Chapter 13 #4
Will feels his eyebrows hit his hairline. “Wait, I’m sorry. So—actually, no, you know what, first: Are you sure you don’t know what kind of graduate program?”
Mrs. Cardini laughs at this, a hard, hearty cackle that makes her throw back her head, although with the slow, careful pace of the brittle elderly.
“Oh, honey, I am glad you came back to town,” she says, shaking her head as she calms down.
“It does an old woman good to laugh like that. You might look like your daddy, but you’re your own bucket of fish, and you always were.
I should let you get on, but don’t you be a stranger now, you hear me?
Just because that bridge’ll be up again today doesn’t mean you can run off for another age. ”
That’s a dismissal if ever he’s heard one, so even though he has about a billion more questions, Will nods. “I won’t. Thanks for the, um…update, I guess?”
Mrs. Cardini smiles at him and pats him lightly on the arm.
“Any time, William. You say hello to Casey for me, won’t you?
” Will feels himself blush bright red, suddenly sure the old woman can see every last thing he and Casey did to one another last night playing out in his eyes.
Certainly she’s grinning at him like she can, looking abruptly twenty years younger.
“Ah, I see . So maybe I don’t have to worry about you being a stranger after all? ”
“Goodbye, Mrs. Cardini,” Will says, all in one breath but in a flat, robotic monotone that must tickle her, since her peal of laughter follows him all the way out of the shop.
He must look slightly shell-shocked as he climbs back into the truck, because as Will passes him the maple latte and the turnover, Casey says, in sympathetic tones, “They doing that weird puppet show in there again? I hate the weird puppet show.”
“I—it—what?” Will says, badly wrongfooted by this.
“Uh, not…as such. No puppets. More of a ghosts of Christmas past situation.” When Casey slants him an interested look, Will relates the relevant details of Mrs. Cardini’s story, emphatically neglecting to mention what brought the topic up in the first place.
When he’s finished, a strange, half-irritated impulse compels him to add, “He never, uh…said anything about any of that to you , did he? About Lucy, or—I don’t know, I guess the other path his life might have taken? ”
“Can’t say he did.” Casey’s reply is thoughtful, and he taps his thumb against the steering wheel a few times, thinking.
Finally, like he’s not totally sure he should be telling Will, he says, “He did mention that name a few times, though. Not to me, exactly, so much as at me? He was—” Casey pauses, his throat working as he swallows.
“Especially the last few years, he’d lose track of where he was, when he was.
We’d have these arguments where he’d think I was other people.
And instead of replying to what I said, he’d reply to what they said.
Or what they had said, I guess, when it happened originally. ”
“Oh,” Will says, quiet. “Yeah, I—know what you mean, I think. Old Bill used to be like that, towards the end. He and my dad used to have the same arguments over and over, anyway, so half the time they’d already be screaming at each other before Bill realized Gramps was just rerunning a version of it from years before.
And God help you if you caught Bill after one of those wrapped up; he’d really let you have it.
Probably he just felt guilty or whatever, wanted somewhere to put it, but it was scary, you know, as a kid.
Unpredictable.” Will realizes he hasn’t thought about this in a long time, that he’d shoved it into a room in the back of his mind with which he has done more or less what his parents did to his bedroom: filled it with things he can’t bear to look at anymore.
“Anyway, sorry you had to deal with it. I know it can get…rough.”
Casey’s face twists into an expression Will can’t quite read, but all he says is, “Sorry you did. Probably easier for me; I wasn’t related to him. Or a child.”
“Thanks.” Will’s surprised and more than a little embarrassed by the way his voice cracks on it, but Casey doesn’t comment, just turns the radio back up and starts singing along.
Maybe it’s that, or that story he told about the song, his name; maybe it’s the way Will can’t stop turning over what Mrs. Cardini told him, the way pieces of that story slot so neatly over his own.
Maybe it’s just that Casey’s rich, warm voice seems to seep into Will’s cracks and crevices like so much wet clay, hardening as he sips his coffee into something not unlike resolve.
Whatever it is, when they’re about halfway back to the farmhouse, something in Will that has been splintering for years now finally, finally cracks.
A bough, perhaps, on the scarred, complicated tree of his life, that he’s cut and grafted together mostly by himself, and grown out of spite half the time—it hurts, feeling it break at last, but not as much as the blow that first cracked it did.
That blow was the first piece of a story that led him here, to this car and this man and this moment, wondering how on earth to begin telling it; Will had thought it was, anyway.
Now he thinks maybe the first blow was years earlier, before he was even alive.
Before his own father was alive, maybe. Perhaps it had been the very first Bill who had first lifted the axe, and all of them, ever since, have been telling that same old story he started for the sport of it, handing it down like an heirloom, or a curse.
And none of them, Will realizes, would ever have talked about it. None of them ever had; it was as obvious as anything else about them, that they couldn’t or wouldn’t engage that way, when the emotional chips were down. It wasn’t their way—it Wasn’t What Robertson Men Did.
But Will thinks he’s had just about enough of being a Robertson man. He takes a breath, and starts talking.