“Yeah, well, old folks,” Catherine says. “They can surprise us.” At this point, the asphalt of the sprawling parking lot, built large to accommodate big events, gives way to grass; the ground is a little damp, likely from the recent rains that left the Glen River so high. Will can feel the earth dip slightly beneath his boots, but somehow Catherine’s spike heels don’t seem to sink into the ground at all as she continues, “My own grandfather, you know, was famous up in Cleveland for his crusade against art programs in the local schools; he said it was a waste of public funds, ran for City Council on the platform several times, the whole thing. It wasn’t a popular stance, I can tell you that; peoplehatedhim.” She laughs, as though she finds this quite amusing, before she adds, “But do you know, when he died, we went into his garage and found hundreds of little whittled sculptures? The old coot was an artist himself! It just goes to show you never really know anyone.”
I think it just goes to show your grandfather was a hypocritical old jerk, Will doesn’t say. What would be the point? He also doesn’t see any reason to inform her that his own grandfather, Old Bill, had also been something of a whittler, to say nothing of being something of a jerk. The old man hadn’t taughtWillto whittle, of course—he hadn’t taught Will much of anything, except how to keep his footfalls soft and silent as he walked past the living room where Old Bill spent most of his time. No, actually, that’s not fair; Will had also learned from him what channelThe Price Is Rightwas on, and to never, ever turn it off.
Will had never found Old Bill’s lack of warmth particularly surprising, since the shriveled-up geezer had always made itquite clear that he found even Will’sfatherlacking, in terms of carrying the mantle of his handed-down name. This meant that Will, to his grandfather, was not a person so much as a mystifying anomaly, if one who happened to be occupying the space where a person was meant to exist. He’d never been cruel to Will, exactly, he’d just been…nothing. Vacant. Blank. The few times Will had heard Old Bill express an opinion of him, it was muttered to Bill under his breath, barely audible and clearly not positive.
Catherine draws to a stop, Will pausing next to her, as they reach the fence that encloses the primary apple orchard. Technically—last time Will checked, anyway—Robertson Family Farms encompasses three apple orchards, two large planting fields, and the grazing pasture attached to the barnyard, as well some other land, not put to agricultural purpose. The grove of trees they’re standing in front of is the first and biggest orchard, the one the very first Bill Robertson planted back in the 1920s, and the vast majority of its trees are a few years past their hundredth birthdays. Barring the occasional stand that’s needed replacing due to rot, or beetles, or flood damage, this orchard is the same as it was during the Cold War, and the Watergate trials, and the full run of the Golden Age of Hollywood.
And yet…something’s not quite right. Something’sdifferent.It takes Will a moment to place it, and then he realizes: It’s thefence. All his life, the fences that ran within Robertson Family Farms were the slapdash wooden ones you see all over Ohio, built either with two-by-fours purchased at the nearest big box hardware store or whatever actual logs were nearest to hand. None of this wood was ever treated or painted, and so it all took on the unpleasant brown color of a soaked paper bag, looking a little bit wet even in the peak of an August drought. Periodically, throughout Will’s childhood, he’d been woken at the crack of dawn on an otherwise unassuming morning and told it was Repair Day, and he and his father, or whichever unfortunateunderling Bill had managed to stick with the job, would go around the property replacing pieces of the fenceline that had cracked or rotted out. It was hard, unhappy, splintering work, but there was no getting out of it, not even for school—whenever Will tried that argument, Bill always pointed out that for whathe’dbe doing with his life, the farmwashis school, and he’d better start getting his grades up.
These fences are…not like that. They are intentionally and professionally constructed, recently painted a fresh, crisp white, with a wide flat piece on top on which a person could lean, or set a drink. Craning his neck, Will realizes that all the fences he canseefrom here are the same, crisp and white and slotted together like puzzle pieces. HadBilldone that? Surely not; his hip was already giving him trouble when Will was a teenager, and anyway, he’d never cared about things like this. Bill wouldn’t sink money into a proper fence that he could instead have spent on some get-rich-quick scheme that never panned out—it would have been too practical.
“Will,” Catherine Rose says, in a deep, heady voice, dragging Will away from his thoughts. “I want you to imagine with me. Can you do that?”
“Um,” Will says, not at all sure he can, “okay?”
“Picture this.” Catherine sounds, now, as though she is narrating a very bizarre commercial. “It’s time for the annual Glenriver Shiver, a festival haunted for years with stories of freak weather events and terrible cold! The festival with the most documented cases of hypothermia on record?—”
“Is that true?” Will says, surprised and interested. “Based on what dataset, do you know? I didn’t even know that was a metric anyone wastrackingfor music festivals?—”
“But,” Catherine continues, talking right over Will as though not having heard him at all, “instead of finding themselves in the middle of a terrible, unpleasant, regrettable festival experience, they find themselves instead at the new,improvedGlenriver Shiver. A festival with amenities, you understand? People can come and pickapplesduring the day, with a professional photographer to make sure they catch the moment for their socials, or they can come for a soak in the state-of-the-art hot tub facilities Nimbletainment will be building, or catch some musicwithoutfreezing at the festival’s brand-new, first-of-its-kind, temperature-controlled amphitheater. Whatever your vibe, the Glenriver Shiver will be able to cater to it after these fantastic improvements!”
“Sorry,” Will says, turning to stare at her. She sounds so much like she’s regurgitating a weird commercial that he half expects her to rattle off a toll-free phone number to call, but instead she smiles toothily at him, leaning in ever so slightly too close. Something about that smile seems to be draining Will’s life force; weakly, he continues, “I, um. Just. This seems like a lot to do for just…one festival?”
“Greatquestion, Will,” Catherine says, although Will did not, strictly speaking, ask one. “But actually, the company has big plans for this town. Big plans. With the ability to expand the festival ground, add more stages, Nimbletainment could be bringing live music into town all year long. That’s tourist revenue for businesses; it’s guaranteed world-class entertainment for the locals right in their own backyards—it’s a no-brainer, really. If your father hadn’t been so determined to get in the way, the town would’ve been reaping the benefits years ago.”
Will scuffs his right boot against one of the pristine fenceposts, slopping mud up against the side, as he considers this. Certainly, the last part rings true—God knows Bill loved to cause a problem, be the holdup—but something about the rest doesn’t quite sit right.
Then again, he’s not sure he cares. What he knows for sure is that he doesn’t want to be here, in this town or on this property in particular. He doesn’t want the trees hurt, or to screw upthe local economy—his childhood memories of the place might not be the best, but he isn’t a total monster—but it doesn’t sound like he’s at any risk of doing that by selling. If something feels a little weird, does that really have to matter? After all, it might just be Catherine Rose, who is clearly fairly weird herself.
Seeming to sense his hesitation, she throws an arm around Will’s shoulders. “Walk with me, William.”
She spends the next hour leading him through a property he absolutely knows better than she does, nearly walking them into a dead end or a patch of poison ivy roughly seven times. But throughout she’s chattering, barely letting Will get a word in edgewise, about Nimbletainment and their gift for improving a town with music, about what each part of the place will look like when they’re done, about how all the apple trees will of course be allowed to continue to flourish, and be looked after. He hardly has a chance to take in the land he grew up on, let alone get a sense of what’s changed here—it takes everything in him to keep himself paying even the vaguest attention to what she’s saying without graying out from sheer, overwhelmed boredom.
Still, the more she talks, the more Will allows the nervous little voice in the back of his head, the one screaming that something feels off and it’s all too good to be true, to relax. He’s probably paranoid; this woman really seems like she has things under control. How else would she be able to generate so much to say about it?
As they’re looping back around to the parking lot, Catherine’s phone rings. She shoos Will towards the market, saying, “Go on, go in, look around! We wouldn’t be changing too much in there—the company loves the old-world charm. I have to take this—Bethany, hi!” That last is clearly directed into the phone, and she turns on her heel and walks off, her conversation quickly veering towards what could not more obviously be a personal call.
Will stands awkwardly in front of the door for a moment, his hand reaching out briefly towards the handle before it drops to his side, fingers twitching until he curls them into a resolute fist. It’s just a door—it’s not even the same door, he realizes, as it was when he was growing up. That one had been red and peeling, with the ghostly remains of dozens of little painted apples around the trim, less recognizable as fruit with every passing year. There’d been two small glass windows set near the top; for years Will had been too short to see through them, and the day he finally could, he found they were so filthy that looking through them was like peering into another time, warped and sepia-stained and somber.
This door is a bright, cheerful yellow. It has one enormous window in the center, which is lightly and expertly frosted. The paint job around it is crisp and fresh and professional, and while the large glass pane is intentionally opaque, it’s clean. Hanging in the center of the window is a little wooden sign on a hook, clearly hand-painted, that reads,We’re open!and then, below, in smaller letters,If no one’s inside, c’mon in anyway; we’ll be right back.
Will stares at it. It’s so…friendly. And it’s hung like it’s designed to be flipped over; curiously, Will lifts it slightly with two fingers to peer at the other side. It reads,We’re closed!but again, there’s an additional message in smaller letters below:If you come in now, technically it’s breaking and entering, just so you know.
In spite of himself, Will finds a smile tugging the edges of his mouth. It’s…charming, which is a word he didn’t ever imagine he’d use about anything on Robertson Family Farms. “Chilling,” maybe, or perhaps “decrepit,” or even “so unpleasantly loaded for me that looking at all of it makes me feel like driving my stupid rental car north until it careens into Lake Erie.” But “charming”? No. And yet…it’s such a bright, inviting door. Such acheerfullittle sign, and not cheerful the wayCatherine Rose is cheerful, which has a certain edge of “You’ll have a good time with me or else.” Someone made it by hand, clearly took their time about it, sanding down every edge and painting every letter with painstakingly clear brushstrokes, even the tiny ones. It reminds him, oddly, of the new fences, every aspect of it carefully thought out.
His hand flexes at his side, uncurling from a fist so tight he can feel the half-moon fingernail dents it left behind on his palm. He reaches out; he opens the door.
The first impression he has of the market as he steps inside is—bright. The old market had been dimly lit by a handful of hanging lamps, industrial gray metal shades that each housed a single bulb, which were forever flickering and going out. More than once over the course of Will’s childhood, he’d gone into the shop to open it and flipped the switches only to havenoneof the lights turn on, which, depending on the cause, typically triggered a tirade from his father about either the worthless, cheap lightbulbs or the worthless, cheap power company. And it had been all done in old, dark wood, anyway, the wood Bill Senior, the very first Bill Robertson, had used across the farm. Old Bill must’ve liked it; he’d repurposed a lot of it from an unused barn on the west end of the property, which was more of a ruin than anything else. Maybe the wood had been nice in the ’20s, or the ’50s, or whenever, but by the time Will was introduced to it, it seemed to actively absorb light and energy both, leaving anyone who spent too long within its presence tight-lipped, drawn.
But the market now is—God, are there more windows? There’s so much light, and the walls are—still wood, Will realizes, blinking, but much paler in color, and accented with white trim and…
Will stops dead in the center of the room, his mouth dropping open, immediately forgetting to track on the innumerable changes to the once-familiar space he’s standing in. None of itseems important anymore, because there is, impossibly, an honest-to-God Bill Robertson standing behind the counter.
It’s not Billhimself, of course; he’s in the ground, or at least Will certainly hopes he is, along with all his predecessors. The man doesn’t even look like Bill, or Old Bill, or Bill Senior—the Robertson men have thick, dark hair that only grows up and back, like Will’s, and long, rectangular faces, like Will’s, and heavy eyebrows that tend towards scowling over dark brown eyes, like Will’s. This man has dirty blond hair that hangs loose nearly to his chin, tucked casually behind his ears, and a square face, with the jaw to match, and deep green eyes that seem to sparkle with cheerfulness. He would never be mistaken for a Robertson, at least not by anyone with a basic understanding of a Punnett square.
And yet…somehow, intrinsically, Will knows that in the broad strokes, this man embodies everything a Bill Robertson is meant to represent. Unlike Will, he is tall and broad-chested, though admittedly not to the degree of either Will’s father or grandfather. Still, he wears his patched flannel shirt as though he earned every hole and fray, and it clings a little against the strain of his forearms. He looks like he doesn’t mind working up a sweat—he looks like someone Will wouldn’t mind working up a sweatwith—and,whoops, Will is veering wildly from center. The man looks…correct behind the counter, in a way Will never did. In a way that, if Will’s honest, even Bill never did—he was scowling more often than he wasn’t when he worked the shop floor, and this guy issmiling.
Oh, God, wait, correction: This guy is smilingat Will. It’s a warm, open, inviting smile, too, a smile that says, “I’m here to help.” Maybe he’s no Bill Robertson after all.
