Breathlessly, Will says, “Yeah, I won’t fight you on that one,” and then Casey’s kissing him.
Their last kiss was desperate, and pleading, and intense. It was a great kiss, one whose memory, hand-in-hand with an endless photo reel of choice moments from their night together, chased Will all the way to Chicago, and all the way back. But this kiss isfilthy, so rich with promise of the things to come that they might as well be doing them. Will loses himself a little in the sensation, dizzily trying to catalogue the places Casey has touched him and, for once, finding the fine details too arduous to be bothered with; wherever Casey touches him, it sends sparks of white-hot electricity through Will’s every nerve ending, so the minutiae doesn’t seem important. When Casey tilts Will’s head to deliver a series of kisses along the side of his neck, Will lets out a groan that he would, normally, be a little embarrassed to release even alone in the privacy of his own apartment. But somehow today, even under the buckeye tree in front of his parents’ house, even in earshot of every ghost that’s ever haunted him and probably also, God help him, Daphne, he doesn’t care who hears him. It could be that he’s growing as a person, but Will suspects it has rather more to do with the way Casey chuckles against his ear, says, “Oh, so you like that, then? Okay. Noted.”
“God,” Will says, and catches Casey’s mouth again so he won’t have to say anything else. He can’t quite remember most of the words in his personal dictionary right now. His world hasnarrowed down mostly to sensations: the warmth of Casey’s hands against his skin, the weight of Casey’s body against his, the soft cracking and crunching of buckeye nut shells being crushed under the soles of his shoes. What words he can call to mind are hardly descriptive enough to do the situation justice, and are instead the basic, simple, bedrock ones, like “good” and “wow” and “yes.”
When, eventually, Casey pulls back, it’s only a little; he allows Will to remain in the circle of his arms, which Will thinks is good, because he’s not totally sure he trusts himself to stand on his own in this critical moment. Half of him is almostblissed outto a degree that’s a little frightening, and another third is scrabbling to get back to the unresolved conversation and whether or not being kissed nearly to death counts as agreeing, and the awkwardly sized sliver that remains is thinking ridiculous thoughts like,I should send Anthony the Lizard Man an anonymous telegram that says “In the time since we parted, I have grown reasonably sure you’re NOT actually good in bed,”which, while entertaining, isn’t productive. Will’s not even sure how he’d go about sending a telegram at this particular moment in human history, nor how to contact Anthony, who had communicated largely through a series of burner photos and via a social media account, from which Will has since been blocked, for his lizard.
God, and Casey’s justlookingat him, warm and smiling, eyes crinkling at the corners, and…
“Oh my God, man, you have tosaysomething,” Will groans. “You can’t just kiss me like that andlookat me after I make a proposal like that, are youin? Does that mean you’rein?Or do I need to, like, read it from your mind while you stare into my eyes?—”
“Yeah, see, I just don’t think you have it in you to be asilentpartner,” Casey says, grinning at him now, his eyes dancing. “Not really how you’re wired, is it? So I’d say I’m in, but, youknow. Only for the version where you talk.” Smiling down at Will, he adds, “It’s your name on the building, after all. It’s only right.”
Will smiles back up at him, brimming suddenly with so much happiness he feels like it might just spill out of him, bubble over like a pot left too long on the stove. “Eh,” he says, feeling a little laughter slip out on the words. “A name’s just a name. It’s what you do with it that counts.”
EPILOGUE
FIVE YEARS LATER
On the last day of October and the first day of his fortieth year, Will arrives, six-pack in hand, at the cemetery. It’s an awkward place to be on Halloween, to be sure—Will passes several clusters of uncomfortable-looking teens, who scatter like cockroaches at the approach of a card-carrying adult. It reminds him, with a pang, of Noel, off at college for a few years now, replaced by an equally bizarre youth called Dakota of whom Will has, in the end, also grown quite fond, and who he will be sad to replace in her turn when the time comes in a few months.
Time keeps rolling on, no matter how much you might like to catch it between your palms like a firefly and keep it still—nothing says that quite so succinctly as teens in a cemetery on Halloween. Will smiles wanly at them, the passive, “Please, God, let’s not interact, I’m trying to be polite, but for the love of all that is holy, do not attempt to speak to me,” message seeming to land every time, and keeps his distance. He’s relieved to find the corner of the cemetery he’s headed for empty when he gets there; it would have been a bummer, honestly, to have to shoo children away from the area. On theme for the errand, certainly, but a bummer just the same.
Will sits down, at last, in front of a headstone that readsWilliam “Bill” Josiah Robertson III. It’s buttressed on either side by headstones that also readWilliam “Bill” Josiah Robertson, jammed in between the other two when it was obviously intended to be the third in the line—Will asked about it, a few years ago, and was told the cemetery had done it to save space. They’d offered to alter it for a fee, but Will had told them to leave it; it was fitting, really. The whole thing was fitting, down to the fact that the three of them were stuck with each other in the end; Will had always found it telling that none of the Robertson wives had wanted to be buried here in the family plot. His own mother, who had done her hard, complicated, miserable best at least some of the time, had started telling him when he was only ten or eleven, her voice very serious: “When I die, don’t you let them bury me here, Willy. You make sure they take me back home to Willow Brook, and put me with my own parents, and Grandma Dottie, and Aunt Grace.”
He had, too. He’d made sure; he hadn’t spoken to his father, but he’d called, and double-checked the arrangements, and confirmed that his mother’s burial was exactly as she’d wanted it. He’d felt he owed her that much. Maybe that’s what he’s doing here, this odd, macabre little birthday tradition: Will doesn’t feel he owes his father anything, necessarily, but a little part of him can’t quite let go of the idea that coming here feels…good. That, paradoxically enough, it feels like letting something go.
Will cracks the bottle cap off his beer on the top of Original Bill’s headstone and, smiling slightly, says, “Hello, boys.”
None of them answer him, which in a way makes these meetings the best conversations he’s ever had with at least two of the three deceased participants. He never actually spoke with Original Bill, who was dead long before Will showed up, but he does feel he met the man in absentia. His ghost did its hauntingsomewhere in the ways Old Bill hurt Will’s father, in the ways Will’s father hurt him, although Will does understand that maybe he hasn’t seen the man’s best side.
“Farm’s good,” he tells Bill’s headstone, taking a long pull from his own beer and sprawling out as comfortably as he can amongst the somewhat unkempt grass. “Turning a nice profit this year. Casey’s ice cider’s really taking off, and the tourist traffic has been higher than ever, so. And the lab’s doing well, too, not that you’d care. I know all you ever wanted was for me to put the books down and be more like you, but we’re making breakthroughs that a normal parent would have been proud of.”
He sighs, and then frowns, just slightly, at the carved lettering of Bill’s name. Of course, in this form, in this place, it reads very nearly as Will’s might have one day: just that old yolk of a name, with no other inscription besides the years of his birth and death. “I couldn’t think of what to put,” Casey had admitted, clearly embarrassed, when Will asked why there wasn’t an epigraph. “I asked him once and he said, ‘Guess you might as well put, “Here lies Bill, who was over the hill.”’ Itwasjust about the only time I ever heard him tell a joke, but still. Didn’t feel tasteful.”
Of course, Will is Will Reeves now. He sold Selma the rights to decide what words go on his grave more than fifteen years ago, in exchange for her never again mentioning a particular incident involving a risqué costume party, a very ambitious and ill-thought-out outfit choice, and the sentence, “Well, how hard could it be to shave my legs,” so. Maybe he’s never been at that much risk of a sparse tombstone; after all, setting the name aside, it’s not as though he and his father were ever much alike.
In any case, Will can’t blame Casey for being unable to come up with an epigraph for the man. Will wouldn’t have been able to, either, despite sharing his DNA and spending most of his childhood with Bill. The situation is too complex to explain on a headstone, and, anyway, Bill wouldn’t have wanted itexplained. Bill would have preferred, Will thinks, this blank rock to one that revealed too much, or that made him look like a different man, softer or warmer than his reality. For all his flaws, for all his problems, he was—Will has to give it to him—who he was. Subterfuge had never been his style.
Sipping his beer, Will lets his gaze unfocus for a minute, staring out into the middle distance. After a while, motion catches at the corner of his eye, and he looks over to see three cardinals swoop down into a nearby tree. It appears, to Will’s surprise, to be something that could pass for a family grouping—a showy, bright red male, a more demure brown female, and a juvenile male, still growing in his crimson plumage, and looking a little awkward next to the splendor of the older birds. They’re probably not a family—just three separate, unrelated animals who have landed here together by coincidence—but Will still finds himself staring, oddly transfixed.
All three are silent for a moment; then the older male trills sharply at the juvenile, who balks at once and flits away, vanishing into the nearby tree line. The remaining male, smug, hops closer to the female, trilling at her too; she ruffles her feathers, annoyed, and takes flight, leaving the small red bird to puff up in victory and then, at least to Will’s eyes, deflate a little, as though realizing that, through his own familiar folly, he has found himself alone.
That’s not what’s happening, Will knows. Really those birds were having a conversation of their own, probably on the topic of hunger, territory, or mating, in a language Will would be a fool to imagine he could begin to understand. He could call up maybe a dozen former classmates or colleagues who broke towards fauna instead of flora, and they’d all confirm that the state bird of Ohio probably wasnotinclined towards playing out intricate family dramas to mirror Will’s own.
Still, he can’t help but smile at the cardinal, who stares back at him, fixed and unblinking, and doesn’t fly off even whenWill stands up, stretches, finishes his beer, and cracks open a second one.
“Here lies Bill,” he intones, in his most serious voice, “who was over the hill,” and slowly, he pours the beer out onto the grass, staring at the bird all the while. He’d like to tell himself he doesn’t know why he does this every year—it’s not as though he owes his father anything, after all—but he can’t. Every time he tries, his mind crowds up with images of the last five years, of Casey and the life they’ve built together, of his work and his lab and his beloved grove of testing trees, of the friends who have become like family, of the farm that’s become something more than it was when Will was a child. None of it would have happened if Bill hadn’t left Will the property, even though he’d promised years before, in no uncertain terms, that he’d do no such thing. That choice, if it had evenbeena choice, as opposed to decades of the sort of inertia that might motivate someone to fill up a room with junk—thataction, whether Bill meant to take it or not, changed Will’s life. It brought him to love and happiness; it brought him home, to a version of this place that couldbea home for him, instead of a trap, or a cage, or a millstone.
Smiling up at the cardinal, as the last drop of beer lands, Will adds, “I can’t say much about the old bastard, but he got one thing right.”
The cardinal trills and, at last, takes flight, its bright red plumage a streak of crimson through the air before it’s gone. Will sighs, and smiles, and shakes his head, and starts the long walk home.
He doesn’t mind the walk. In fact, he’d had Meredith drop him off here with the goal of walking, after a leisurely birthday lunch and a long chat in the upstairs office at Gunderson’s. It’s become something of a tradition in the last few years, for his birthdays and hers, to do a bit of a Year in Review; the results are always hilarious, and often oddly heartwarming, and it reminds Will of their teenage years in a way that brings him asmall, almost comforting pang. Back then, every birthday had felt like turning a page in a new, exciting book, breathless with excitement to see what was going to happen, and they’d celebrated together by imagining what the next chapter would hold. Now that Will’s reached that awkward point in his life where he’s probably read at least as much of the metaphorical book as there’s remaining to go, it’s nice to look back on the year he’s left behind him, savor it for the utterly singular delicacy it was.
Will takes, now, the route he would have taken as a teenager, ignoring the various objections his adult self has woolgathered over the years, to petty things like “trespassing” and “traffic laws” and “not climbing the fence into someone’s vegetable garden just because it will save you .27 seconds of walking time.” He cuts across the Northside Creek, and walks briefly the wrong way up Poplar Road, before he grins and, for the first time in twenty-plus years, cuts through what used to be old Mrs. Quincey’s yard. No one’s lived here since before Will left, Mrs. Quincey having died sometime around Will’s fifteenth birthday and the house having slipped into the kind of chaotic mess of disputed wills and mismanaged estates that leads a place to fall to ruin. Her farmhouse, which had been cut from a similar cloth to Will’s own home, is dilapidated now in a way that would have horrified the old woman. Will hadn’t known her well, but what impression she did leave was all rooted in the pride she took in keeping her home and garden pristine. Well, that and the truly pervasive, utterly inescapable scent of mothballs.
Feeling slightly guilty about the mothballs thought, Will smiles to notice that the old woman’s prize-winning rosebushes are still here. They’re wilder and more unkempt than Will remembers them, certainly, but they’ve survived all the same, the fancy varietals cross-pollinating with one another to create all sorts of interesting one-off blooms. Intrigued, Will can’t help but pull out his pocketknife—an anniversary gift from Casey, afew years ago now—and take a couple of cuttings, careful to carry them without gripping the thorns. The blooms are lovely, and Will’s interested to see if he can reproduce them if he plants these at home, or if they’ll just default back to whatever their base varietal was once separated from the thicket.
