Casey cocks his head. “How do you mean?”
“Me and my dad—we weren’t built to communicate with one another.” The words tumble out of his mouth like a confession, or a eulogy, too raw to be anything but honest. “Too different in some ways, I think, and in others, I guess…” He grimaces, hating it, but forces it out anyway: “Ugh. I guess too alike? But whatever the reason, my whole childhood we were like—oh, I don’t know. Two radio transmitters, maybe, each sending signals to the other in increasing frustration, neither of us realizing we hadn’t been equipped with receivers. All these years I’ve thought I knew who he was, and what he thought of me, and what he wanted from me, and now…” Will sighs, wanting almost to laugh even though it isn’t funny. “Now I’m not sure I ever really knew him at all. I know he never really knew me.”
“His loss,” Casey says, soft. “In my opinion.”
Will smiles at him, although he’s sure the expression is at odds with the tears he can feel glimmering, held barely at bay, in his own eyes. He’s sad, all of a sudden, in a way he didn’t expect to be over his old man, in a way he’s surprised to find he’s grateful for. “We all lost something, I think,” he says, quietly. “All us Robertsons, handing down the same stupid, needless pain across a century. It used to make me so angry, thinking about it—what good did it do anyone? What was the point?” He meets Casey’s eyes, warmed by the steady, patient understanding in them, and shrugs. “I thought the only way to win was to stop playing, but. I think… I think the truth is, it’s more about changing the rules.”
Casey doesn’t say anything at first, just considers it for a moment, then nods, sighs. “Maybe there aren’t winners and losers, at least not when it comes to this. Just…people being people, and trying their best, and messing it up, same as always. You and Bill—yeah, sure, it’s not a nice story, but it’s a family story, right? Ifmychildhood taught me anything, it’s that family doesn’t have to be nice to make you who you are.” He smiles, and shrugs, and, a little awkwardly, adds, “And I’ve heard, if you don’t like the one you’re issued, the option is on the table to go ahead and make your own. No personal experience there, of course, but. Rumor has it.”
A train whistle screams in the distance as if to underscore his point, low and mournful and impossible to miss, startling the birds from the trees. Just for a second, as he watches them climb, Will thinks he feels a similar shift within his heart, a susurration rising as if from nowhere to seek new skies.
SIXTEEN
In the end, after several minutes of companionable silence and then several more minutes of slightly awkward silence, it becomes apparent to Will that they need—or, at least,heneeds—to get off the truck bed and do something physical. If he doesn’t, one of two things is going to happen. The first, likeliest, and worst option is that the weight of what’s been said in the last few hours will come crashing down, and Will just doesn’t think he can take that right now. On top of everything else, being flattened like a bug under the enormous, crushing shoe of his own emotions seems a bit too much.
The second option is that—faced with nothing left to say to one another and the nearly empty, perfectly serviceable bed of Casey’s pickup behind them—they might succumb to temptation, and try out the practicalities of the phrase “A roll in the hay.” Granted, it wouldn’t exactly be a roll in the hay so much as a roll in the hay, mud, twigs, leaves, dirt, and various tools, but Will doesn’t actually think that would be their biggest problem. Their biggest problem would be that this is themarket parking lotand it isSaturday morning, so anything they got up to would be giving the good citizens of Glenriver quite theshow. Even the ones who weren’t here to see it would have heard about it by the time Will next talked to them, and every one of them would have something to say, some joke to make, some comment about how Will’s the one who finally bagged him, eh? The thought of that, just at this moment, is stomach churning, and yet Will is upsettingly sure that if he sits here much longer, he’ll lose sight of it entirely, too distracted by Casey’s gently parted lips, the jut of his square chin, the curve of his jaw.
Casey must come to a similar conclusion, because after a long, charged look at Will, he glances away and, somewhat sheepishly, says, “Hey, not to thank you for telling me all that with asking you to do a bunch of manual labor, but any chance you might, ah. Be willing to help me break that fallen tree down into mulch? I went and got the woodchipper from Greg three days ago, but it’s just sitting back there, next to where we hauled the stupid tree last week, because…well, because I’ve been lazy, mostly.”
Will groans, but good-naturedly, not meaning it, as he hops off the back of the truck. “I swear to God, nobody back in Chicago is going to believe me when I tell them how much of this trip I spent using a chainsaw.”
“Are you kidding? They’ll probably be jealous,” Casey says. He hops down, too, closing the truck bed up before starting off in the direction of the outbuildings, glancing back briefly to make sure Will is following him and grinning when he is. “I’d want to get my hands on a chainsaw if I spent all day in a cubicle.”
“My coworkers don’t spend all day in a cubicle!” Will says, and then, in the tones of an admission, has to concede, “But, it is. You know. A lab, so. A little sterile, I guess. And some of them probablywouldlike to get their hands on a chainsaw, although…it might better if they very emphatically did not, especially in, uh. A few…notable cases.”
“Mm,” Casey says, and, only half-jokingly, “sounds serious,” and Will, more or less accidentally, finds himself telling Casey about the flaws and foibles of his various colleagues as they walk to the far corner of the farm. Casey’s just…upsettingly easy to talk to, that’s the problem, and before he knows it, they’ve reached the tree and the woodchipper and Will’s told Casey all of his fears about what his second-in-command, Bartholomew, gets up to while he’s away, but has not once cycled back to:
“Catherine Rose,” Will remembers, with a groan, as Casey reaches towards one of the chainsaws to start breaking down the tree trunk, which he more or less strapped whole to his truck and dragged down the road last week. “God, I forgot to—look, I’ve been dodging her calls for the last two weeks, all right? I don’t knowwhatI’m going to do, but I know I don’t want to…well, to screw you over, or anyone else, either. I just need some time to think, and talk to my friend Selma—she’s a lawyer, you know—and Itriedto talk to Mere and some of the other business owners in town, but?—”
“All clammed up on you, right?” Casey says, and shakes his head. “That stupid company—I can’t prove it, but I’d bet anything they got the locals to sign something, promising them some payout if they go along, and making sure they know they’ll feel it if they opt not to. When they first rolled into town, a lot of folks around here were on my side—Mere and Sandy, Noah Anderson, a lot of the older guard. They said they didn’t want some outside corporation having such a significant stake in the town any more than I did, and if Nimbletainment did try to make an aggressive move for the farm, they’d vote down the business license when it came before the council.” He sighs, rolling his shoulders back. “But, you know. Suddenly they were getting visits from your buddy Catherine Rose, and one by one, they all kinda faded out on me. Real awkward, every time, even with Mere—still, sometimes, you notice that? After everything?”
“Yeah,” Will says, because he has. “Sometimes, it’s like she’s—embarrassed, I guess, is how it comes off.”
“I wish she wouldn’t be,” Casey mutters. “It’s not her fault, and I don’t blame her. I don’t blame any of them, you know? They’ve got kids and livelihoods, and they don’t know what I know; I couldn’t expect them to. But if they did know, they wouldn’t accept the payout—it’s worthless in the long run.”
“How so?”
“Oh, the festival will come in and take it all over,” Casey says, waving a hand. His tone and body language are light; only the grim twist to his mouth, the tightness in his jaw, betrays how angry the very idea makes him. “Seen it all before, in other little towns. They get enough space that it’s a big-deal venue, and suddenly, it’s, hey, why stick to holding a little festival once a year when they could have music playing here every weekend? And, hey, that’s a cute local restaurant, but it’s a little far from the venue; why don’t they open one almost exactly like it, just a little bit worse, right on the venue grounds? And, hey, it seems like the locals aren’t loving the constant congested traffic through town, and the way no one wants to bother coming out to Main Street on a night with a venue show, and people are starting to shutter their businesses after all—might as well buy that real estate up cheap, right? Turn some of it into short-term rentals for festival-goers, and otherwise sell it out to big-name retailers, who don’t live and die on their weekly sales the way smaller operations do? And hey, while we’re at it, who needs these old apple trees, anyway, right?”
Casey’s breathing hard by this point, and he seems to realize it; he cuts himself off, and Will can almost see him reeling himself back in to say, trying unsuccessfully for nonchalance: “Or, at least, that’s how I’ve seen it go in the past. Maybe it’ll be different this time! But I doubt it.”
“Jesus,” Will says, alarmed. “Why didn’t you justsaythat two weeks ago?”
Casey shrugs, discomfited. “Would you have believed me? Nobody else does, and they’re my friends and neighbors! You were a stranger, and I had a…let’s call it an incorrect impression of you, on top of it.” He casts a slightly helpless look at Will and adds, “And then I realized pretty quickly that I’d maybe gotten the wrong end of the stick from Bill, but I didn’t want to—I don’t know. It felt like if I said something, it would all go wrong; it was all a lot more fun than I expected, honestly, and I couldn’t bring myself to ruin what I thought was—ugh.” He scowls, and mutters, “Jesus, this isn’t coming out right. In a lot of ways, we hardly know each other and I don’t want you to think I’m, Christ,expectinganything from you because of last night. If it was just a one-off for you, a bit of fun before you go, then that’s?—”
“It wasn’t,” Will says, very quietly, because even for him, it’s hard to interpret that particular statement in a way that doesn’t line up, quite precisely and on a number of the more vulnerable particulars, to Will’s own reasons for not wanting to talk about it. “Or, I mean… itwasfun, it wasreallyfun, but it wasn’t, uh. Just fun. I—understand what you’re driving at, I think. I’ve felt…similarly.”
“Do you?” Casey says this sharply, and whips his head around to look at Will with such intensity that Will flushes. “Haveyou?”
Still, flushed or not, Will can’tentirelyhelp being his father’s son: His chin lifts defiantly, of its own inherited accord, even as he swallows hard and admits, “Yes.”
For a moment, they stare at each other, small in comparison to the corpse of the tree sprawled in front of them, and yet each of them seeming slightly larger, more substantial, than they did just a moment before.
Then Casey grins, wide and slow and lazy, and says, “Well, okay, then. I guess we should get to cutting this tree up, huh?”
“That mean I can stay?” Will asks this before he can evenask himself if it’s what he wants; he knows it is, though, the minute the words hit the air. “Until I decide what I want to do, anyway? I promise I’m not going to screw you over, at least not on purpose.”
“It’s your house,” Casey reminds him.
