Chapter 4
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 the street, 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 him had thought that Glenriver would stay the same, that the farm would 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 would prove 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 they shouldn’t exist, 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 the last 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, they still seem 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 the town; 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 practically think in 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 at all .
First of all, nearly everyone he asks assumes he’s asking out of attraction to 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. ”