Chapter 13 #3
But Casey, to his surprise and, honestly, pleasure, meets him beat for beat, not a moment of hesitation before he says, “Yeah, I know how that is. I think when I was eight what I wanted most in the world was to see Jerry Garcia play live, which in and of itself wasn’t a terrible aspiration, except that at that point he’d already been dead for years, and I didn’t have any idea who he was.
I knew that’s what a person was supposed to want most in the world, just like the right answer to ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ was ‘I want to be chill, man.’” Casey must notice the confusion Will’s sure he’s not managing to keep off his face; he laughs, not entirely pleasantly.
“I had a very different childhood to yours. Not that I know so much about yours, but I think it’s a safe bet, anyway.
Mine was pretty…pretty far from the standard, or at least that’s what I’ve been reliably told.
It all feels fairly normal to me.” He shrugs, his eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead of him.
“Best I can tell that’s almost always true, right?
Even for the people whose childhoods were really traumatic—you talk to them and they say it was whatever, no biggie, nothing to worry about, let’s change the subject.
I guess you get used to what you get used to, right? ”
“I went to undergrad with this guy who was obsessed with the idea that human evolutionary success was entirely a result of adaptability,” Will says, shaking his head to remember it.
“Luke Graves—he was interesting, honestly, but he would go on. But the idea was that what made a human being a human being, on a fundamental level, was the ability to look at almost any given situation and figure out a way not just to get on with it, but to forget there was ever a time before it was normal .”
“He sounds like he was a real hoot at parties,” Casey says drily.
Will chuckles, shaking his head. “Actually, proving his point, you…got used to him? A little something to eat, a little something to drink, a little light existential chatter with Luke—oh.” He realizes, abruptly, that Casey has parked the car outside Cardinal Bakery, and is looking at him patiently across the gearshift, no longer driving at all.
“Right, uh—you drive, I get. You want anything in particular?”
“Eh,” Casey says, with an easy grin. “So long as there’s coffee, I’m good; anything else is a bonus.”
Will feels a little spike of odd, irrational irritation at this, laced with a fondness that’s strangely hard to bear.
He swallows back the urge to say, But I asked you what you want , isn’t there anything you’d like , can’t you ever make it easy for anyone to do anything for you? And, instead, smiles. “You got it.”
Still, spike of irritation aside, he’s in a good mood when he walks through the Cardinal doors.
An oddly good mood, to be honest, given the way his morning started and the way it’s likely to go after this.
Will can’t imagine he’s going to have a good time dragging up the past for Casey, who is, in all likelihood, going to take Bill’s side.
That will be both really embarrassing and, if Will doesn’t miss his guess, a lampoon through the balloon of silly, desperate hope he’s been trying frantically to keep tethered to the earth with fraying rope.
Even Will is not so self-punishing as to imagine he could stomach building something on ground that profoundly cursed.
But that’s later, after coffee, after breakfast. This might be Will’s last morning in Glenriver for some time—a thought that makes him feel brittle and half-sheared, as though the next strong wind is going to send him toppling—and he is, by God, going to enjoy it.
This, right now, is Will’s golden moment, his final chance to savor the way these last two weeks have felt before it all goes wrong, and, for his sins, he is going to let himself have it.
He’s humming under his breath as he walks to the counter and waits in line, a tuneless, half-remembered version of the song Casey was named for, heard only once but rattling around still in his head.
When he reaches the front, he cracks a couple of jokes with the people working the counter, and doesn’t have to think about the order at all—he’s been in here with Casey enough times, after all.
Left to his own devices, Casey usually orders a maple latte and a bear claw, but the bear claws are sold out by the time Will reaches the front, Saturday mornings being what they are.
Instead, he orders Casey’s latte, as well as a brown sugar cardamom one for himself, and gets them each one of the apple turnovers that are being freshly placed in the case as he watches.
As he waits for the order to come up, he tries to drink in the smell of this place, the specific color of the paint on the walls, without allowing the thought of why he’s doing so to make him maudlin.
But as he’s walking to the door, a paper coffee carrier with their drinks in one hand and the turnover bag in the other, old Mrs. Cardini waves to him. “William! You weren’t going to leave without saying goodbye, were you?”
Will was, in fact—he hadn’t seen her—but he shakes his head and smiles at her, hurries over. “Sorry, sorry, I was just?—”
“Oh, I can see what you were ‘just,’” Mrs. Cardini says, her expression going dangerously knowing.
“Your old man used to come in here, you know, back in the day. You look more like him now than you did when you were coming up—it’s like that, for some folks.
I used to try to tell him.” She shakes her head, and then, her eyes sharpening, adds, “Anyway! He’d come in looking just like you, all cheerful, whistling himself a little tune, buying coffee and treats for two.
Honestly, it’s a little spooky—I think sometimes he was even wearing that shirt. ”
Will scoffs, rolling his eyes. “Listen—I’m sorry, I don’t mean to doubt you, but come on . For my mom? I don’t think I ever saw him bring her so much as a bag of chips; they weren’t like that. Not ever.”
Mrs. Cardini wrinkles her nose. “Oh, honey, no. Not for June. Bill and June—well. Nobody ever could have mistaken that for a love match, I tell you what. But…Bill never told you, huh? About Lucy?”
“Lucy?” Will says; it comes out slightly laughing, as though he finds this amusing, which he doesn’t.
There’s nothing amusing about this at all; it’s that he’s realizing, in real time, that his body and brain have no idea how to react to what Mrs. Cardini is saying.
“Uh, no, I—can’t say that I ever heard him mention that name once in my life. His life. Whoever’s, uh, life.”
Mrs. Cardini sighs and shakes her head. “Ah. Well. I guess that isn’t such a surprise—that was your father.
He was how he was. He and my Roger were good friends when they were boys, you know, and he was hard-headed from the first, that Bill.
All you Robertson men are made that way, that’s my theory.
But the way I figure it, Bill opened his heart once in his life, and his daddy couldn’t help but crush it.
He was never the same, after that. Neither of them were, I don’t think. ”
“Him and…Lucy?” Will isn’t sure why he’s asking. Half of him is entirely certain he doesn’t want to know. “Whoever she was?”
“Bright girl,” Mrs. Cardini says, in the tones of a fond reminiscence.
“Bill brought her ’round to the house a few times—think he wanted to show her off to us, since he knew his own father wouldn’t approve.
Whip-smart, she was, and out of his league by a mile.
It was a shame. She’d have been good for him, steadied out that temper, balanced out his foolish side.
I tried to tell Old Bill, but he never did take anybody seriously, especially back then. No talking to him.”
“Not to either of them, really,” Will says, a little wryly.
“Oh, Bill wasn’t so bad,” Mrs. Cardini says, waving a hand.
Then, at the expression on Will’s face, she says, “All right, all right, I’ll grant you—he wasn’t exactly in the running for Father of the Year.
But there were times, when he was young, when he might have gone a different way.
I prayed on it, but…oh, you never know, do you?
How things’ll work out, or why. That Lucy brought out the lighter side in him, I know that.
He and June made each other so unhappy, I think, that they both forgot how to get there for themselves. ”
“Why didn’t Old Bill like her?” Will asks. “Lucy, I mean. I think he liked my mother fine, or at least as much as he liked anyone. More than he liked my dad, maybe.”
“I always thought so, too,” Mrs. Cardini says, with a sad little laugh.
“The curse of the Robertson men, though, isn’t it?
Their own fathers—” She pauses, looking suddenly and uncharacteristically stricken, as the words “don’t like them” seem to hang in the air, for all she hasn’t spoken them aloud.
Will offers her a little nod, both acknowledging the truth of this unsaid statement and, though it’s odd to feel like he has this power with her now, allowing it.
She lets out a breath, looking relieved, and continues.
“Anyway. Lucy was a student in Columbus; I don’t remember now how she met your dad, but they made it work almost a year, kept it real quiet.
But they kept it quiet because she’d been accepted early to some fancy graduate program—somewhere New Englandy, if I’m remembering right.
Doesn’t matter, anyway; she was going away and Bill wasn’t supposed to.
Stupid, since probably she would’ve been willing to come back if he’d stuck it out with her for a few years up north.
Old Bill wasn’t a farsighted man, though.
He thought Bill should settle down with a nice local girl, grew up here, knew what she was doing, just like he did, and like his father did before him. ”