Chapter 11 #3
Will knows about people, how they move separately and how they move together.
He knows the way only an observer can know, the knowledge sharpened with the remove of the scientist. He’s been lonely, and that’s been difficult, but it’s been educational, too.
It’s allowed him a perspective that he has, until now, appreciated as unique and useful.
Casey breaks this perspective. Casey, just by existing and acting like this, takes this perspective, spits on it, and throws it out an upper-story window.
The problem is that he’s so…nice, Will thinks.
Not to Will, necessarily—the two of them have achieved, in these last few days, a détente Will would describe as “pleasantly neutral”—but to everyone else, he’s too nice.
People aren’t nice like this, not real people, who walk around in the world interacting with others.
Who has the time, or the energy, or the inclination, or the will, to be that nice?
To help every neighbor who asks; to really listen when someone comes in and complains about something stupid at the market; to head out at least a few nights a week to solve for some issue and not, if Will’s any judge of the creaks and groans of this old house, return until late?
It’s too much for one person, that’s all, or at least for one person based on Will’s understanding of people prior to meeting a certain flannel-loving reckless driver.
It makes it hard to imagine Casey’s a real human being as opposed to a robot invented at Bill’s request, even though Will is all too intimately aware, sharing houseroom with him, that he’s an honest-to-God flesh-and-blood man.
A flesh-and-blood man who is sometimes wandering around in a towel after a shower; a flesh-and-blood man who hums to himself in the mornings while he’s getting ready, the sound filtering down to Will’s bedroom from the attic; a flesh-and-blood man who never seems to find time to eat dinner, not that Will is paying attention to that.
Paying attention or not, Will finds himself puzzling at that last piece on Sunday evening, a week and a day after the incident that wiped the bridge out.
The estimated one week of repair is now being reported as two, and Will, sitting at the kitchen table, should be thinking about that.
He should be making a new plan, or, at very least, dinner, not thinking about Casey’s dinner.
He should be calling Selma, something he has put off for so long now that she must surely be apoplectic.
A sharp pang of guilt distracts him, and he pauses the entire train of thought to send Selma another apology gift.
There have been…several, in the days since he learned he would be trapped indefinitely here on the farm.
It’s not that he thinks he can buy her affection; he knows Selma doesn’t work like that.
If her affections could be bought, her parents would have managed years ago.
But if she knows Will’s alive, and thinking about her, and sorry for going ghost mode, and just in that place where he’s basically bricking it and turtling up and unable to have an honest conversation without absolutely freaking out, she’ll understand.
Will hopes she’ll understand, anyway. Their friendship has only survived this long because she very generously has before.
He sends her a pair of leather Chicago Cubs driving gloves, with the note, “Because I’m sure I’m driving you crazy. Sorry, for that and the pun. Love you.”
Guilt semi-assuaged, his thoughts return, as they tend to lately, to Casey. This time it’s not a particularly wholesome turn, and he jumps, hoping he’s not blushing, when Casey slouches through the door as if summoned. “Oh! You’re back. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Hey,” Casey says. His voice is lower than usual, a tired, drawn quality to it.
He drops into the chair across from Will heavily, puts his elbows on the table, and rests his head in his hands.
Some inner part of Will twitches—June had the unfortunate habit of delivering a hard, unforgiving flick to the back of any elbow that she happened to see on this table—but he doesn’t comment as Casey adds, “I’m surprised you’re here already.
I thought that thing at the cider mill would’ve taken you hours. ”
“What, the contracts issue?” Will says, his eyebrows going up. “No, I was done with it an hour ago. ”
Ruefully, Casey snorts. “Of course you were. Would’ve taken me hours, anyway.”
“I mean…” Will says, in what he hopes are generous tones.
Casey seems to be in a dark headspace; that’s not like him, and Will stares for a second, warring with conflicting internal impulses.
Half of him is screaming that it’s never a good idea to stay at this table, in this house, with someone in this mood, but the other half wants to do something insane , like reach out and squeeze Casey’s shoulder.
Better he find something to do with his hands.
Will stands, and starts puttering around the kitchen as he says, “In your defense, I’m pretty sure I was the last person who sorted that filing cabinet, so I had a leg up.
My labels were still in there and everything—my teen handwriting, I have to say, probably didn’t help anyone else who tried to use it very much.
” Deciding he might as well solve one of his own problems, Will starts rummaging around in the cabinets for likely-looking things to eat as he continues, “I redid it so it’s easier to navigate, and I did find that Bradley contract you were looking for—stuck between two files with something that smelled like maple syrup, horribly enough.
Still legible, though, and that guy who called is full of it, like you thought.
He sold Bill all that equipment flat out, no rental agreement.
Probably figured he could squeeze a few more dollars out of the place, since the old man was famous for losing track of the paperwork. ”
Casey mutters something colorful under his breath, but then, lifting his head briefly to make eye contact with Will, says, “That’s great, actually. Thanks. You leave it?—”
“In your office at the market? Yeah,” Will says easily.
He doesn’t have to be easy about it—he could point out that, really that it’s Will’s office, because it’s Will’s market, because it’s Will’s farm, but there’s no point.
Casey knows all that, and it would be rubbing salt in the wound to point it out.
Anyway, Will doesn’t want to. This tentative peace they’ve managed to cobble together is…
strange, certainly, but nice. It wouldn’t be worth it, to go upsetting the equilibrium over something that, at least to Will and at least right now, doesn’t matter very much at all.
“Thanks,” Casey says again, with real feeling, and drops his head back into his hands. “One less thing to deal with; thank you.”
“It’s…really fine,” Will says, eyeing Casey’s bent head in mild concern that he would, if Casey were to look up and catch him at it, have to pretend was disdain, or perhaps smelling something odd.
Selecting a few things from the cabinet and moving on to the fridge, he adds, “Uh, not to be weird, or whatever, but…are you like…good?”
Casey laughs, short and bitter. “Define ‘good.’”
“Well, that’s not a promising answer,” Will remarks, mostly to himself.
“But, sure, you asked, fair enough: adjective, at least in this instance, meaning favorable or positive. Are you currently feeling favorable or positive?” When Casey snorts, but doesn’t respond, Will grabs several items from the fridge as he adds, “It can also mean morally correct, if you’d rather answer that question.
I can’t imagine you would, but it’s there for you as an option. ”
“Is anyone morally correct, really?” Casey asks, sounding a little bleak. “Do you think there’s such a thing? Or are we all doing our best and not getting there, most of the time?”
For several long moments, as he finds and removes a pan from the cupboard next to the fridge, Will tries to think of something to say other than what he is thinking, which is, Yeesh.
“Yeesh,” says Will eventually, not feeling great about it.
“Did someone like break your spirit on the way back from—uh—where—well, wherever you were, anyway.” God, Will had almost asked Casey where he was , as though he has any right to know; sharing houseroom with the man is playing tricks on Will, and that’s all there is to it .
He focuses, because it’s high time he did, on making dinner.
He’s lucky that there was a natural disaster, and that he and Casey teamed up with Meredith.
If he’d tried to do this even a few days ago, the contents of the fridge as Casey kept it would have left him with a choice between a variety of gross frozen dinners and a spoonful of questionable mustard.
But, as it is, they were sent, like everyone else in town, a bag full of staples and supplies and, because they’d both filled out their dietary needs and preferences through Will’s hastily constructed little electronic system, Will knows there’s nothing in that Casey can’t or won’t eat.
He finds himself turning to a dish he used to make a lot in college, which involves, essentially, boiling pasta in one pot and cooking together olive oil, white beans, garlic, red pepper flakes, and a can of tuna fish in another.
It’s not anything he cooks from a recipe—now, as then, it’s a meal of convenience more than one designed to impress.
As Will works through the motions of the opening steps, he thinks that it’s a pretty good summary of his general cooking philosophy: Will is a functional cook, and that’s all he’s trying to be.
He does his best to save what brilliance and creativity he possesses for the lab; at the stove, he’s satisfied if it’s tasty, and, broadly speaking, not too terrible for him.
Will’s so wrapped up in getting things going that he half forgets Casey’s there, and only just doesn’t jump when Casey says, “I was with Todd, actually.”
It takes Will a second to process that Casey is picking up a conversational thread Will thought he abandoned several minutes ago; then it takes him another second for the content of the sentence to sink in. When it does: “ Oh . How, uh. How did that go?”
“Oh, you know,” Casey says, and Will cocks his head, surprised to hear an edge of bleak despair in his tone.
“He wanted to talk about how he’s having nightmares, which is fair.
I would be having nightmares, too, if I were him.
I am having nightmares about him, about what would have happened, so I get it.
It’s not that I mind , right, talking to this traumatized teenage kid about what happened to him, God knows I’ve done it before, I don’t mind!
It’s just that everyone in this town, all of them, for months and months, have been so polite, and so awkward, and so distant.
‘Hey, Casey!’ and ‘Hiya, Casey!’ but never anything more.
And now, all of a sudden, it’s so urgent for all of them to talk to me, and ask my help with this thing, or that thing, or the other thing, and while I’m there, can I help with this issue they’ve been meaning to ask me about, but it’s been so awkward , and oh there’s another problem, and meanwhile it’s not as though there isn’t always something that needs doing here and I—” Casey cuts himself off, his chest heaving, and Will raises his eyebrows down into his pan as he stirs.
When Casey speaks again, his voice is tightly controlled.
“I feel. As though it might be nice. For things to…stop. For a minute or two. That’s all. ”
Will stares at Casey, whose head is still in his hands, who is not looking at Will.
Will stares at Casey and tries, for an upsettingly long moment, to place the sharp sense of confusion within him, the abrupt but utter sense that he, Will, is at sea.
What’s so confusing about that statement?
Why should it make him feel unmoored, lost?
Casey is obviously feeling exhausted, worn thin, overtaxed, and it’s perfectly normal that he should be.
After all, it’s a natural disaster they’re living through right now, and, surely, they’re all feeling worn and overtaxed…
A wave of realization washes over Will; it’s almost nauseating in intensity, and he turns back to the nearly finished dinner, draining the pasta and combining the ingredients essentially on autopilot.
Casey might be feeling worn and exhausted, pushed to the brink by these strange circumstances, but Will is not.
Will is feeling—good. Really good. The best, maybe, he has felt in…
It couldn’t be years, could it? Could that possibly be right ?
He tips the pasta into two bowls as he tries to disprove this theory within himself, carding through memories for a comparable sense of fulfillment and calm and coming up worryingly blank.
When was it, the last time he felt like this?
God, has Will ever felt like this? And what does it mean, if he hasn’t? If this is the first and only time?
Throwing a handful of Parmesan on top of each bowl, Will sets one down in front of Casey as he walks back to his own vacated chair, too distracted by this disquieting moment of realization to be self-conscious. “Here, eat. Nothing ever feels as grim after pasta.”
Will sits down, too, and sets his own food on the table, and then looks up to see Casey staring at him over his steaming bowl like a trapped animal.
Will stares back at him, guilt and confusion and a horrible certainty raising the hairs on his neck, climbing like bile up the back of his throat.
He focuses, dizzily, on the way the light from the overhead lamp catches in the soft green of Casey’s eyes and thinks he doesn’t know what he wants at all, and maybe he’s never known.
“Thank you,” Casey says, like he really means it, like he can’t believe Will’s done this simple thing for him. And God, hell, maybe Will does know what he wants, but he would prefer, actually, if he didn’t.