Chapter 2 #4
When this had been his father’s place they’d sold apples in clear plastic bags, crowded up against one another and inevitably bruising.
It was cheapest, Bill said, even when Will tried to point out that the bruising led to rotting and the rotting spread from apple to apple and they’d lose less, waste less, if they tried another method.
Bill never wanted to hear it, and Will had given up after a while.
But the apples on this long, flat counter, separated out by variety, each type accompanied by a hand-painted sign describing its flavor and best uses, are not in bags. They’re in little cardboard boxes, separated out by layers of thin green foam, so that none of them are touching.
“A little overwhelmed by all the choices?” Casey asks; Will’s eyes jerk back up to his, startled, even though he could hardly have forgotten the other man was there. “I can give you a little breakdown, if you like.”
I’m already having a little breakdown, thanks so much . Will keeps this within himself by the skin of his teeth. Instead, although it isn’t much better in the scheme of things, he says, “Oh, no, uh. Thank you, but I actually—know a lot about apples. I’m, uh…an apple scientist.”
This time Casey’s smile breaks wide, spreading out into a huge grin. Will blinks at it, a little dazzled in spite of himself. “Sorry—you’re an apple scientist ?”
“I mean,” Will says hurriedly, suddenly painfully aware that “apple scientist” is not a real job, and he might as well have announced himself as a dog whisperer, or a psychic detective.
“I’m a—botanist, that’s what my degree is in and everything, but my work is focused on apples. Well. Mostly apples.”
Casey whistles. “Well, I call that lucky. Listen, in your professional opinion—how do the apples look? I’ve put a lot of work into them, but I wouldn’t call myself a professional, just a dedicated amateur with internet access; I’d love an academic assessment.”
Distantly, a little part of Will that has been honed through many nights at many bars, and many stern talkings-to from Selma, holds up a little sign.
The sign reads: William, you big idiot, this man might very well be flirting with you , in handwriting that, to give Will’s imagination credit, does look quite a lot like Selma’s.
As always, Will ignores it. He looks, instead, at the apples, his eyes skipping from McIntosh to Evercrisp to Winesap in increasing amazement. “They look… good .”
“Well, thanks,” Casey says; when Will glances up at him, slightly stricken, Casey flashes him another bright grin. “Diiiiidya…want one?”
God, it’s a good smile, an upsettingly, fracturingly good smile, and Will could look at it all day, except…
his gaze is drawn, helpless, back down to the apples.
They shouldn’t look good, is the thing. They should look like Robertson Family Farms apples, which are small and often underripe and sometimes mealy, or punishingly tasteless.
The big draw when Will was a kid hadn’t ever been the apples—it had been the bakery, and the hayrides, and the corn maze, the maple syrup and especially the cider, both the nonalcoholic kind that was essentially whole-grain apple juice and the harder, alcoholic stuff, which Bill brewed himself and sold out of the animal barn on Friday and Saturday nights.
Even inconsistently watered apples grown in soil with the wrong pH and nitrogen balance could make a decent enough cider, assuming you were willing to throw in enough sugar to cover the flavor gaps.
These apples, Will can tell immediately, were neither inconsistently watered nor grown in incorrectly balanced soil.
They are large and perfectly round and marred with neither bruises nor the unsettling pitting that’s evidence of beetles and worms. They look like apples that would come in—in—in one of those fancy fruit baskets Selma’s always bringing in around the holidays, where each individual piece of produce is wrapped up in several layers of tissue paper, and looks so perfect Will’s always almost afraid, before taking a bite, that he’ll find himself sinking his teeth into wax.
“Oh boy, maybe you really do need to eat something,” Casey says, laughing slightly.
“You’re staring at these apples like one of those cartoons, you know, where a wolf is looking at a bird and seeing a roast chicken dinner.
Here.” And in one long, fluid motion, he plucks an apple off the top of the nearest basket, tosses it into the air, picks up a paring knife from the counter while the apple is still falling , catches the apple, and lops off a single, perfect slice in two strokes so fast Will barely sees them.
Then he holds out the slice, balanced between his thumb and the blade of the knife, for Will to take.
Will takes it. He takes a bite. It’s a Pink Lady, his favorite stupid apple—he knows it immediately, the second it touches his tongue.
God, even here, when he’d been a kid, the Pink Ladies had been good—it was a newer apple then, only invented in the ’70s, but Old Bill had taken a liking to it and grafted the varietal onto some of the strongest trees.
They’d been small, but they’d been flavorful, crisp and sour and sweet, never disappointing like the Red Delicious or the McIntosh.
But this one… God help him, it might be the best-tasting apple Will’s ever had.
It’s sweet at first, so briefly it hardly counts, and then sour enough to pinch at the back of his cheeks, and then sweet again, rich and light, like an apology for being so sharp.
“And you grew this here ?” Will demands, when he’s eaten the whole slice without entirely meaning to and swallowed hard a few times. “Here on this farm?”
“Sure did,” Casey said. He looks a little pleased with himself now. “I gather it passes muster?”
“I…” Will says, his eyes flicking from the apple in Casey’s hand to Casey’s face. “I… You, I mean… How on earth did you fix the soil ? Did Bill do that? They shouldn’t… for them to look…and the taste . It had to have taken years !”
And Casey’s face…changes. Something shifts, nearly imperceptible and yet, somehow loud in the sudden quiet of the room. For a second, Will imagines he can hear the sound of a door slamming shut.
“I’m sorry,” Casey says, and his tone is guarded now, in a way it wasn’t a second ago. Suddenly, it’s familiar to Will, although he couldn’t quite say why. “What?”
Catherine Rose, naturally, chooses this moment to walk through the door.