Chapter 3 #2
“Yeah,” Will says, instead of any of that, and glances one last time back at the yellow door. “Yeah, that’s…that’s a good idea. I’ll take the weekend and think about him—that! It!”
“Sure,” Catherine says. She smiles in a way that Will thinks is meant to be winsome; it comes off slightly threatening.
“Just promise you won’t take too long, okay?
Monday’s fine, but like all great deals, this is a limited-time offer.
My client has put a lot of time and energy into making this happen, but they’re frustrated, Will, if I’m honest, and getting ready to cut ties.
They’ve made it clear to me that we can’t get things wrapped up by the twenty-fourth—that’s two weeks from Monday—well.
Let’s just say it would be a real disappointment to the people of this town, who are so excited about this opportunity. ”
Will swallows, a pit opening in the hollow of his stomach. He wants to sell—he came here to sell—but the idea of so much riding on his decision rankles. He’s always found he has more success making choices that are just for himself. Fewer chances, that way, of disappointing anyone.
“Noted,” Will says, ashamed of how thinly it comes out. Clearing his throat, he adds, tone firmer, “I’ll do my due diligence this weekend, ask around, and get back to you. All right?”
“Right, right, diligence, of course.” She’s looking at her phone. “You do that. My office will call you to set up the signing, okay?”
“I didn’t say I was ready to—” Will starts, but she’s already walking off towards her own rather nicer car, heels clacking again against the asphalt.
“Monday, honey, I’ve got a meeting!” she calls, even though she could not possibly have generated a meeting so quickly, and then she’s climbing into the sleek black sedan and speeding away in flagrant violation of the 15 mph—children playing signs around the parking lot.
Signs that, Will is realizing abruptly, and with an accompanying internal scare chord, he’s never seen before.
God, he has to get out of here. The whole place gives him the sickening sense of being in one of those dreams where everything is almost right until you realize it’s not .
It’s starting to make Will feel like he’s in the opening scenes of a horror movie.
He knows things have reached a point beyond rationality when he’s starting to expect the scarecrows to start hobbling towards him wielding chainsaws.
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 he was , and who cares if Will can still taste his uncannily, horribly, upsettingly perfect apple on his stupid treacherous tongue!
Who cares if being smiled at, and even scowled at, by that rude, unpleasant Adonis made Will’s mind dive directly for the gutter?
Will is hungry , 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 he wants it 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…this Casey Reeves .
He puts the car in gear; he drives away.
When he passes a fast-food restaurant, without noticing which one it is, he pulls into 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 any better .
In fact, if anything, it makes him feel worse , 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 just figures . 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 of bad will, 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 farm isn’t a ruin. Will scowls at a Need 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.
Was that the 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-headed almost-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 nowhere to go.
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.