Chapter 4 #2
There is—Will begins to gather as he progresses through his visits—a somewhat fervid tone to the gossip about Casey’s love life, as though he has been elevated to the status of local celebrity on merit of, as best Will can tell, a mixture of sheer mystery and raw animal magnetism.
Finding clues to the man’s preferences and passions appears to have become the town’s collective crossword puzzle, and Will gets the sense some of them are beginning to lose track of the objective line.
Noah Anderson at the bike shop, who Will recognizes from the years he used to work at the town’s since-shuttered video store, clearly doesn’t remember him at all, but he still does not hesitate to lay out in great detail an incident the previous summer where he saw someone who might have been Casey across the room at a gay bar in Columbus.
All Will had said to prompt Noah’s telling him this story was, “Hey, so, I met this guy Casey? Up at the farm?” But the man tells it with confidence, as though he’s told it many times before to many rapt listeners, who all filed the information away with great interest to consider at length later.
Will, of course, does listen raptly and file the information away with great interest to consider at length later, but he feels a little guilty about it.
Or, at least, he does until he remembers that he hates Casey, who is a horrific person, to whom he owes nothing at all.
Then Will feels fine. Perfectly, utterly fine.
Anyway, in all cases, the conversation stays weird even after Will forcibly turns things away from such topics as, “Well, I heard he doesn’t date because he has a secret family in Iowa,” and “I swear half the traffic to that farm in the summer is folks hoping to see him out working with his shirt off. It’s disgraceful, really, what young people get up to!
” Once he’s established that he is, in fact, asking business questions, for business reasons, and is simply looking for a character read in the context of the Nimbletainment deal, the tone shifts every single time.
Half of them say, “Oh, well, Casey’s the best,” or “His personality, you mean? Nicest guy in the world, real helpful,” or something along those lines before their faces freeze.
The other half freeze up straight away, looking at Will as though he has caught them in a trap.
And eventually, one by one, they all come up with similar, very careful responses: Casey’s passionate, but misguided.
Casey means well, but he’s got the wrong end of the stick here.
Casey’s heart is in the right place, but he should learn when to leave well enough alone.
Casey’s doing the best he can in a tough situation, but unless something changes, we might all be better off if he lets the whole thing go.
That last one Will hears from old Mrs. Cardini, who had seemed ancient even when Will was a child and now seems to have shrunken down into the oldest and most essential version of herself.
She’s not working the bakery counter, just sitting at the table in the back holding court, but she does recognize Will when he comes in, gimlet-eyed old woman that she is.
She cackles, and invites him to sit, and answers his questions as the rest of them did, but with a sharp gleam in her eye that seems to be entreating Will to understand what she’s not saying.
Unfortunately, the unspoken request alone is not itself a cipher key, so Will’s left turning her words over and over in his head as he walks up the road, eating a blueberry streusel muffin Mrs. Cardini had insisted he take, on the house.
Unless what changes? What will happen if Casey doesn’t let it go?
He’d tried asking Mrs. Cardini, but she’d clammed up immediately and started pushing pastry on him, so Will had no choice but to leave it for now.
There’s something here, though, some thread of this he’s not understanding, or being told, or both.
Will doesn’t like it. He’s never enjoyed the sensation that there’s some critical piece of information floating around outside his field of vision—that sort of thing will often tend to crash into him from behind at the worst possible moment if he doesn’t keep an eye on it.
He stops, warily, outside of Gunderson’s.
If Robertson Family Farms was the backdrop of most of Will’s bad childhood memories, then this grocery store and the rambling, spacious apartment above it were the backdrop for most of his good ones.
Will had been born only three days before Meredith Gunderson, the third of six Gunderson siblings, and they’d become fast friends in elementary school.
When Will could get away from the farm—a little easier to do, he found, with each passing year—he was often at the Gundersons’ apartment or messing around with Mere in the back room of the store.
Her parents had been cheerful and kind and permissive, and Nancy, her mother, had always heaped an extra helping of whatever they were having onto Will’s plate when he stayed for supper.
Once, when Will had been about eleven, he’d dropped a plate while setting the table for dinner.
He’d panicked immediately, almost hyperventilating, knowing in his own house a mistake like that would set someone off on a tear.
Nancy had stared at him and then she’d nodded, and then she’d picked up another plate, grabbed Will by the wrist, and pulled him out onto their back patio.
Making direct eye contact with him, she’d held the plate up in the air, shrugged, and dropped it, not blinking or flinching when it shattered across the ground.
“It doesn’t matter,” she’d said, “okay? They’re only dishes.
” Will had just nodded, wide-eyed and solemn, and helped her clean it up, and that night when Nancy dropped him off, she’d asked Will to wait in the car for a minute.
He’d watched, confused and more than a little afraid, as Nancy spoke to his mother, hard-faced and gesturing emphatically, for several minutes before coming back and sending him inside.
Nothing had really changed in Will’s house after that—all June had said was, “Stop being such a nervous nelly, you’re making people think we treat you bad”—but he’d never forgotten it, either.
The flash of anger in Nancy’s eyes as she said good night to him, the way she always offered him a hug before she sent him off home, had sat in the pit of his stomach, an anchoring weight, all through his childhood.
It still sits there even now, as he stares up at the semi-familiar facade of the store, updated and repainted over the years, but still the same in the essentials.
He’d never called Meredith, after he left.
Never written, never stopped by. She’d been the first person he ever came out to, a gawky teen out of place everywhere but in her living room, and she’d been surprised but sweet about it, kind and discreet where she could have been cruel.
He’d owed it to her, probably, to give her an explanation, but he just…
couldn’t seem to face it, not at the time, and the longer he waited, the harder it got.
But Nancy had been there, at June’s funeral.
She’d come into the service late, like Will did, and stood in the back, like Will did, and about halfway through, she’d shuffled up next to Will and taken his hand.
She hadn’t said anything; she hadn’t needed to.
Her hand had been as cool and dry as Will’s eyes, but for all he held his composure, he couldn’t quite bring himself to let go.
For an hour, they stood like that, and then she’d walked with him out to his car, and given him a brief, firm hug, like she used to when he was young.
“You take care of yourself,” she’d said, which was a simple kindness.
A platitude. But it was the closest he came to crying that whole stupid day, sitting there in his car with his throat catching as she walked off into the fog.
Will takes a breath. It’s just a store. He’ll go in, and if he sees Mere, great, and if he doesn’t, great.
It doesn’t have to be a whole thing; he’s already here , right in front of the place, with a question he needs to ask of whoever happens to be in charge these days.
It might not even be Meredith—in fact, it probably isn’t.
One of the other Gunderson siblings had probably stepped in when Jake and Nancy retired, if they even have retired, and it will be one of them Will has to face.
Or, better yet, it’ll be some member of staff.
He needs to go in, and find out what’s what, instead of standing out dithering his way into a panic attack.
That, as he knows all too well, will not help anyone.
He goes inside. The store smells as he remembers it, of smoked meat and fresh herbs and rich, earthy spices, all balanced against the sweet, perfumey notes of the floral section up front.
He takes a huge lungful of air and feels transported back in time as he weaves through the aisles, hardly seeing the product on the shelves.
And then he steps up to the information desk, and Jamie Gunderson is standing there, preserved in time, not a day older than the fourteen-year-old he was when Will last saw him standing here, more than a decade ago.
Will’s saying, “ Jamie? ” before logic catches up to eyesight—this can’t be Jamie Gunderson, Meredith’s youngest brother, because Jamie Gunderson has to be at least thirty by now.
This kid is just his absolute spitting image, down to the way he grins easily at Will, and shakes his head, and says, “Nah, he’s my uncle. I’m Todd Weaver, actually, but—Ma! Some guy’s in here calling me Jamie again!”
“Ooh, a blast from the past?” a semi-familiar voice calls from upstairs. “Be right down!”