Resolutely, he turns his focus away from the yellow door and the market and the fences and the signs and everything,all of it, because he, Will, has had enough. He’s had enough! Who cares that there’s some stupid hot guy working behind the counter of the shop! Who cares if he liked Will at first until he realized who hewas, and who cares if Will can still taste his uncannily, horribly,upsettinglyperfect apple on his stupid treacherous tongue! Who cares if being smiled at, and evenscowledat, by that rude, unpleasant Adonis made Will’s mind dive directly for the gutter? Will ishungry, is all, and wound so tightly now as to be nearly at a snapping point, at risk of leaving shrapnel all across these more or less innocent fields. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to matter, unless hewantsit to, which, obviously, he doesn’t. He’s going to get some food, is what he’s going to do. Once he’s eaten, he’ll see, as he usually does, that most things aren’t worth feeling upset, or angry, or anything much at all over, and certainly not this…this…thisCasey Reeves.
He puts the car in gear; he drives away. When he passes a fast-food restaurant, without noticing which one it is, he pullsinto line, orders a burger and fries, and mechanically eats as he follows the GPS’s guidance to the hotel. It’s a bleak, unsatisfying meal, and while it does make Will feel a bit less shaky down in the marrow of himself, it doesn’t make him feel anybetter. In fact, if anything, it makes him feelworse, each empty bite seeming to land on the smoking pile of coals at the pit of his stomach, catch along the edges, and then go up in flames entirely. By the time he’s swallowed his last fry, the conflagration in his chest is in danger of burning him down.
It figures, Will thinks, as he drives what turns out to be nearly forty minutes to a business-class hotel in an Akron suburb, that Bill did this. It justfigures. Somehow, from beyond the grave, Will’s unbearable jerk of a father has managed to build a Will-specific torture device, a diabolical trap set to ensure maximum suffering. Will’s wondered for weeks now why Bill did it, left him the farm after all that talk about how he was turning away from his family and dooming the entire Robertson name and unfit to call himself Bill’s son, after well over a decade of total radio silence; in his weaker and more self-punishing moments, he’d allowed himself to imagine that maybe it was a goodwill gesture, if more or less the definition of “too little, too late.” He’d allowed himself to at least consider the possibility that time and age and sixteen years to reflect had moved the man, or, at very least, inched him a little to the left.
But now that he’s met Casey—now that he’s seen, in Casey’s eyes and expression and tone of voice and general, utter rejection of Will, what impression of him Bill must have given—Will understands what’s happened here. It’s as he suspected in his more rational moments: Bill left him the farm as a gesture ofbadwill, one last twist of the knife. He’d wanted to force Will to come back one final time and look at it, the mess he’d created by leaving, the ruin of Robertson Family Farms, and he’d even found a strapping young man to play the part of the person Will was supposed to be.
Except…except the farmisn’ta ruin. Will scowls at aNeed to close? Call Catherine Rose!billboard as he passes it, trying to square this disquieting fact with the rest of the sharp, angry story he’s woven for himself. Will’s not being here hadn’t left a mess. In fact, as far as Will can tell, the whole place is in better condition than it has been in at least thirty-five years. Wasthatthe twist of the knife, then? That someone else had come in and done it better than Will ever could have? Surely not; Bill wasn’t that conceptual a thinker. He had trouble working up a plan to clear a field for planting, much less set a complicated emotional trap for a person he never knew as an adult.
Abruptly, Will is exhausted, aching down to his bones with the desire to be asleep. He left his apartment before dawn this morning, since Catherine insisted she couldn’t meet any later than noon, and the drive from Chicago was more than six hours; it must be catching up to him now. It’s only 5:30 p.m., but when Will reaches his hotel, he checks in without processing much of the conversation, wanders around until he finds the room that corresponds with the number on his key, and lets himself inside. He collapses on top of the covers, his shoes still on, and falls unceremoniously asleep, his head only half on the pillow.
When he wakes up, jolting as though he’s been shocked, it’s 2:30 a.m. This is incredibly disorienting for several reasons: The first is that Will typically goes to bed at 10 p.m., falls asleep at 11 p.m., wakes up briefly around 1 a.m. and then again around 4 a.m., before finally admitting defeat and opening his eyes for good around seven. He wasn’t always this way, but ever since his thirtieth birthday, his body has largely refused to offer him the long, blissful stretches of unconsciousness with which he used to while away particularly unpleasant hours. So to wake up in an unfamiliar hotel room, on top of the covers, still dressed in yesterday’s clothes and shoes, with a crick in his neck from the angle of his head on the pillow and the fuzzy-headedalmost-hangover of long, uninterrupted sleep, is…disquieting, to say the least. For a slow, unhappy moment, he runs through possibilities of how he got here and dismisses them quickly—who would drug and kidnap him, for example, and for what possible ransom?—before the events of the previous day fall into his head in one huge, unbroken block, like a brick plummeting from a high-rise.
Will groans, rolling onto his back, and throws a hand over his eyes. Then, feeling silly and overdramatic, even alone and unobserved in his hotel room, he gets up and gets re-dressed to go…well…nowhere. This is because he realizes, as he pulls his shoes back on, that there’s nowheretogo. At 2:30 a.m. in Chicago, the bars would be closed, but Will could still go out and get a hot dog, or a cheesesteak, or what would admittedly probably be a slightly odd selection of items from the nearest all-night grocery store. But in this part of the country, the world is truly quiet in the small hours of the morning, nothing open and no one about, nothing to do but listen to the crickets sing and the owls trill, the occasional haunting scream of a fox.
Remembering that this room is on Catherine Rose’s tab, Will selects a bag of M&Ms from the minibar and rips it open. He eats them all, one by one, as he paces around the room, thinking.
The thing is…the thing is…the thing is that it’s notright,for Casey to have acted like that. It’s notfair. That’s why Will can’t get over it, is ruminating on it angrily as he stomps around shoving M&Ms into his mouth; it’s not for any other reason. Itcertainlyhas nothing to do with Casey’s chiseled face, or his well-muscled chest, or his broad, long-fingered hands, or any dreams Will might have had about any of those things! It’s because Will has a sense of justice and decency, that’s what it is, and Casey’s out here—out hereassumingthings, about people and events, assuming he knows what he’s talking about when hedoesn’t. Will is the one who knows what he’s talking about!Willis the one who had to grow up on that farm, up to his eyeballs in other people’s problems and expectations and failings, never an inch of room for him to be himself. Theaudacityof Casey to suggest he knew a single thing about it, that’s what’s stuck in Will’s craw. The audacity, and nothing else.
Will spends the next few hours iterating new variations of essentially this same thought, in a dizzying assortment of different configurations. Casey’s audacity is the problem, until it’s his rudeness, until it’s his stupid smug face, until it’s his audacity again; then it’s righteous indignation on behalf of Will’s father, which admittedly he can’t sustain; then it’s righteous anger on behalf of the town, which feels like it has more of a foothold. It’s—yes—Will is simply, out ofconcernforGlenriver, offended that Casey would—would have theaudacity, oh, it’s all coming together now—to be so rude about something that will benefit the community! With his stupid smug face! There it is, the unifying theory of “Why Casey Doesn’t Merit Another Moment of Will’s Thought,” packaged up nice and neatly. No reason to think about it any further at all.
Unfortunately, by the time Will draws this conclusion, it’s only 4:24 a.m. Groaning, he allows himself to look at his phone for the first time in about sixteen hours; there are an absurd number of missed calls and messages, but they’re nearly all from Selma. Will, honor bound by a pact of more than a decade that he’s fairly certain Selma doesn’t hold up her end of, dutifully deletes every voicemail left between 11:45 p.m. and 4 a.m. without listening to them. There are, however, enough of them that he winces, and when he scrolls through the messages, he sees that Selma seems to have played out several stages of grief in a one-sided argument, cycling through anger and bargaining and back to anger and then briefly to depression before landing, grudgingly, on acceptance: The last message says:
Proof of life, please, you incredibly stressful bastard. I will send a Marine if I don’t hear from you by 0800.
Will chews on the inside of his lip, weighing his options, before finally he types:
Hi, I’m alive. Sorry to vanish on you—it’s all kind of a lot. Not trying to be a stressful bastard; you really don’t have to worry about me. All under control here. Please don’t send a Marine if by “a Marine,” you mean “your brother, Vaughn,” you know how I feel about Vaughn. If it’s a different, hotter Marine, though, feel free.
He sends it before he can think better of it, before his treacherous thumbs add something dangerously true, like,I wish I’d asked you to come with me, or,I met this really hot guy, but we became Mortal Enemies before I could figure out if he was flirting with me, do you have a solve for that?or,Turns out I’m a little more cut up about this whole thing than I expected, ha ha, I know you love being right.Then he silences his notifications and shoves his phone deep into the pocket of his jeans, and, feeling obliquely as though he’s being chased, picks up the keys to his rental car and quits his hotel for the parking lot.
The lack of sleep has taken a toll. Will drops the keys when he climbs into the car, and dawn hasn’t quite found it in herself to stretch her first rays of weak, wakeful light into the sky. It’s so dark he has to turn on the overhead light to search for them, not that it helps; it barely casts any light at all, and in the end, Will has to pat around for the keys under the seat, unearthing several receipts the previous driver must have lodged there in the process.
Will starts driving not entirely sure where he’s going, just turns on the radio to the old country station and starts down theroad, singing along tunelessly to songs by Garth Brooks and Charlie Daniels he hasn’t heard in years. He’s not that surprised, though, when between the aggressively and unsettlingly watchful eyes of Catherine Rose, he finds himself zipping past landmarks on the way to Glenriver. A little part of him has been here on this road all these years, left behind after one drive too many, stretched out thin between the double yellow lane lines. He’s dreamed the last stretch of the trip, off the highway and down the long, winding road to the bridge, so many times that when he finally reaches it he feels tingly and barely awake, as though any moment he’s going to blink and find himself back in his hotel room, face still half-pressed against his pillow.
As he did yesterday, Will pulls off the road before crossing the Glen River, but unlike yesterday, this time he gets out of the car and walks up to the barrier separating road from riverbank and hops up onto it. For about ten minutes he sits there, watching the water flow, fast and churning, brown with disturbed sediment, and oddly high for the time of year. Or, at least, it would have been, once up a time; Will supposes he wouldn’t know anymore. Maybe this is perfectly normal for October these days. It’s not as though anyone would have told him if it wasn’t.
Despite this sour note, it’s peaceful, sitting next to the water. It puts Will in a reflective state of mind, and then a determined one. If he wants to know whether or not Casey had any right to say those things to him—more importantly, he wants to know whether or not the town will benefit from the sale of the farm—well, then all he has to do is follow through on Catherine’s suggestion andask the townspeople. He’s here, isn’t he? If he thinks about it, that’s probably exactly what he came here today to do. That, and nothing else.
It’s too early, though, to go visiting businesses and knocking on doors—most businesses, anyway. Abruptly, it occurs to Willthat there’s one place he could go, and he finds to his surprise that he’s smiling slightly as he hops off the barrier. He gets back into his rental car and drives it over the bridge, and it’s only a few minutes down the road to Mike’s Diner. The original Mike had died some generations back, but the current Mike—the fourth or fifth in a row, Will can’t remember now—keeps the same eye-wateringly early hours as his forefathers. He’d been in school with Will, a few years older, and once or twice they’d shared the strange confidences of two young men born into names and fates they wouldn’t necessarily have chosen for themselves.
Still, though, Will had congratulated Mike on social media when he’d taken over the diner a few years ago, and when Will walks in this morning, though Mike’s eyes widen briefly behind the counter, the expression settles into a smile as he says, “Will. Good to see you; I was sorry to hear about your old man.”
Will bites back,I wasn’t, thinking mostly of the disgust on Casey’s face and, if he’s honest, hating himself a little for it. Instead, he says, “Oh, thanks. It—he—well, you know how it is, with family.” He has to forcibly contain a sigh at falling back on this particular chestnut, the sort of Midwestern classic he’s heard trotted out over the years to cover a horrific multitude of sins.
But, as expected, it makes Mike break out in a sympathetic grin, shake his head. “Boy, do I ever. Listen, you take a seat wherever you like, okay? I’ll have someone bring you some coffee—you know what you’re getting?”
For all it’s been more than a decade, Will could still recite the menu at Mike’s Diner after several drinks, long after he’d lost track of saying the alphabet backwards or reeling off all the Latin names for the various species of apple. It’s not a menu that’s subject to change—classic diner staples, all day breakfast and overstuffed deli sandwiches, an ever-present meatloaf special and a rotating selection of pie. As a child, Will’s orderhad always been two eggs and hash browns, because his father had always said he was allowed to order two eggs and hash browns; he’s opening his mouth to ask for it before he remembers that he’s anadult, with his own money and no one’s preferences to cater to but his own, and smiles.
“I will have the Daybreak Special,” Will says, relishing the words as they fall out of his mouth. “With sausage links, and fried eggs, and buttered rye toast, please. And—you guys got pie yet this morning?”
“You know it,” Mike says, his grin a bright, brief slash across his face. “Blackberry today; it’s excellent, if I do say so myself.”
“A slice of pie, too, then,” Will says, with a firm nod. “And a big mug of coffee, whenever you can—I’m not awake enough to eat all that yet.”
Mike laughs, and nods, and waves him off, and Will settles in, after a moment of hesitation, at the booth in the far corner his father always used to choose. Bill had liked it because it afforded him a view of the whole place, allowed him the chance to people-watch in glowering silence; Will, on the other side of the booth, had only been given the opportunity to watch him. His stony face had not changed much in eighteen years of observation, becoming more weathered and wearied, perhaps, but never any softer.
Today, he sits in what he still can’t help but think of as Bill’s seat, sips his coffee when a waiter runs it over, and watches Glenriver wake up. His breakfast, when it comes, is hot and greasy and too much; he eats about half of it, then lingers over the pie, savoring each sweet-tart bite against his tongue, as the diner fills up with people. There are parents and children, single diners on their harried ways to work, sharply dressed office professionals and people clearly on their way to a more outdoor-oriented job. Will finds himself flush with a sudden understanding of his father’s distant, vacant stare on those mornings they breakfasted here together—Will has to give it tohim, it’s pretty interesting. Will himself doesn’t think he’d find it more interesting than, for example, his own child, but still, he can see the appeal.
