He’d half expected these people would scream on seeing him, or treat him the way Casey did, when he figured out who Will was. But most of them don’t look twice at him, and those who do—the ones who recognize him—mostly blink, and then smile, and nod.
By the time Will has swallowed the last bite of his pie, and left a hearty tip for Mike and his staff, it’s 7:45 a.m. The shops will be open by the time Will makes it over to them, and he feels ready, with a full belly and a few less confrontational encounters, to start asking questions. He’s going to get to the bottom of this Casey Reeves situation once and for all, and after that, his conscience will be clear, and he can head back to Chicago, as planned.
And, well, sure, when Mike says, “Good to have you back, Will!” Will turns around and replies, “Good to be back, Mike.” Sure, he does that. But it’s just…polite, isn’t it? It doesn’t have to mean anything at all.
FOUR
It’s… an interesting morning.
Mike’s Diner is at the very top of the long, sloping hill that serves as Glenriver’s main drag, the appropriately named Main Street, running straight through the heart of the town. Will starts out by walking slowly down one side of its retail district, then back up the other, observing and peering into the windows of still-opening shops with interest. Some of the stores are the same as they were when Will was a child; Cardinal Bakery is still standing at the intersection of Main and First Streets, its cheerful red logo chalked onto the front window as it had been when he was a boy. It’s a lovingly painted version of the state bird, after which the bakery was half-named—it’s run by the Cardini family, whose matriarch had enjoyed the pun. His father’s favorite hardware store looks exactly as it did the last time Will remembers looking at it, down to the chipping paint on the sign. The bike shop where Will had handed over years of scrimped and saved allowances remains, too, as do the toy and candy stores he’d spent his childhood hungrily staring into, and the bookstore he’d lurked inside for much of his adolescence. And, of course, Gunderson’s Grocers stands at the far end of thestreet, so achingly familiar even after all these years that Will can hardly stand to look at it.
But there are new stores, too. A number of new stores. More new stores than, if Will is entirely honest, he feels should be allowed. He understands logically that Glenriver is not a snow globe, stilled forever in the moment Will last bothered to pick it up, turn it over, and give it a good shake; he knows, too, that life goes on, wherever you are, and whatever you’ve left behind. He’s built his life on knowing that—at the end of the day, it’s most of why he’d left this town in the first place. Will could have stayed in Glenriver, if what he’d wanted was to wither into a gnarled, unrecognizable version of himself, watching the years he could have spent thriving slip through his fingers the way apple blossoms always seem to float off on the wind all at once on the one day all season you’re not paying attention. But he had understood, achingly and horribly and too well for someone who had, at the time, been so young, that the time would pass either way. That whether he chose to submit to standing still or made the grueling effort to move, the world would continue to revolve around him, as it had around Will’s father, and Bill’s father before him. It had been that, more than anything, that had forced Will’s hand—more than he’d wanted to please his family, more even than he’d wanted to live up to his name, Will had abhorred the thought of watching his life pass him by without his ever once getting what he wanted from it.
And yet…God. Will supposes some part of himhadthought that Glenriver would stay the same, that thefarmwould stay the same, preserved in life just as in the thick, clouded amber of his memories. Some small, stupid part of him, not subject to the rules of logic or the rigors of adulthood, had held onto Glenriver as he’d left it, marked it down as a sure, immovable thing. If someone had asked him yesterday, he would have described the town as perhaps slightly cursed and certainly utterly unchangeable, a fixed constant even when you wished it wouldprove itself capable of a bit of growth, small and uninspired and stifling.
But, much like Robertson Family Farms, the little town of Glenriver seems to be committed to showing Will its good side this weekend. The new stores—a clothing boutique, a Thai restaurant, a coffee shop, and a place called Lucas Ice Cream, which has a sign in the window that reads,Soup season—no ice cream. Soup! Soup! Soup!—are all places that Will thinks he’d enjoy shopping in. And, to his surprise and amazement, a number of the stores, new and old, have little queer pride flag decals in the window.
It’s not that Glenriver had been anti-queer when Will was growing up, exactly. That wouldn’t be characterizing it quite right. It was more that, at least in this part of Ohio in the ’90s and early 2000s, queer people were like…elephants. Everyone vaguely knew that they existed, if somewhere far away and rarely thought of, and no one would ever have said that theyshouldn’texist, at least not out loud. In the right context, an elephant could be quite interesting, after all. But if one were to show up in the town square, or otherwise announce themselves to the populace, well. People would have every right to find that a little dangerous, wouldn’t they? An elephant on a rampage in the innocent town of Glenriver, where people were trying to live quiet, normal lives? This simply wasn’t the place for one of those—they’d be better off in a different environment, with more of their own kind. Certainly, no one would ever have considered putting signs in their windows that said,Elephants welcome, or otherwise done anything to indicate they were open to the possibility of inviting them into the community. If nothing else, their neighbors would have had something to say about it.
But it seems this, like the selection of shops, and the height of the Glen River in October, and so many other little, inconsequential details that Will has lost count, has changed since thelast time he visited. As he completes his first circuit and starts venturing into stores one after another, he’s surprised and then oddly touched to see a number of clearly queer people, in singles and couples, popping in and out of the various buildings, chatting and laughing and waving hellos to their friends and neighbors like everyone else. It’s almost unmooring, and Will wanders in and out of several establishments before he remembers that he came here with a purpose in mind.
Nobody recognizes him at the bike shop, or the hardware store, or any of the other places Will stops by. He recognizes a few of them, but over fifteen years on and not expecting to see him, he catches a few assessing glances, nothing more. Will’s glad—it’s easier to strike up conversations as a random stranger, and then pepper in the fact that he’s an interested party in the sale, than it is to explain exactly who he is and how he’s involved. Feeling a bit like a spy in one of those novels he used to read in college when he was supposed to be covering great works of literature, he asks each person he talks to, working his way subtly up to the topic, for their thoughts on the Nimbletainment Corporation and the Glenriver Shiver. Only then, as carefully and neutrally as he possibly can, does he turn the topic to Casey Reeves.
It’s…well, it’s an odd little series of conversations, if Will’s going to be honest with himself about it. Everyone Will talks to is chipper and friendly right until the point Nimbletainment comes up; after that, theystillseem chipper and friendly, but in a more brittle way. Will gets the sense, in each successive chat, that the person he’s talking to is choosing their words very carefully, not wanting to take a step out of line and into dangerous territory.
But those words they do choose are fairly consistent. They’re grateful for the Shiver and Nimbletainment; the traffic from festival week covers a huge portion of their sales every year; expansion of the festival can only bring good things for thetown; they’re personally invested in seeing it through. That last part they all say more or less exactly that way—personally invested in seeing it through—and Will chews on that as he walks from store to store to repeat his little data-gathering exercise again and again. He wonders if it’s a slogan Catherine Rose, who must practicallythinkin them, attached to the project to convince people to get on board, or if it means something deeper, more literal. It’s the kind of thing Selma would probably know how to find out, and he puts a pin in it for when he can next face talking to her properly.
And on Casey Reeves… Well. Will’s not sure how to parse those answers atall.
First of all, nearly everyone he asks assumes he’s asking out ofattractionto the man, which is deeply mortifying. Will stumbles through a furious, flaming-cheeked protest three times before it occurs to him that the way people are bringing it up is more informative than it is personal. They all say things like, “You wouldn’t be the first to go sniffing around that tree,” and, “Oh, Lord, you too? Seems like everyone who goes through that farm comes out with an eye on snagging him. I wouldn’t hold your breath, though; in all the years he’s been living here, no one’s ever seen him out with anyone.”
There is—Will begins to gather as he progresses through his visits—a somewhat fervid tone to the gossip about Casey’s love life, as though he has been elevated to the status of local celebrity on merit of, as best Will can tell, a mixture of sheer mystery and raw animal magnetism. Finding clues to the man’s preferences and passions appears to have become the town’s collective crossword puzzle, and Will gets the sense some of them are beginning to lose track of the objective line. Noah Anderson at the bike shop, who Will recognizes from the years he used to work at the town’s since-shuttered video store, clearly doesn’t remember him at all, but he still does not hesitate to lay out in great detail an incident the previous summer where hesaw someone whomighthave been Casey across the room at a gay bar in Columbus. All Will had said to prompt Noah’s telling him this story was, “Hey, so, I met this guy Casey? Up at the farm?” But the man tells it with confidence, as though he’s told it many times before to many rapt listeners, who all filed the information away with great interest to consider at length later.
Will, of course, does listen raptly and file the information away with great interest to consider at length later, but he feels a little guilty about it. Or, at least, he does until he remembers that hehatesCasey, who is ahorrificperson, to whom he owes nothing at all. Then Will feels fine. Perfectly, utterly fine.
Anyway, in all cases, the conversation stays weird even after Will forcibly turns things away from such topics as, “Well,Iheard he doesn’t date because he has a secret family in Iowa,” and “I swear half the traffic to that farm in the summer is folks hoping to see him out working with his shirt off. It’s disgraceful, really, what young people get up to!” Once he’s established that he is, in fact, asking business questions, for business reasons, and is simply looking for a character read in the context of the Nimbletainment deal, the tone shifts every single time. Half of them say, “Oh, well, Casey’s the best,” or “His personality, you mean? Nicest guy in the world, real helpful,” or something along those lines before their faces freeze. The other half freeze up straight away, looking at Will as though he has caught them in a trap. And eventually, one by one, they all come up with similar, very careful responses: Casey’s passionate, but misguided. Casey means well, but he’s got the wrong end of the stick here. Casey’s heart is in the right place, but he should learn when to leave well enough alone. Casey’s doing the best he can in a tough situation, but unless something changes, we might all be better off if he lets the whole thing go.
That last one Will hears from old Mrs. Cardini, who had seemed ancient even when Will was a child and now seems tohave shrunken down into the oldest and most essential version of herself. She’s not working the bakery counter, just sitting at the table in the back holding court, but shedoesrecognize Will when he comes in, gimlet-eyed old woman that she is. She cackles, and invites him to sit, and answers his questions as the rest of them did, but with a sharp gleam in her eye that seems to be entreating Will to understand what she’s not saying.
Unfortunately, the unspoken request alone is not itself a cipher key, so Will’s left turning her words over and over in his head as he walks up the road, eating a blueberry streusel muffin Mrs. Cardini had insisted he take, on the house. Unlesswhatchanges? What will happen if Caseydoesn’tlet it go? He’d tried asking Mrs. Cardini, but she’d clammed up immediately and started pushing pastry on him, so Will had no choice but to leave it for now.
There’s something here, though, some thread of this he’s not understanding, or being told, or both. Will doesn’t like it. He’s never enjoyed the sensation that there’s some critical piece of information floating around outside his field of vision—that sort of thing will often tend to crash into him from behind at the worst possible moment if he doesn’t keep an eye on it.
He stops, warily, outside of Gunderson’s.
If Robertson Family Farms was the backdrop of most of Will’s bad childhood memories, then this grocery store and the rambling, spacious apartment above it were the backdrop for most of his good ones. Will had been born only three days before Meredith Gunderson, the third of six Gunderson siblings, and they’d become fast friends in elementary school. When Will could get away from the farm—a little easier to do, he found, with each passing year—he was often at the Gundersons’ apartment or messing around with Mere in the back room of the store. Her parents had been cheerful and kind and permissive, and Nancy, her mother, had always heaped an extrahelping of whatever they were having onto Will’s plate when he stayed for supper.
Once, when Will had been about eleven, he’d dropped a plate while setting the table for dinner. He’d panicked immediately, almost hyperventilating, knowing in his own house a mistake like that would set someone off on a tear. Nancy had stared at him and then she’d nodded, and then she’d picked up another plate, grabbed Will by the wrist, and pulled him out onto their back patio. Making direct eye contact with him, she’d held the plate up in the air, shrugged, and dropped it, not blinking or flinching when it shattered across the ground. “It doesn’t matter,” she’d said, “okay? They’re only dishes.” Will had just nodded, wide-eyed and solemn, and helped her clean it up, and that night when Nancy dropped him off, she’d asked Will to wait in the car for a minute. He’d watched, confused and more than a little afraid, as Nancy spoke to his mother, hard-faced and gesturing emphatically, for several minutes before coming back and sending him inside.
Nothing had really changed in Will’s house after that—all June had said was, “Stop being such a nervous nelly, you’re making people think we treat you bad”—but he’d never forgotten it, either. The flash of anger in Nancy’s eyes as she said good night to him, the way she always offered him a hug before she sent him off home, had sat in the pit of his stomach, an anchoring weight, all through his childhood. It still sits there even now, as he stares up at the semi-familiar facade of the store, updated and repainted over the years, but still the same in the essentials.
He’d never called Meredith, after he left. Never written, never stopped by. She’d been the first person he ever came out to, a gawky teen out of place everywhere but in her living room, and she’d been surprised but sweet about it, kind and discreet where she could have been cruel. He’d owed it to her, probably,to give her an explanation, but he just…couldn’t seem to face it, not at the time, and the longer he waited, the harder it got.
But Nancy had been there, at June’s funeral. She’d come into the service late, like Will did, and stood in the back, like Will did, and about halfway through, she’d shuffled up next to Will and taken his hand. She hadn’t said anything; she hadn’t needed to. Her hand had been as cool and dry as Will’s eyes, but for all he held his composure, he couldn’t quite bring himself to let go. For an hour, they stood like that, and then she’d walked with him out to his car, and given him a brief, firm hug, like she used to when he was young. “You take care of yourself,” she’d said, which was a simple kindness. A platitude. But it was the closest he came to crying that whole stupid day, sitting there in his car with his throat catching as she walked off into the fog.
Will takes a breath. It’s just a store. He’ll go in, and if he sees Mere, great, and if he doesn’t, great. It doesn’t have to be a whole thing; he’s alreadyhere, right in front of the place, with a question he needs to ask of whoever happens to be in charge these days. It might not even be Meredith—in fact, it probably isn’t. One of the other Gunderson siblings had probably stepped in when Jake and Nancy retired, if they even have retired, and it will be one of them Will has to face. Or, better yet, it’ll be some member of staff. He needs to go in, and find out what’s what, instead of standing out dithering his way into a panic attack. That, as he knows all too well, will not help anyone.
He goes inside. The storesmellsas he remembers it, of smoked meat and fresh herbs and rich, earthy spices, all balanced against the sweet, perfumey notes of the floral section up front. He takes a huge lungful of air and feels transported back in time as he weaves through the aisles, hardly seeing the product on the shelves. And then he steps up to the information desk, and Jamie Gunderson is standing there, preserved in time,not a day older than the fourteen-year-old he was when Will last saw him standing here, more than a decade ago.
