Chapter 3
THREE
“Will!” Catherine calls, her heels clacking against the lacquered hardwood floor. “ There you are, I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”
“You told me to come in here,” Will points out; Catherine doesn’t seem to hear him.
“Well, nothing to be done about it now. I see you’ve met the—oh, whatever you are,” Catherine says, waving a dismissive hand at Casey. “Assistant shop manager, wasn’t it? Not that it matters for much longer, I suppose.”
“I’m the general manager, actually,” Casey says, tightly.
“Of the entire farm. Not that it matters for much longer, I suppose.” He turns to Will, and now his eyes are hard.
“So you must be Will Robertson, the class act who couldn’t be bothered to bury his own father.
And yet, somehow you found the time to come back here and sell the land, huh?
In your busy life as an apple scientist? Funny how that works.”
Suddenly, Will recognizes Casey’s voice; now that it’s shot through with annoyance and resentment and disgust, it pulls him instantly back to the night he first heard it.
Forgetting the weeks of guilt afterward, forgetting the way he’d tried to call the number back to apologize, Will feels his own lip curl up in irritation as he snarls, “Oh my God, and you must be the jerk who called to tell me my father was dead and then lectured me about not wanting to know enough?—”
“Well,” Casey exclaims, both his hands flexing in frustration, “maybe you didn’t! Maybe I thought someone ought to tell you what the right thing to do was, since you obviously couldn’t work it out for yourself?—”
“How dare you,” Will gasps, reeling back a step, feeling the blood drain from his face.
He’s never been the sort of person to say things like, “How dare you,” or “Who do you think you are,” or other dramatic lines from glamorous old movies.
It just…isn’t necessary, he’s found, in life, where people are mostly a little dim and a little grating and a little unpleasant, and it’s best to grit one’s teeth and get on with things.
But something about this man, in this place, while Will is tired and hungry and on edge—the words pour out of him before he can stop himself, before he can think of containing them.
“How dare you say that to me! What on earth could you possibly know about it? You think, what—you think working here gives you the right to tell me what the best thing to do was? After the death of my own father ? I don’t think ‘Hello, just wanted to let you know you’re an orphan and, also, a terrible person, goodbye,’ gives you the moral high ground here! ”
“You’re the one who hung up,” Casey snaps, flushing. “I wanted you to consider the possibility that you owed it to the old man to?—”
“Oh, who do you think you are!” This comes out louder than Will means it to, loud enough that there’s absolutely no way to play it cool and conceal how upset he’s allowed himself to become, so he has no choice but to jut his chin and stand behind it, as though it was intentional.
“I think I’m the person who fixed the soil!
” Casey yells back, throwing his hands in the air.
“You said it must have taken years! Well, it did ! Six years I’ve poured into this place while you were off, I don’t know, studying some other apples, and now you’re going to let these vultures come in and?—”
“Boys, boys,” Catherine says, one of her hands settling in a firm grip on Will’s shoulder again, pulling him slightly back. “I think that’s enough of that, don’t you? We’re all friends here, right? We all want what’s best for the lovely little town of Glendale?—”
“Glenriver,” Will and Casey snap together, and then glare at each other.
“Glenriver, right, right, I misspoke,” Catherine says, waving a hand. “But we’re all on the same team, is my point.”
“I’m not interested in being on any team with either of you,” Casey snaps, folding his arms across his chest. “And I’m not interested in helping you, either.
Technically, I can’t make the owner ”—he says this word as though it’s poisonous—“get off the property, but I have the right to refuse service to anyone .”
“Oh, fine,” Catherine says, as though not remotely bothered by this hostility from a man who had, until about five minutes ago, seemed to be the embodiment of good-natured ease. “Be like that, if you insist. We have other things to do, after all. Come along, Will.”
“I’m not a dog,” Will snarls, still glaring at Casey. Casey is still glaring back, and for some reason, suddenly, Will can’t bear the thought of letting him win this particular contest.
But then, even as she’s saying, “Of course you’re not,” Catherine is dragging him backwards by the shoulder.
This particular move is so reminiscent of Will’s own mother that he jerks and twists away on sheer instinct, breaking eye contact with Casey after all.
He does catch Casey’s eye again, very briefly, as he’s turning back towards the door, and for a second there’s something startled, almost knowing, in the expression.
Then it shutters and closes again, and Will scowls at him as he turns away, not dropping the expression even once they’re outside.
“What was that?” he demands, when he’s slammed the yellow door shut with a ringing finality that reminds him of his father and, as such, immediately shames him. He ignores this and plows ahead: “You said the whole town was behind this! That there was unanimous support!”
“There is unanimous support,” Catherine says, in a tone that she clearly means to be soothing but sets Will’s teeth on edge. “There’s just one or two holdouts, that’s all.”
“That’s not unanimous support,” Will hisses furiously, as she hurries him over to the parking lot.
He hisses it because if he doesn’t hiss it, he will absolutely shout it, and he can’t go reminding himself of his dad twice in one minute.
“Unanimous means everyone , it’s from the Latin—it basically is the Latin—for one mind .
That means everyone agrees , Catherine! That’s what it means! ”
“Everyone does agree,” Catherine says, again in that entirely unsoothing tone.
It’s the heavy peppering of condescension, Will thinks, that makes it so grating.
“Casey Reeves is—well, he’s a disgruntled employee, to tell you the truth.
Rumor has it he was running some kind of long con on your father, trying to get him to hand over the farm.
Who can say if that’s true, of course.” Her tone now suggests that she could say, if she wanted to, and if she wanted to, she’d say that it was true, but she wouldn’t want to ruffle any feathers.
God , Will wishes Selma was here; he’s not built for all this, confronting his past and arguing with horrible, beautiful men and wrangling these weird, passive-aggressive business conversations.
It turns out what he would really like is to be alone in his apartment in Chicago for between twelve and seventy-two hours while Selma just… makes all of this go away.
“Kinda wish he’d succeeded,” Will mutters, glancing over at his underwhelming rental car.
“He has a lot of nerve to tell me what a terrible son I am, or whatever. Is he always so…” Hot?
Frustrating? Infuriating? Deeply in need of having a pie thrown in his face?
Devastatingly, excruciatingly hot? “…unpleasant?”
“He certainly has been every time I’ve encountered him,” Catherine says, shrugging, “but you never can tell down here in the sticks.” Will bristles reflexively; she doesn’t seem to notice.
“ You know, right? You got out—Chicago’s a fun city, but I like the speed in Cleveland better, personally.
But I grew up in a little backwater like this, too, and I swear, it does something to these people.
You can’t take it personally, you know; he’s angry his little scheme didn’t work out, that’s all.
He’ll probably try to run it on you next.
You should go downtown while you’re here, talk to some of the locals.
You’ll see—people want this for Glenriver.
When the Shiver blows up, it’s going to put this little town on the map. ”
“Hm,” Will says, chewing the inside of his lip.
Crazily, there’s a part of him that wants to spin around and march right back into that market and keep fighting , which is just…
Why? Will has proven over the years that he is neither a lover nor a fighter.
He is, if he’s anything, a flight risk; in the face of confrontation or conflict, he has the marked tendency to bolt.
“ Listen ,” Catherine says, reaching out again to pat Will on the shoulder.
Will’s flinch this time must be excruciatingly noticeable, because even Catherine picks up on it; she pauses with her hand in midair for a bare second and then smooths it up over her own hair, as though this had always been her plan.
“Why don’t we pick this back up on Monday?
You can take the weekend to think about it.
I could show you the rest of the property, but you do, after all, already know it.
You take the afternoon instead, go check in to that hotel—it’s not close, you know.
If I’d put you close, you’d be staying in the Motel 6 you passed on the highway on the way here. ”
Will doesn’t care at all for this woman’s casual classism, the way she seems to dismiss this town that Will had—well, yes, okay, she did have a point about him getting out.
Will had dismissed it, too. But it had been Will’s right to dismiss it; he’d been young and alone and badly hurt and—and none of that is relevant to the truth that, in spite of himself, he’s quite glad he doesn’t have to stay in that particular Motel 6.
It’s not a place he’s ever, even once in his life, passed as either a driver or a passenger and thought, It looks like nice things happen in there.