Chapter 5 #2
He winds instead through the third orchard, planted in the ’80s, shortly after Will’s father took over operations.
Bill had been ambitious, but not necessarily a genius—his big idea had been, more or less, more apples .
It had worked out for him. Farm visitors, who had never managed to pick their way through even the first and second orchards, had not, as Bill had expected, spontaneously generated a new demand to meet the extra supply, but he’d found buyers in the end.
The third orchard was closed to guests all through Will’s childhood, promised along with the overflow from the other groves to grocery stores in Columbus and Cleveland, as well as to a few local school districts.
It was these sales, more often than not, that had kept the lights on, the water running, and the staff paid when Will was young, as market traffic had been variable at best.
As expected, it’s empty, and as Will approaches the farmhouse from the back, he has to stop and take a breath.
Here’s something else that looks the same as he left it—after everything else that’s changed here in Glenriver, Will’s been bracing himself all day to see the old place painted over in a bright magenta, or covered with a complicated mural of bees.
But instead it’s the same. Just the same.
The same blue paint, which was maybe a nice robin’s egg once, but has faded and peeled over the years into a dusty, pallid color, like the sky on a half-gray day.
The same tattered red, white, and blue hangings draped over the whitewashed wooden railings of the wrap-around porch, which Bill had hung up over a Memorial Day weekend that must’ve been thirty years ago now and never bothered taking down.
The same thin, yellowing lace curtains visible through the same dirty windows.
But no, Will realizes, squinting. That is different: The windows aren’t dirty at all.
Not one of them is streaked with dust, or fingerprints, or long dribbles of dried bird poop, or a cheeky message along the lines of Wash me!
left by a member of staff who didn’t realize Will would end up catching the blame.
Someone has cleaned them, and recently. It certainly wasn’t Bill, since he’d avoided the task successfully and actively even when he wasn’t in his eighties and approaching his extremely timely death.
Casey might have done it—certainly rumor, vibe, and Noel’s immediate suggestion of getting him suggests he is the one behind most of the improvements—but Will can’t imagine why he would have.
He puzzles over it as he climbs the steps up onto the porch, moving unconsciously towards the back door, which his whole family had always used as though it was the front.
The windows might be clean, but the porch furniture is the same, Old Bill’s rocking chair dust-coated and clearly calcified in place after all these years, but obviously left alone, even now.
Bill’s rocker, too, is coated in a thin layer of brownish dust, which gives Will a moment’s pause.
The man hadn’t died that long ago, not long enough for a layer like that to form, and Will can’t imagine any version of his father not sitting in that accursed chair for at least an hour or two a day, rocking back and forth in a foul mood, chewing bitterly on his preferred tobacco.
He takes a breath; there’s no point thinking about that now.
What’s past is past, and Will’s here to do…
well, to do whatever it is he wants to do here, exactly.
He’s still not sure even now, as he pulls his wallet out of his pocket and, his fingers trembling a little, reaches deep into the recesses of a rarely accessed flap.
He pulls out a small, standard metal key, of the type available in any hardware store.
It’s unremarkable to look at, nothing about it that would suggest any real significance, but Will has transferred it from wallet to wallet for nearly twenty years, feeling small and silly about it each time.
He’d just wanted… He’d wanted to remember where he came from, maybe.
He’d wanted to feel, in whatever stupid, insignificant way, th at there was still some thread tying him to the place that had meant so much to him until, abruptly, it had meant so little.
He takes a deep breath, inserts the key in the lock, and turns.
It opens.
The tumblers give easily, in fact, none of the frustrating sticking and jiggling Will remembers from opening this door in his youth.
And when he turns the knob and pushes the door open, his heart pounding frenetically in his chest, the hinges don’t whine or squeak at all.
It’s the first time in his life he’s managed to step into this vestibule totally silently, not a single creak or groan to announce him, not one voice snapping, “ There you are,” or “You’re not supposed to be back yet!
” or “Get those filthy shoes off your mother’s rug before I make you regret it. ”
He stands for a moment in the stillness, letting his heart rate settle out, his breathing slow.
Bill’s dead, and June’s dead, and Old Bill’s dead—they’ve gone, and their opinions and expectations and standards for Will have gone with them, buried under dirt and past and withering away, even now, to nothing.
There’s no one in the house but Will, save the ghosts, and those walk with him, anyway, and did even when his parents were alive.
There’s nothing left here for him to be scared of, and he might as well, after all these years, give himself the closure of walking these halls as an adult.
Feeling bold and brave and, if he’s honest, a bit like he might throw up, Will sets about exploring. He’s surprised, and then puzzled, and then downright mystified by what he finds.
The living room, first of all. The furniture is the same—the blue chintz sofa June had insisted on keeping under a plastic cover even though it had been out-of-date fifteen years before Will was even alive is still there, as is the brown leather armchair Bill had loved to doze in while whatever Cleveland sports team was playing that night competed and lost. But the ancient box television is gone, replaced by a sleek modern one.
If it was that alone, Will could understand; after all, at a certain point even the ugly behemoth of a television he’d grown up with would have been bound to kick the bucket, having been in regular use since roughly 1982.
But there’s a gaming system hooked up to the television.
Will stares at it, and the collection of games stacked next to it, with the bewilderment of a man who has just discovered a pile of loose shrimp in his medicine cabinet: What are these doing here?
How did they get here? Why? Will knows that people can change, although they rarely do, but he simply can’t imagine anything that could have happened to his father that would have caused him to turn, in his old age, to the sweet embrace of digital adventure.
Will had, more than once, seen the man brought to apoplectic frustration by the shop’s basic digital credit card machine; he didn’t seem the type to play Elden Ring .
The bookshelf in the living room, too, is unsettling.
The various nonfiction books about wars, farming, and maritime disasters, Bill’s three primary interests, are still there, but among them—God help him, there are fiction books on this shelf.
This would be strange enough on its own, since Bill had never held with fiction and encouraged Will not to, either, but some of them are books Will himself counts amongst his favorites. Some of them are queer books.
Will is capable of a lot of things. He can read and understand a complicated genome sequence; he can make a passable French omelette and a pretty solid lasagna; he can assess a pile of graduate student exams in less time than it takes him to finish a cup of coffee.
But he can’t, to any degree, picture his father reading even one of these books.
The very thought is almost bloodcurdling in its essential wrongness.
He sets the books aside as beyond his rational understanding and prowls through the rest of the first floor.
The kitchen, at least, is more or less unchanged, the old microwave still clearly the only element in regular use, the freezer full of frozen dinners and the fridge full of beer and hard cider.
The dining room, too, is the same, dust thick over the large, rarely used dinner table.
That had been a wedding gift, Will knows, from Old Bill and Jillian, Will’s grandmother.
Maybe that’s why Bill had never liked using it, and they’d eaten nearly all their meals at the cramped, wobbling breakfast table in the kitchen.
It is, Will realizes now with a bit of a pang, quite a beautiful dining set—black walnut, if Will doesn’t miss his guess, and with intricate carving work along the sideboards and thick table legs, in the detailing of the chairs.
Old Bill would have gathered the lumber himself, probably, after a storm took down one of the big, behemoth trees near the farmhouse, which were always dropping those huge, ground-staining fruit pods in the weeks leading up to Will’s birthday.
He glances out the nearest window and smirks, satisfied, to see a number of them on the ground even now.
He drums his fingers on the tabletop, thinking about how Old Bill, ever the whittler, must have carved it himself.
Even when he’d forgotten essentially everything else near the end, he’d whittled simple figurines and spoons, still scattered on windowsills around the house.
There was love in that, wasn’t there, of a sort?
And yet Will had never heard the old man express love, not to his father or his grandmother, and certainly not to him.
It just…wasn’t the sort of thing the Robertson men got up to.