Casey smiles, and makes a noise Will’s not sure how to parse, a low hum of not-quite-disagreement. “Probably was. I don’t remember a lot of it all that well; in retrospect, I think my mental health probably took kind of a nosedive, and I should’ve stayed put before I went changing my whole life around. But I just had to getoutof there, so I pretty much drove three days straight across the country. After that I promised myself I’d never do it again, get so attached to theideaof something, some possible future.” He runs a hand through his hair, shakes his head. “But then I ended up here. If you’re trying to get over a young woman, you reallycan’tget further away than helpingout an old man, so I thought, for a while, that it was all fine. I’d just stick to the farm, and to myself, and help your dad, keep any dating I did out of Glenriver, not that I did much. I thought that way I wouldn’t get hurt again.” He shrugs, a little despondent. “But then Bill neededsomuch help, and the whole farm did, too, and I’d worked enough construction jobs and handled enough broad-scale projects to see what needed to happen, so I just got to work. It had to get done, right?” He pauses, and, wryly, adds, “My mom always says that’s mything, when she sees me. My ‘troubled life pattern,’ or however she phrases it—feeling likeIhave to be the one to do something, just because it needs doing. Never quite manages to ask herself what might’ve made me that way, though.”
“Oh, of course not,” Will says, waving a hand. “Obviously, I’m no expert, but from what I hear, parents rarely do. And God knows mine left me some fun little surprises like that; you should ask my friend Selma about my taste in guys sometime. She’ll give you a whole master’s-level psychotherapy thesis on how I’m seeking out destructive patterns while the sheer enormity of the embarrassment drives me to drink.”
“Spoken like someoneverycommitted to disproving her thesis,” Casey says dryly.
“You shutup,” Will says, but undercuts it by smiling at him without entirely meaning to. “But don’t, actually, because mypointis, I get it. Thanks for telling me.”
“Oh,” Casey says, and blinks, and, to Will’s surprise, flushes slightly. “Well, sure. Thank you for…listening, I guess.”
“My pleasure,” Will says, and waits what he hopes is an appropriate amount of seconds before letting his curiosity get the better of him: “So did you like…happento end up stopping here, in the end? From Boise? That’scrazy?—”
“What? Oh, no,” Casey interrupts, shaking his head. “That would be crazy, but, uh, I saw the billboards for Cedar Point—you know about Cedar Point, right?”
Offended, Will draws himself up to his full sitting height and says, “Excuseme? Of course I know about Cedar Point. Ididgrow up here,nobodymakes it out of Northern Ohio without atleastone trip to?—”
“All right, all right, I get it,” Casey says, laughing now. “The point is, I was there, and I saw an ad for this place and—I know how stupid this sounds, by the way, but it’s the truth—I liked the name. RobertsonFamilyFarms. I know it’s dumb, but that’s what I wanted, what I felt like I’d lost, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.” His mouth twists, and he adds, sounding sorry about it, “But then I got here, and the ‘Family’ in ‘Family Farms’ was just this one old man, clearly in over his head, couldn’t even afford to staff the place because sales were so low. I talked him into hiring me as counter help and just started—fixing stuff. Making it work better.” Casey shrugs, looking away. “We… Sorry, Will, but we got on pretty well, me and Bill, right from the start. I don’t want to rub it in, that the two of you—that it was so?—”
“Oh, God,” Will says, waving a hand and pulling a face. “You don’t have to do that; it’s fine. I figured you probably did.” He meets Casey’s eyes and, slightly more honestly, says, “Okay, I mean, it might have made me go for your throat two weeks ago, but I don’t mind so much now. I guess.” Will pauses, chews his lip, clears his throat. “I guess I’m glad he had someone hedidget along with, in the end. Someone to help.” Finally, and so honestly it’s a little agonizing, he adds, “And, I mean. No offense or anything, but I’m still pretty glad that person wasn’t…me.”
This does make Casey laugh, a proper laugh, and when he finishes, he says, “Yeah, that’s fair. Probably helped that I wasn’t blood—less history, right? And different stakes.” He looks at Will, and sighs. “Speaking of which, that’s the other thing: the dementia.”
“Yeah,” Will says, his voice low. “From what you’ve said,and what I remember from my grandfather, I kind of figured it probably—came up, between the two of you? I have to imagine at a certain point it would have been impossible for it not to.”
“I should have called you,” Casey says, quiet. “I’m sorry—the first day I realized Bill had living family, I should have found your number, or your email, or whatever. Before he got diagnosed, probably, right when I first moved in with him to make sure he didn’t hurt himself in there alone. But definitelywhenhe got diagnosed and I started making decisions. That wasn’t right. They were your calls to make, if they were anyone’s, and at the very least you had the right to know. But…Bill didn’t talk about you, except, uh. Except when he was…a little confused, right, about who he was, and who I was, and when…it was, overall. There were a couple of times he said things to me and I knew he was talking to you. And, well, between that and the people in town I asked about what happened—they were all perfectly polite, you know, but they all said things like, ‘Oh, better to leave well enough alone there,’ and in retrospect they were trying not tooutyou, probably, but.” Casey takes a deep breath, squares his shoulders, and, like a confession, says, “I got the impression that you were, maybe, a mean and spiteful person who willfully turned his back on his family and wouldn’t want to hear from me.”
“Ah,” Will says, surprised to find he feels oddly sanguine about all of this. Perhaps even, dare he say it, slightly amused, if in a grim, maudlin way. “Well, I gotta say: That checks out.”
Casey’s eyebrows shoot to his hairline. “Really? You don’t want to, I don’t know, punch me in the mouth for making that decision without you? For deciding you were a jerk and then acting accordingly, without bothering to find out?”
“Nah. I’m not a violence-oriented person,” Will says, after a second’s thought. “Why attack something when you could put it under a microscope instead, you know? Also, I mean, in the days after I met you, I may or may not have told someone youmoved here from your previous address of Satan’s Butthole, so. I’m not sure anyone comes out of thistotallyinnocent.”
Casey laughs again, and then surprises Will by saying, “It wasn’t mylastaddress, but I did live in Hell for about six months once,” and they lose about ten minutes to a discussion of Hell, Michigan, a place Will has always wanted to visit. Casey, who had moved there primarily because he thought it would be fun, later in his life, to be able to say that in his youth he’d worked in Hell’s gift shop, seems to have wonderful memories. It’s nice, to hear him talk for a moment about wonderful memories, the cool people he met, the dear friends he made. Will knows enough—about life, about the people involved, about how these things usually go—to know that what’s to come won’t be an easy listen.
He wants to hear it, anyway, though; in some ways, he feels like he came all the way down here, got trapped here, spent all this time stuck here, justtohear it. So when Casey winds down in his recollections, Will steadies his palms against the sun-warmed metal of the truck bed and, quietly, says, “Will you tell me what happened? With Bill, at the end?”
And Casey sighs, and nods, and does.
Will takes in the story as best he can, although it’s a little helter-skelter, both in terms of Casey’s telling and in terms of Will’s internal experience of the words. He can almost feel some little part of himself running around in the back of his mind, trying frantically to file everything that’s coming in and, finding no place to put it, becoming slowly buried in a heap of new information until nothing but one twitching finger is visible. And he knows, even as it happens, that he’s putting pieces of it away incorrectly, in places that they don’t go. That, weeks from now, he will reach for something little and barely related, like the name of a particular brand of cereal Bill happened to like eating, and be walloped, gut-punched, by a wave of nauseating sadness and grief. It’s that kind of story; it’s that kind ofday. Will thinks that once it would have really upset him, but here in the heart of autumn’s vibrant, dying resplendence, he feels calm, at peace. Things hurt, sometimes, even when you don’t expect them to, or wish they wouldn’t. Things hurt, and you feel it, and you carry on. What else is there? What other choice does life offer?
Casey was helping Bill in a professional capacity, he explains, at first. He helped Bill update the technology, and then do some desperately needed maintenance around the farm, and then fixed the billing system, and then the water filtration system, and then the hole in the farmhouse floor. It was around this time that he asked Bill if he could move into the farmhouse, less because he minded sleeping in his car and more because Bill couldn’t explain the hole, or so many of the other problems, and once Casey moved in, it was obvious why. During the middle of the day, he was more with it, but early morning, or later at night, Bill would forget. He’d forget who Casey was, or that he’d moved into the house; he’d mix Casey up with Will, or with his own father, or with people Will might have been able to place in those circumstances, comparing names or details against his own knowledge of his father’s life, but who Casey, more or less a stranger, could not.
He muddled through, though, apparently. Casey tells Will, quite earnestly, that for a while it was fine—nice, even. When Bill was lucid, he was grateful for the help, for someone to confide in, and he was lucid more than he wasn’t, at first. And for Casey, it was—though Will has to read this between the lines—nice to have someone relying on him, and something around which to orient his own life. A bit of much-needed lead, maybe, in boots that had a tendency to go haring off at a moment’s notice.
“But then,” Casey admits, on a heavy sigh, “it…wasn’t fine anymore. We both knew it; he was getting erratic during the day, and in ways that were dangerous. Dangerous for him, butfor the farm and the customers, too: One afternoon, he took the tractor out and started trying to clear down the back fields. Problem was, it was the first week of June, and pick-your-own strawberry season. He took out a huge patch of beautiful berries and nearly ran down a nine-year-old, although luckily, she had the good sense to get out of the way in time.”
“Jesus,” Will mutters.
“Yeah,” Casey says, his jaw working; it’s obvious the memory still pains him. “Anyway, after that, we had a conversation and made a deal. He said he’d seen all the work I’d put into the place over the years, and that if I helped him, you know, close things out with dignity, or whatever, he’d—he’d leave me the farm.” He glances over at Will with an anguished expression on his face, and says, “Please believe me when I say that I—I didn’t know about what had happened between you two, all right? Not the real story, anyway. And, regardless, I knew… I knew making a deal like that with someone in his condition was like writing a contract in sand. Iknew, and I don’t expect—” Casey blows out a harsh breath before he finishes, “I’m not telling you this because I think I’m entitled to anything, okay? I just… I want you to know the whole story. After all this, if anyone deserves to know it, it’s you.”
“Okay,” Will says quietly, his mind too overfull to begin to think of saying anything else.
“Anyway,” Casey says. He’s talking quickly now, like the words are searing his tongue as they land, and he can’t wait to get them out of his mouth. “I didn’t do it for the farm, I knew it probably wasn’t legal, that he probably—forgot, or whatever. I just wanted to help him, because it was sad and he’d been—oh, I don’t know. I wanted to. So I found him a nursing home, one that wasn’t too far away, and I helped him pay for it?—”
“You helped himpayfor it?!” Will nearly yelps this, and wants to scream, actually scream, when Casey shrugs uncomfortably.
“Oh, sure,” he says, like it doesn’t matter. “He couldn’t have afforded it on his own, and I’m—more or less allergic to rent, honestly, so. I have a lot more saved up than most people do, and anyway, it’s not like he lasted that long there. Barely a year. I visited him as much as I could, but the lights were on less and less.” Hoarsely, staring down at the gravel, he whispers, “I should have called you.”
“Heshould have called me,” Will says, abruptly stubborn, crossing his arms over his chest. Then he recognizes the posture and the emotion and cringes entirely away from it, saying, more softly and not at all sure he means it, “Or I should have called him, I guess, although I can’t say he ever gave me any reason to want to. It’s my personal belief that when you pull the ‘dead to me’ card, you have to be the one to extend the olive branch, but…” He lets a smile, wry and a little bitter, twist up the corners of his mouth. “Maybe I’m being stubborn, you know? Heritable trait. Maybe when my mother died, I should have—ah, but.” He cuts the train of thought off, suddenly and entirely sure: “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”
