleep at night. I’d get a contract job, or pick up construction work, and do that until I got bored or it dried up, and then blow town and drive until I found somewhere else that looked interesting.”
“Wasit interesting?” Will wants to know. He couldn’t do it himself, but: “Itsoundsinteresting.”
Casey’s eyes widen for a second, just slightly. Then, though he doesn’t fully smile, they crinkle deeply at the corners. “Do you know, no one ever asks me that? Even though I always phrase it that way—yes. It wassointeresting. I learned so muchaboutso much, I met so many fascinating people, and…” He looks at Will oddly for a second, and then says, “Well. Maybe you know. After you left the farm, did you find yourself feeling that sense of—oh, I’m not sure how to explain this.” He pauses, clearly turning the words over on his tongue, before saying, “That sense that all the horrible, hard feelings you were carrying around could just be. Left behind on some curb? Part of a version of yourself you weren’t anymore?”
And suddenly Will is eighteen again, the disintegrating vinyl of the Greyhound seat warming slowly under his hands as he clutches it, waiting for Bill to burst through the bus doors and drag him out of the bus station, out of Canton, and back home to Glenriver. God, he cantastethe cheap cologne the man two seats up was wearing, mixing with a nervous flop-sweat smell he’d end up realizing, halfway through the trip, was coming from himself. The relief of the closing doors, the buslurching away from the station, still hits like a drug even in memory. It was the first slow, sweet taste, of a life outside of Bill and June’s influence. Of a life that was about more than being the fourth in a line of similarly named men. Of a life where he felt safe enough to be himself.
“Yes,” Will says, after a pause. “I think I do know, yes.”
“Well,” Casey says, looking pleased to be understood, “it made me feel like that, at first. And for a while, I thought I’d be doing it forever. But when I was about twenty, I realized I wasn’t…happy, anymore. That I didn’t feel joy when I was driving away, just jealousy of all the local people and the complicated webs of their lives, all their connections and histories and roots. I started to feel like stopping, at least for a little while. I started to feel like if Ididn’tstop, something inside me might turn rotten.”
He sighs, and, looking out across the trees and away from Will, says, “I met this girl in Boise, Rhonda. She was beautiful, and smart, and she made me feel—like it was okay, I guess? Like I could tell her about the heavy stuff, about me and my life, and have it be okay. She was so nice about it.She’sthe one who helped me figure out how to do all the basic personhood stuff, as you put it. Certainly, it wasn’t my mom, and my aunt and uncle didn’t consider me their problem enough to bother, but she knew all that. She came from a big family, good parents who were happy together and pretty well-off, and she’d learned how to be an adult from them when she was a kid, like people are supposed to. So I was grateful, and I loved her, and I thought for a few years there that she loved me, too, that that was it.” His voice turning somewhat sour, he continues, “I was so happy to think of having something stable, something real, that I chucked all my eggs right into that stupid basket without hesitating. I moved into her apartment; I got a job working for her dad; he was a nice guy, I liked the work, everything made sense. It was like I saw this whole future setting itself up before my eyes andI wasready. Ready to be a local somewhere, and part of a real partnership. A real family.”
“Didn’t work out like that?” Will asks, sympathetic, when Casey has to pause briefly, get a handle on some emotion. Could be sadness, but if Will were to guess, he’d say something more along the lines of self-recrimination. It’s the same face Bill used to make every time some sleazy salesman had successfully talked him into buying something expensive for the farm that had then, within hours, fallen apart.
Casey shakes his head, and makes a hand gesture reminiscent of an explosion, with an accompanying sound effect. “It all blew up. Turned out everyone in our whole circle—her friends, her family, all these people who’d cozied up to me for years, acted like they cared about me—they all knew deep down, like she knew deep down, that she was going to end up with her high school sweetheart.” Making a disgusted face, he adds, “Hewas the quarterback of the football team, of course, and from another prominent local family.Gary. It’s not even his fault, not really, but Christ, I still hate him.” Casey scowls for a second at the thought of Gary and then adds, “Anyway, this is probably obvious, but she left me, and went home to her parents, and then suddenly all my friends, or the people I thought were my friends, were onlyherfriends. Had only ever been her friends. And that Monday at work, my boss, her father, who had always been happy to work with me before, couldn’t even meet my eyes. And then about a week later, Gary turned up, real polite, at our apartment, to say he was sorry, and he hated to do it, but I wasn’t actually on the lease and he and Rhonda were planning on living in it, so if I could just clear on out, that would be real great.” He sighs, looking down at his hands. “So I did. I cleared on out. Put all my stuff in my car, and got in the passenger seat, and booked it out of there. I decided to go east because I figured it was the way it would take me longest to hit another ocean, and I wanted to be as far away as I could get.”
Will whistles. “Damn. Casey, I’msorry, that sucks.”
Casey looks slightly startled to have this clear and obvious fact acknowledged. “Oh. I—thanks. Yeah. I didn’t love it.”
“Was it weird? To just—pull up roots on your life like that?” When Casey slants him a speaking look, Will holds up his hands, laughing a little, and says, “Okay, yes, I’ll grant you, I did famously run away, dooming my family line and ruining the Robertson name, that one time, but it really was only the once. I got on a bus to Chicago, and I still live in Chicago. In the same neighborhood, even, where I got off the bus. Even the place I live—I mean, okay, it’s not thefirstapartment I rented, because that apartment was, seriously, very terrible, the stuff of nightmares, full of roaches and previously undiscovered molds and a series of mice who I called Bernard, because calling them all Bernard made it easier to convince myself it was one mouse.” Will shudders, briefly, to think of Bernard, and of the morning he had been forced to confront the reality that what he was dealing with was, very inarguably,Bernards. “I…moved out of that one pretty fast. But the second place I lived was only better in the sense that it was liveable, like up to code. It’s otherwise grim and dark and empty and Istilllive there. Moving always seemed like too much of a hassle. I’ve never pulled up and started again as an adult, not even a little. Must’ve been hard.”
