“Oh, don’t start any of that up,” Selma says, waving a hand. “Nobody says you have tomove, you know. Don’t do anything crazy, just take some actual vacation time, maybe? A sabbatical? Go deal with your life and your real estate issue and see if this is something real, I guess, is what I’m suggesting.”
Will groans. “Sel, I haveno ideahow to deal with my real estate issue.” Realizing it only at this moment, he drops his head into his hands and adds, “JesusChrist, I can’t even keep track of my belongings—you know I drove all the way back here and I’m just realizing I never went back to myhotel. My laptop is there! And my second-best duffel bag!”
“Oh no,” Selma says, mock-solemn, “not your second-best duffel bag.”
“Mypointis,” Will says, ignoring this, “I should not be trusted, okay, with something as serious as a land deal. I am not equipped. I am not prepared. I am not suited for solving a problem of this nature. Also, I mean, I think it’s even odds Catherine Rose is going to roast me on a spit, so?—”
“Did you know, ‘I’m about to be roasted on a spit’ is one of those sentences that tends to just summon lawyers out of the ether,” Selma says, offering him a small and promising smile. “And this Catherine Rose sounds…fun. Here’s another question for you: Have you ever found yourself with any interest in showing me your hometown?”
EIGHTEEN
Two days later, Will once again finds himself cruising down the long, lazy stretch of Route 90 towards Cleveland, this time in the passenger seat of Selma’s cherry red convertible. It’s a nice day, sunny and in the high sixties; they’ve made the bulk of the journey with the top down, at Selma’s enthusiastic insistence. Will is 90 percent sure that Selma’s love of open-air driving is less about the air and more about feeling like she’s Audrey Hepburn, since, with her hair tied back under a scarf and a pair of enormous sunglasses on, she does look a bit like Audrey Hepburn. Audrey Hepburn’s scarier, more scandalous cousin, perhaps. Tawdry Hepburn.
Will shares this thought with Selma, who laughs, looking quite pleased by it, and then says, “Tawdry Hepburn should be your drag name, you know.”
“Please,” Will says, rolling his eyes. “First of all, I would be terrible at drag; I can’t sing, I can’t dance, and I have no rhythm to such a horrific degree that I can barely clap along to a beat. Remember when you tried to teach me to do the Electric Slide? At that wedding?”
Selma grimaces dramatically out at the road. “Who could forget?”
“Well, exactly.” Will shakes his head, adding, “And that means if Iwasgoing to do drag, I’d have to lean into the camp thing, be as over the top as possible, which isn’t exactly my vibe. I’d have to base it on someone, and the campiest person I can think of is—” Will glances out at the road, considering, and then catches the single eye of one of Catherine Rose’s large billboards and shudders. “God.Her.”
Selma glances at the billboard, the fourth or fifth they’ve passed, with an unimpressed expression. “You know, this is starting to get grating. Is it just going to be like this the whole way? Signs with her eyeballs?”
“More or less,” Will admits, with a sigh.
“Tacky,” is Selma’s verdict; her mouth twists in distaste. “It’s not that it doesn’twork, you understand—if I put up eight thousand billboards along the side of the highway that said, ‘Think you got screwed? Call Selma Mahmoud,’ I would get hundreds of calls a day?—”
“That’s actually a good slogan,” Will says, turning in his seat slightly to grin incredulously at her. “Oh my God, have youthoughtabout this?”
“Of course I’ve thought about it, William, everyone thinks about it,” Selma snaps, glancing away from the highway for an unsettlingly long time to roll her eyes at him dramatically. “You clean up, generally, if you do it. It’s just, you know, not tasteful.”
“Yeah, well. I wouldn’t call Catherine super tasteful in general, to be honest,” Will mutters. As they pass a billboard with her full headshot on it, it makes cheerful and unpleasantly direct eye contact with him, her frozen gaze following him briefly up the road before, thankfully, the car pulls out of its range. Still, it makes the look on her face the other day swim before his eyes again, and that seems to follow him up the road every inch as much as the billboards. He shudders.
“God,” Selma says, eyeing him. “You’re really freaked out by this woman, aren’t you? She’s just aconsultant, Will. She can’t do anything, you know? And honestly, like I said at brunch yesterday, I’m sure she has a personal stake in it. Or, at least, she’s certainlyactingthe way I know people to act when they’ve overpromised something to a corporation like this: panicky. Sloppy. But that’s what you get when you bite off more than you can chew, at least with any company that classes in the ‘ruthlessly evil’ category?—”
“And you’re sure,” Will says, not wanting there to be an inch of room for doubt, “you’resureNimbletainment falls into that category?” He’d said the same thing yesterday at brunch, when Selma had pulled out a manila envelope marked,Why Will Should Never Again Stop Taking My Calls for Two Weeks When Dealing With Any Legal Matterand started laying out her case against Nimbletainment.
Or, well, okay. First there had been several foldable brochures, of a type Will recognized from Selma’s office; typically when he’s seen them before, they’ve said things like,Property Taxes and YouorCopyright Law: What’s All The Fuss About?These were not like that. Selma had clearly made someone in her office print them up special, as they said things like,Things Your Friends Will Convince Themselves Have Happened to YouandLetting Your Pals Microchip You Like a Dog: It’s More Legal Than You Think!
“It’s not, actually,” Selma had told him, stabbing a potato, when Will asked about that last one. “But I wasn’t going to do it anyway; I was just really mad at you that afternoon, and there’s good gossip in the copy room if you’re careful about where you stand.” Then she’d passed him a beautifully spiral-bound presentation entitledGuilt Gifts You Sent Me, Rated By How Much I Enjoyed Them, which she explains she hadmade the same afternoon, and suggests he file away to refer to at Christmas.
Those essentials settled, she’d gone on to explain about the company’s long history of doing more or less exactly what Casey had said they’d do, not to mention leaving behind them a string of lawsuits, ruined lives, bitterly unhappy ex-employees, and evidence of deeply questionable business practices.
Still, even now: “I mean, they’ve got the whole town behind them,” Will says, the wind whipping his hair back as Selma speeds recklessly down the road. “Wouldn’t someone have noticed if they were evil? And made sure they didn’t get away with it?”
Selma stares at him incredulously for so long that Will starts to genuinely get nervous she’s forgotten she is driving and they’re both going to die. Then, turning her head back to the road and shaking it slightly, she says, “Christ, Will. Sometimes you’re so smart and sometimes…sometimes I forget that you’re basically a science hermit, and you don’t knowanythingabout the real world. Need someone to tell you the protein structure of a molecule, you’re the guy, but—companies do stuff like this all the time. If there isn’t someone like Casey to put their foot in things, it mostly…goes ahead, honestly. Evenwithsomeone like him, it tends to go ahead.”
“Oh,” Will says. He considers this for a moment. “But surely some intrepid local journalist?—”
“Nope,” Selma says, shaking her head. “That only happens in the movies, at least these days. Local papers are mostly dead, and anyway, even if someone does run a story, thingsusually go ahead. There also isn’t going to be a last-minute vote by the town council, or a moment where the CEO of Nimbletainment has a change of heart due to being overcome by the Christmas spirit?—”
“It’s October.”
“Well, exactly,” Selma snaps. “Exactlymy point. It’s October, it’s Monday morning, Nimbletainment knows what they’re doing—this is all business as usual. The only way it everisn’tbusiness as usual is if one person, or ideally several people, take a look at the opportunity to be given a big pile of money in exchange for signing something they don’t totally understand, and instead say, ‘You know what? I’m good. You keep the big pile of money; I’m all set.’” Selma casts a sidelong glance at him, and sighs. “You’re still worried about people being mad at you, aren’t you? For getting between them and their big piles of money?”
“Yeah,” Will admits, with an uncomfortable little shrug. “It’s not that I don’t think it’s the right thing; I mean, your case was very convincing. The stuff on the other towns…” Will grimaces. “I don’t think anyone will want to think of us husked out like some of those places looked, and the stories about ruined business and people getting bankrupted by legal fees were. Grim.”
“You know, some of that,” Selma says, very casually, “may just have found its way to distribution amongst the townspeople of the good village of Glenriver yesterday. Who could say how that happened? Maybe there was some random email address that, if anyone bothered to trace it, would route to a remote village in Switzerland; maybe that email address happened to pass some information along to the maintainer of a certain town message board. Hard to know what goes on, you know, in these tiny Midwestern towns.”
