“You didn’t!” Will says, after a beat.
“Of course I didn’t,” Selma says calmly. “That would have been in violation of the Prime Directive.”
Will furrows his brow, but not seeing any way around it, asks: “Uh. Isn’t that ‘Don’t interfere with the natural development of alien civilizations,’ more or less?”
“Not for lawyers,” Selma says cheerfully. “For lawyers, it’sjust ‘Don’t interfere.’ People are going to do what they’re going to do; we’re just here to clean it up and get paid.”
“Hmm,” says Will, who has, over the years, determined that while Selma talks a big game, the vast majority of her work is fighting for the rights of the little guy. “Well, I’d be grateful to anyone whodiddo that. If someone had. Would make the whole thing feel a little less daunting.”
“Duly noted,” Selma says, “though irrelevant,” and flips on the radio.
They drive in comfortable silence for a while, Will staring out the window and gnawing at his lip as they pass through Cleveland, wincing away from every Catherine Rose billboard they see. He’s nervous about the town hating him, sure, and about regretting the choice he’s made—about to make—whatever. He’s nervous about Catherine Rose murdering him in cold blood, and also about her then making a billboard out of the crime scene photos as a warning to other potential obstacles to her closing process; whatever Selma says about how she’s bound to be more bark than bite, Will is reasonably sure that’s a real concern for him here, at least if the voicemails of the last few days are anything to go by.
But mostly he’s nervous about seeing Casey, who hasn’t called, or texted, or emailed. Will’s not even sure Caseyhashis email address, but he’s refreshed his inbox four hundred times over the last two days, hoping against hope to see something pop up. Will knows this is ridiculous, not fair; the ball is so emphatically in his own court here, and he’s the one who should be doing something. He’s the one who ran off, drove fully out of the state without even stopping by his hotel for his things, after Casey put it all on the line and kissed him so thoroughly and passionately that a little part of Will is still there, locked in it, wholly unwilling toevercome up for air.
The rest of him, however, has to face reality, and so he swallows down his nerves, drums his fingers against thepassenger side door, and asks Selma if she minds swinging by the hotel for his laptop.
It takes a few minutes to get that laptop, largely because the employee at the hotel desk is quite amused by Will’s attempt to explain, poorly, why he left his laptop behind. After a fumbling explanation that involves a lot of hand gestures and apologies and saying Casey’s name rather more times than is appropriate, the woman tilts her head, looks at him, and, sounding like she’s trying very hard not to laugh, says, “You understand that I don’t need to know any of that, right? Just your room number and ID should do it.”
The whole experience is humbling, but it doesn’t take that long, either, and soon they’re in the last fifteen minutes of the drive, the aggressive Catherine Rose billboards seeming to appear every mile or so now.
“Do you know what, I actually think it must be an intimidation strategy,” Will mutters, after what has to be the twentieth board they’ve passed today; Will’s half-convinced she’s had new ones put up since the last time he drove this way, two weeks ago. “Like a threat display or whatever. Nothing to unnerve your enemy like making them stare at you anew around every bend!”
“It never means anything good for your headspace when you start using words like ‘anew,’” Selma comments, but lightly enough. “It seems like this woman genuinely scares you, Will. Why? She’s just a consultant; it’s not like she can force you to sign.”
Will shudders slightly, not totally sure how to put it into words. “She’s just—ugh. She’s so aggressive, and she’ll never take no for an answer, and it can only be her way, and she doesn’t listen to anything I say, and if I don’t do what she wants she’ll just keephoundingme andbelittlingme andscreamingat me and making me feel like—” Abruptly, Will hears himself and flushes. “Oh. You, uh. You…think this is about my dad?”
“I,” Selma says, smirking slightly, “am a lawyer, not a therapist,so I’m going to go with: You said it, I didn’t.” But she slants him a sidelong look that says more than enough, and Will sits in slightly embarrassed silence for a few minutes, processing.
He groans when they pass another image of Catherine Rose, towering over the road. “Okay, look, maybe it is about my dad, but still, it’s too many billboards! I swear to God it’s like she’sfollowingus.”
Selma laughs, glancing jokingly in the rearview mirror. Then, sounding lightly surprised, she remarks, “God, actually, weirdly enough, there’s a woman who looks like her in the car behind us. What are the odds, right?”
Will freezes. Then, very carefully, he turns in his seat as slightly as he possibly can, so that just enough of his face is tilted past the headrest for him to glance back to the car behind him.
Catherine Rose, scowling in irritation, her hair bigger than Will has ever seen it, makes direct eye contact with him and bares her teeth. Will’s not proud of it, but it’s so unsettling he nearly yelps.
Instead, heart pounding, he slams himself back to facing forward and hisses, “That’sher, Sel. It’s notlikeshe’s following us—the lunatic isactually following us.”
“Good Lord.” Selma’s voice is casual, unbothered; her gaze, when it flicks back to the rearview mirror to assess the situation behind her, is utterly calm. “People do not have enough tododown here, if this is what they’re getting up to. Honestly. Does she have nothing more urgent to attend to than stalking you? No other clients to see? Park benches to paper with her own face? Really, it’s embarrassing.”
“Your professional standards aside, what do wedo?” Will hisses, peeking back over his shoulder again and regretting it. “God, she saw meseeher?—”
Selma, on the other hand, laughs. “What do you mean, what do we do? We do exactly what we were already doing—head to the farm. GPS says we’re close, and we were going to have to call her once we got there, anyway. Let me handle her, though; I’m not sure the necessary conversational grace is, ah…entirely in your wheelhouse.”
“You can just say, ‘I think you’d put your foot in it, Will,’” Will mutters, trying to glance behind him without turning his head at all and failing quite miserably.
“I think you’d put your foot in it, Will.” Selma says this with a solemnity that is either slightly mocking or upsettingly sincere—Will can’t quite tell. She turns the radio back up, and adds, “Look, try to stop thinking about her, okay? We’re only a few minutes out; you should use this time to make sure you’re good with what we talked about, what you decided. If you want to change your mind, this is final notice that the window is closing.”
Will nods and goes silent as Selma winds the car down the last few roads before the new Glen River Bridge appears in front of them. He hadn’t bothered to look at it while he was haring out of town on Saturday, but as they cross over it, Will decides that it’s a good bridge. It’s not as ornamental, maybe, as the one that washed away, but it looks stronger and sturdier, engineered to survive more serious weather than its predecessor. Like much of what they pass as they drive up Main Street and down the twisting residential blocks that lead to Will’s childhood home, time has played its favorite trick: taking what once was and replacing it with something almost like it, but not quite.
Catching a glimpse of his own pensive expression in the rearview mirror, Will thinks wryly of looking at himself from this same angle as an eight-year-old, in his father’s old truck. He’ll be thirty-five in just a few days—the face he’s wearing lately bears only a passing resemblance to that little boy’s; it’s been so long since Will lived through being him. And yet that child sits here still, tucked up within the branches of the gnarledtree of Will’s life, looking out from behind Will’s eyes with his own smaller, more trusting ones.
“No,” Will says, very softly. “I don’t think I would like to change my mind.”
“Okay, then,” Selma says, and grins. “Then this should be ariot.”
She pulls into the parking lot of Robertson Family Farms, parks the car, and then smirks slightly when Catherine pulls to a stop directly behind them, tires screeching. Will, himself, has never quite understood this aspect of Selma; he’s always hated nearly all forms of confrontation, done whatever he could to avoid it. Setting aside a few particular moments—screaming at his father in the cornfield, for example, or yelling at Casey in the rain—he’s generally a quiet, unassuming person, the kind who will go along to get along, because it’s not worth the trouble.
