Chapter 2 #3
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 a cheerful little sign, and not cheerful the way Catherine 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 have none of 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 it seems important anymore, because there is, impossibly, an honest-to-God Bill Robertson standing behind the counter.
It’s not Bill himself , 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 sweat with— 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 is smiling .
Oh, God, wait, correction: This guy is smiling at 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.
“Hi,” the man says. He tilts his head a little, and, his smile going smaller and more amused as he meets Will’s eyes, adds, “You look lost. Were you hoping to buy something, maybe? The apples are up here, and if you go through that door and around the corner, Glenda can help you with the baked goods.”
Who on earth is Glenda? Will doesn’t say this—probably Glenda is some teenager who will work the counter until she gets bored or won’t put up with the abuse anymore; that’s how it always was when he was a kid.
“Uh, no baked goods,” Will says slowly. He takes a few hesitant steps forward, almost as if he’s in a dream.
As he gets closer, he realizes the man is wearing a nametag in the shape of a tree; under the roots, the name Casey is written in a hand that matches the sign on the door.
“I’m sure they’re great, I’m just—realizing I haven’t had a ton to eat today.
Probably better to have a meal before I eat a bunch of sweets.
” He could strangle himself—why did he say that?
What possible reason could this man have for wanting to know that?
But for some reason, the man—Casey, apparently—continues to smile in response to this.
If anything, the expression seems to deepen slightly, crinkling his eyes at the corners.
Will notices, his mouth going a little dry, that his flannel shirt seems to shift with the man’s slightest movement, as though the muscles beneath are moments from escaping containment.
“I see. In that case, it’s an apple you want—nice healthy choice, right?
That’s here at this counter. Step right up. ”
Will releases, very belatedly, that he is still standing more or less in the center of the room, an accidental island in the sparsely populated waters of the shop.
He’d taken a few hesitant steps forward and just…
stopped, again, standing immobile as other customers moved around him, transfixed by this person who he’s half-convinced is a hallucination his stress-addled mind is using to conceal from him the fact that he has finally snapped.
Hurriedly, he strides up to the counter, where he stops again and looks down, blinking.