Then he’s behind the wheel of the car and, thankfully, it’s easy from there. Although Will braces himself as he turns the engine over, whatever Casey did to it worked beautifully: It purrs to life happily, not even a hint of a whine to suggest it ever troubled him in the first place.
That would be satisfying, if Will didn’t catch, in the rearview mirror, the look on Casey’s face. It makes him lift two fingers to his lips, where he can still feel the ghost of Casey’s kiss lingering, and haunts him all the way out of Glenriver: the sharp lines of Casey’s frown, the dismay and disappointment in his eyes.
It consumes his thoughts so completely that it takes Will nearly an hour to notice that he is, without meaning to, returning the way he came. He’s back in downtown Cleveland, hopping onto Route 90 heading west, when it clicks for him that he is going back to Chicago.
God, he can’t just keepfindinghimself doing things, stumbling around like the right answer is going to land at his feet. It’s notdignified, for one thing, and it’s not the better part of adulthood, either. Adult life,personhood, is about making decisions, and taking actions, and doing what you can to make your life the one you want to live.
Will’s father lived his whole life in service of someone else’s vision for him. That he’d wanted that for Will, too, was wrongheaded, certainly, but it was understandable, the way wrongheaded things often are. What other understanding of personhood did he have to work with, after all? What other lesson could he possibly have taught?
But Will thinks, as he drives past what he hopes will be the day’s finalNeed to close? Call Catherine Rose!billboard, that maybe this is like the nitrogen in the soil, andharvesting strategy for the apples, and so much else: Just because his father insisted on doing it a certain way doesn’t mean that way was right.
If Will wants to be his own person—if Will wants to make the decision here that a Robertson wouldn’t make—then he has no choice but to face the music, turn his open eyes towards the truth, and let the chips fall where they may. The time for the soothing balm of denial and fantasy has come and gone; what he needs now is reality. The harsh kindness of brutal honesty.
Will sighs, and shakes his head, and does what he was always going to have to do eventually. He calls Selma.
SEVENTEEN
Will doesn’t reach Selma.
Or, well, that’s notstrictlyaccurate. He reaches Selma for a rushed, whispery forty-five seconds, in which she manages to communicate that she is in court, that she can’t talk to him now, that he’d better be on his way back to Chicago, and that she’s planning on very thoroughly killing him when he arrives. The bulk of the forty-five seconds, in fact, is spent on her laying out that final point in some detail.
About fifteen minutes later, however, he gets a call back from Selma’s assistant, which makes him wince out at the road because, while yeah, okay, he deserves it, she must bereallypissed at him. Still, after a few very pointed comments about the value of Selma’s time and howsomepeople don’t seem to understand what an important person she is, Alexandra, who Will has always suspected of harboring a bit of a crush on her boss, does deign to inform him that Selma expects to see him tonight, and where, and when. Will rolls his eyes—usually he would refuse to play such games with Selma at all and send her a text begging her to climb down off her high horse enough to meet him at one of their usual dinner spots. She’s notusually this mad at him, though, so Will agrees to an oddly late dinner at the sort of fancy restaurant in which she will swan elegantly around and enjoy being seen at heartily, while he struggles with which fork he’s meant to pick up with less and less grace.
This takes, roughly, six minutes. It’s not long enough, and, despite his best attempts to claw himself out of it, Will spends the remaining four and a half hours of his drive in a dragging, cavernous pit of self-loathing. It’s almost like a shampoo, washing the good parts of Glenriver out of his hair as though they were never tangled there at all, asking him what he’d been thinking, and what he could possibly have thought would happen, and how he could be so stupid: lather, rinse, repeat.
Will certainly feels in a lather by the time he crosses the state line into Illinois. He’d thought at the beginning of the drive that maybe he’d prove Casey wrong and outrun the haunting image of his face in Will’s rearview mirror, that obvious, crestfallen heartbreak—no dice. Even two states away, it seems to be overlaid across the windshield, or maybe Will’sretinas, for how persistently present it’s been since he pulled away from Robertson Family Farms. Casey might as well be in the passenger seat, his presence in Will’s mind is so heavy, so palpable.
It’s damning, Will thinks, gnawing not for the first time at his too-recently- and too-well-kissed lips, that he wishes Caseywasin the passenger seat. It would defeat the whole purpose if he was—Will hasto get some distance here, hehasto, it’s the only rational way to approach this and he’d always wonder if he didn’t, but—God. He wishes Casey were here, anyway, this man he’s only known two weeks, singing along with the radio and taking a turn at the driving. He just likes the person he is when Casey’s around a little better, maybe. Maybe it’s just easier to like the person healwaysis with the proof that Casey does.
Or did, anyway. Will has to assume, though it twists hisstomach to do so, that Casey is not feeling particularly fond of him anymore.
The thought is so upsetting that Will presses his foot down a little harder against the gas pedal, as though leaving it behind is simply a function of reaching his apartment. Though he speeds the entire way there, he feels no further away from the terrible, ruinous idea when he sighs, parks the rental car, and steps outside. He stares at the car for a moment; is he supposed to return it somewhere? Someone dropped it off for him when he left two weeks ago, obviously at the behest of the irascible Zane the Assistant—is that guy going to come back and get it? The thought of calling Zane and asking is even more bloodcurdling now than it was before, which is really saying something. He’s half-afraid, given the way he left things with the sale, that the man might send snipers to his location.
Eventually, he decides the rental is Catherine Rose’s stupid problem, pockets the keys, and starts walking. He’s about a block from his building—after long experience with the parking around here, he hadn’t even bothered to make the frustrating and almost always fruitless attempt to find a closer spot—and he makes the journey slowly, looking around. Though he hadn’t set out for a vacation when he got in the car two weeks ago, he is, in a strange way, returning from one. Certainly, these last two weeks were the first time in years he’s spent more than a few days outside of Chicago, and those times it had been on business, or to bury his mother. So this is, in a very real sense, the first time Will has everreturnedfrom a vacation to see this place, where he’s lived all this time, with the fresh eyes of someone who has allowed himself to briefly grow comfortable somewhere else.
The cement sidewalk is smooth and flat under the treads of Will’s shoes; he hadn’t realized how used to the uneven gravel he’d become. He nearly trips more than once, his feetcompensating for something that isn’t there as he cranes his neck and looks around.
Will likes this neighborhood…doesn’t he? Likes living here? Certainly, he’s lived here a long time; why would he do that, if he didn’t like it? Why would anyone? He likes these…well, these slightly drab and boring buildings, if he’s honest—but still, they’re buildings! Familiar ones! And he likes them! And the…the sad wispy trees the City Works Department seems to have given up on, that look as though they’ve never heard of chlorophyll, let alone managed to produce any themselves. Well, Will likes those, too. Who wouldn’t like those? It’s not as though it matters, anyway, like Will needs to live in some fancy neighborhood with great curb appeal and lots of amenities. He can make almost anything work. He prides himself on it.
And as for his building itself, Will thinks as he steps into the lobby that it’s…fine. It’s perfectly fine. After all, who wouldn’t be happy with the creaky, upsetting elevator and its orchestra of unsettling sounds? Or the increasingly dark hallway, because the bulbs have been burning out one by one for the last year, but the super won’t replace them until they all go, which Will knows from the last time this happened? He slides his key into the lock under the flickering light of one of the two remaining bulbs and, looking at the cheap wood-print laminate surface of his own front door, thinks again of the yellow one into the farm market. Pushing that door open the first time, before it all went wrong, and then more wrong, and then weirdly right, and thenhideouslyright, and then somehow wrong again—it had been such a rich, warm surprise, to expect the market of his childhood and find, instead, Casey’s version of it.
Walking into his apartment is the opposite of that.
It’s exactly as he left it; that’s not the problem. Looking around, a lump rising in his throat, Will almost wishes someone would have come in and tossed the place while he was gone. Realistically, at least in his life at present, the only people likelyto have done that would be Catherine Rose or Bartholomew from work—either prospect is horrifying, and still, he’d take it over having to face it like this.
It’s a perfectly fine apartment, of course. It’s always been perfectly fine. Will’s pretty sure that’s even what he said when he’d first toured it: “Well, this looks like it will be perfectly fine.” But as he stares around his living room, and then, walking around in a blank, glazed headspace, takes in the rest of the apartment, he realizes that in all these years, he’s never made it his own. His office at work has personality—a few pieces of artwork along with his diplomas on the walls, a photo of him smirking while Selma laughs framed on his desk, a variety of little oddities he couldn’t quite leave behind at flea markets sitting on bookshelves and surfaces, for guests to examine or fidget with as they will. Someone who walked in could get a sense of Will, if only a broad one, even if he wasn’t there to greet them. And being in that office makes him feel calm, happy, in a way he’s realizing only now that being here never quite has.
Because this place—God help him, it reminds Will of hisfather’sbedroom, minus the sad, indicative Post-its. The books on the shelves tell a story, of course, and there’s a little of him in the kitchen, although admittedly mostly what’s in the kitchen right now is the series of unfortunate discoveries left for any regular home cook who has unexpectedly left said kitchen untouched for two weeks. But otherwise, anyone could live here; there’s very little evidence thatWilldoes.
He returns to his living room, sits down heavily on his couch—beige, here when he moved in—and puts his head in his hands. At eighteen, he’d been so determined to get out of Glenriver, to build his own life, to make things work whatever the cost. He’d wanted to prove that hecoulddo it; he’d wanted to know, for himself, that he wasrightto walk away, to seek a world beyond the river that ringed his hometown. And he didit,didn’t he? Whatever it cost him, however he had to, he’d put his head down, and gritted his teeth, and made it work. He first got good at that, after all, back home on the family farm, one long, heavy day after another.
But he never stopped to ask himself whether heshouldmake it work, just because hecould. Or whether there wasn’t a difference—a whole world of a difference, even—between making something work and being…being…
There’s a knock on the door at this point, which is a relief. If Will had been forced to confront the end ofthatthought, he might really have lost it.
He’s surprised, and happy, to see Selma on the other side of the door. Still, suddenly suspicious of Alexandra, who he knows has never understood Selma’s continued friendship with him, he holds up his hands and says, “She told me we had a reservation! I was going to leave in fifteen minutes!”
“Oh, I cancelled it,” Selma says, scowling at him. “I wasn’treallygoing to make you embarrass yourself with the cutlery, I just wanted to know youwould.” She pulls him into a tight hug then, and, in his ear, mutters, “Ass.”
