Chapter 4 #3
The voice almost tips it, but—it’s aged, naturally, changed a little, so on that alone Will’s not 100 percent sure.
But her footfalls on the stairs… Will heard those a hundred times, learned to track them automatically the way he’d learned to track his parents’ through the farmhouse.
His gut is clenching with anticipation, muscles seizing up with a desire to run that he clamps down on with everything in him, as Meredith Gunderson herself emerges from the stairwell.
She’s older, certainly, curly auburn hair a little shorter, features more settled, but she’s still got the same round, expressive face, the same kind brown eyes.
To her credit, she stops dead the second she sees him. None of the hesitant glancing or double-taking Will spotted amongst the townsfolk here—Meredith’s eyes widen, and then fill with tears, and her mouth drops open before she covers it, belatedly, with one hand.
Finally, she says, “ Will? ”
“Um. Yeah?” Will says, and shrugs, and winces, feeling abruptly and utterly fifteen years old.
“God, look. There’s a lot I should say, probably, and I don’t, uh.
Think I know how to say most of it? Or where to even start?
So, I guess I’ll start with: sorry. I know it sucks that I, um. That I…haven’t been in touch.”
She starts to move towards him, and he braces himself—for what he’s not entirely sure even as he’s doing it. Is he expecting her to slap him? Push him back out the door? He thinks he’d probably deserve that after more than a decade, but it doesn’t seem her style.
Instead, to his absolute shock, he realizes that she’s hugging him. Quite hard, in fact. Hesitantly, his arms lifting as though against some great resistance, he hugs her back, not entirely certain he’s doing it right.
“You stupid jerk ,” she says, releasing him, after a moment. But she’s smiling as she says it, and when she does thwap him, it’s lightly on the arm with the end of an overlong knit pullover sleeve. “You couldn’t have written me a letter? A postcard? ‘Hey, Mere, FYI I’m alive, Love, Will’?”
“I’m sorry,” Will says again, groaning on it a little. “I didn’t mean to… I know I should have. It was all so?—”
“Oh, stop, stop,” Mere says easily, flapping the sleeve at him and then wiping her eyes with it. “You don’t have to explain it to me—I get it. You had to get out of here, and didn’t want to look back, right?”
Will blinks, startled, though he shouldn’t be, by her easy empathy.
She was always like this, more perceptive than she had any right to be, so quick to forgive things Will would have spent years castigating himself for that it made him feel a little silly about being so upset.
With a sheepish smile, he says, “I mean, I was going to blame being a teenage imbecile with more anxiety than social skills, not to mention an incredibly poor relational model, but something like that, yeah.”
Grinning at him, Meredith says, “You sound like you’ve been to see a therapist, Will. Could be wishful thinking, of course—I’d send this whole town to therapy if I could.”
“Ugh, you only say that because Dad’s a therapist. It’s gross; get a room if you want to be in love with him.
That’s my dad ,” Todd comments, rolling his eyes.
Then, his tone abruptly dropping into a wheedling one, he adds, “Speaking of therapy, you know, this was a really intense Jamie mix-up. So many emotions flying around for my tender young ears to hear! So maaaaaybe you could let me off the last fifteen minutes of my shift so I could go meet up with Luke and the guys?”
Meredith rolls her eyes at Will, as though the lost years never happened, and they are still at the same level of easy camaraderie they were in high school. “That depends on whether or not Will—sorry, that’s Mr. Robertson to you?—”
“Oh, God, no it’s not,” Will says, horrified. “Will’s fine—Will’s great. I’m in town for a visit, okay, not trying to be Mr. Robertson .”
“Hmm,” Meredith says. “Fine, but you mind your manners otherwise, Todd, all right? And if Will doesn’t mind covering the store with me until Winnie clocks in for her shift, then yes, you may go to?—”
“Thanks, Ma, thanks, Will!” Todd cries before she can finish her sentence, not waiting for Will’s approval, just vaulting directly over the desk and dashing for the door.
“Oh, for crying out—” Mere starts, annoyed, but cuts herself off when the door slams behind Todd with a laugh. “God, you know, it used to drive my mother nuts when Jamie did that; I always thought it was hilarious. I get it now.”
“How is your mother?” Will braces himself again; it’s been ten years since June’s funeral, and Nancy’s not the youngest woman. It’s always possible the worst has happened.
“Oh, she’s good,” Mere says easily, with the warmth and lack of tension of someone whose relationships with their parents are largely positive, and not, at least for the moment, riddled with the grief and horror of either significant childhood trauma or serious health problems. “She and my father got a place down in Georgia—she likes the peaches, you know—and they stay with us here in the summers, but they spend most of the winter down there. The cold gets to my dad’s sciatica these days, otherwise.
You just missed her, actually; they left last week. She’ll be sorry she didn’t see you. ”
“Tell her I say hello, will you?” Will says, a little wistful, and Mere promises she will.
The conversation turns, as conversations have always seemed to for the last ten years or so, to the basic niceties of two adults with busy lives catching up.
Meredith tells Will about her husband, Sandy, who she met in college and eventually lured out to the sticks from the teeming metropolis of Columbus; they’ve got four kids, three boys and a girl, Todd being the oldest, the youngest having just entered third grade.
She hadn’t intended to take over the store—she’d gotten a bachelor’s degree in business administration, with big plans of starting her own clothing line.
“But,” she confesses, flushing a little even to tell it all these years later, “the truth is, I never cared much about fashion—it just sounded glamorous when I was eighteen, you know?”
“Sure,” Will says, waving a hand. They’ve passed off control of the shop to Winnie by this point and settled into what was once Mere’s parents’ living room, but is now clearly hers.
She’s redecorated it entirely, stripping out the ’70s chic-gone-shabby-chic wood paneling and colorful carpet for soothing forest green walls, a fuzzy shearling rug tossed across the hardwood.
Her couch is a little plush for Will’s taste—he tends to err on the spartan side when it comes to decor—but it’s comfortable, and cozy, and her .
“When I was eighteen, I thought I was going to be… Well, at eighteen, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen.
” He reaches up unthinkingly to rub a thumb against the scar along his left cheekbone, then drops his hand and swallows, hard, when sympathy wells in Mere’s eyes, blinking the emotion away from his own.
“But at twenty, when I started college, I was sure I was going to be an engineer. I wanted to build rocket parts.”
“Your tone makes me think that’s not where you ended up,” Meredith says dryly. “What do you do for a living? I won’t lie, I’ve tried looking you up on LinkedIn with no luck—the curiosity is killing me.”
“Oh,” Will says, blinking again. He’s never kept up much of a social media presence; the single account he has, he’d created to decline an invite to his ten-year high school reunion, because it had been the only option provided for doing so.
Resultantly, he has only three contacts on the app: Mike’s wife, who had organized the event; Mike, who had presumably heard about it from his wife; and Selma, who had found and friended Will out of amusement before he even finished telling her the story.
“I never set up one of those. A LinkedIn, I mean. I’m not much of a social media guy; I was nothing but school for about a decade there, honestly, and I think I missed my window.
I ended up studying, uh…botany, actually.
” He clears his throat, Casey’s comments about going off to study some other apples still rattling around in his brain, and neglects to get into specifics.
“Plants are a lot more interesting than rocket parts, as it turns out. Or, I think so, anyway. I don’t have anything against the rocket folks, just couldn’t be me.
Anyway, I got a job in the lab I work in now while I was completing my PhD, and just…
stayed. Worked my way up. I’m the Primary Investigator now, running my own study—the boss, basically, which is weird to say, I guess.
Still doesn’t feel like it could possibly be true, you know? ”
“You seem pretty professional to me . And good for you, honestly—I’m sure that lab’s lucky to have you, you always were a genius.
But I do know what you mean,” Mere says, with a little grimace.
“Some days, I can’t believe I’m the Gunderson keeping Gunderson’s going—it feels like maybe a stress dream I started having in the tenth grade, and any minute I’ll wake up. ”
She’s joking, so Will laughs, but then, painfully aware of the life he himself barely escaped, says, “You’re happy, though, right?
I mean, you—it’s not… I don’t know, you don’t feel—stuck in it, or anything, right?
” Cringing slightly, he adds, “I don’t mean—it’s great, obviously, that you’re here!
You seem amazing, yo u have this beautiful family, the store’s never looked better, I only wanted to—oh, God. I don’t know.”