Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
It’s easy enough to tell Casey the first parts of the story.
He thinks, based on the way Casey nods and mumbles, “Mmm,” and “Yep,” that over the last two weeks, Casey’s maybe put a lot of what Will tells him together from context clues.
He doesn’t seem surprised when Will says that his childhood was less than idyllic, his parents far from warm, which, honestly, is a relief.
In spite of everything that’s shifted between them, Will had been more than a little afraid that Casey might jump to Bill’s defense, tell Will he should have been less selfish, cared more about family and farm.
There’s part of him expecting that even as he tells Casey the broad strokes of what life was like for him as a kid; that’s why he’s doing it.
He wants Casey to have a grip on that, at least a little, before Will gets into the specifics of The Final Night.
Will’s thought a lot about his childhood, over the years.
He hasn’t talked about it much, though, and most of the talking he has done has been either at the behest of mental health professionals, or while he hasn’t been entirely sober.
It’s harder, by a long shot, to spit the words out here in this truck with Casey than it ever was at the bar with Selma after too much tequila, or even in a therapist’s office.
At least, in a therapist’s office, you knew you could simply leave and never come back.
Not that Will couldn’t leave and never come back here, of course.
It’s his entire plan, and it has been the whole time.
It’s just that Will so desperately doesn’t want it to be the plan anymore that he’s ripping his heart from his chest piece by agonizing piece to place on the dashboard in front of Casey, that’s all. Nothing to get worked up about.
It helps more than Will would have guessed, that Casey knew Bill.
He’d expected it to go the other way, that Casey’s relationship with Bill would complicate this story the way it’s complicated so much else between them.
Instead, Casey’s understanding of Bill, if later in life and from an utterly different vantage point, allows Will to shorthand a lot of things he would have had to explain to someone else—that he has , in point of fact, had to explain to everyone else he’s ever discussed this with.
But to Casey, he can say, “So you know how my father could be when he really had something in his craw, right?” or “You know how Bill could really yell when he wanted to yell?” And Casey raises his eyebrows, making it clear that he does know even before he nods, which he always does, and…
And it’s a relief , Will realizes as he skates over being seven and eleven and fifteen, Casey following him easily as he sets this scene with half a dozen smaller ones.
It’s such an insane, absurd relief to talk about this with someone who knew him, let alone to talk about it without being cut off, shut up, told he’s wrong.
He wants to cackle with glee as he works his way through grim memories, which is an incongruous, almost sick feeling that becomes solely and exclusively a sick feeling when, as they’re pulling into the farm parking lot, Will reaches the summer he was eighteen, directly after high school.
“I…met a guy,” Will says, and flinches when it comes out, even now , in the tones of an admission .
He tries again: “I met a guy! At a club up in Cleveland that’s definitely closed now.
” Will sighs, still a little forlorn to think of the whole thing, although it makes him feel more than a little bit stupid.
“His name was Brandon, and he was my age, and had a car, and his parents were a little homophobic, and, obviously, my parents were a little homophobic, so, you know, for a while, it was perfect. We’d meet up in out-of-the-way little places, or he’d pick me up outside of town and we’d hang out in his car, or whatever. ”
“Oh, sure,” Casey says easily, waving a hand in acceptance of this. “I had a few boyfriends like that back in the day myself, although I was always the one with the car.”
“Increasingly, I’d believe you started driving as a toddler,” Will says, smiling slightly in spite of himself. “Sitting on a large pile of dictionaries to see over the steering wheel?—”
“Yep, that was me,” Casey confirms with a lazy grin. He’s put the car in park, and he turns to look at Will, his voice very dry, as he says, “I was on the news and everything. ‘Local driving savant, age three, towers over citizens on the freakishly long legs that allow him to reach the pedals?—’”
Will snorts, and then lets out a big laugh, and it, too, is a relief.
A relief to pause for a moment and feel something good before he plunges into the past, and all the thrashing, dangerous emotion that lives within it.
For a moment, he is as a dolphin on a clear, still night, poised on the dark lip of the ocean’s surface, pulling in one last long, blissful sip of air before slipping back down to the depths.
“How was Bill about you being gay?” Will asks the question abruptly, like he’s pulling off a Band-Aid, and then realizes too late that it’s presumptive, even offensive. “Or, sorry—not to just, like, assume that you’re gay. You could be bi, or, uh, God, what’s the other one?—”
“Pansexual is the word you’re looking for there,” Casey says, with an easy smile that spills into a laugh when Will grimaces at having not been able to think of it when it’s, quite clearly, the way Casey does, in fact, identify.
“Don’t sweat it, man—took me a long time to figure it out.
I came out as every other damn thing under the sun first, and honestly, even pan doesn’t feel quite right and usually I just say ‘queer.’ Didn’t come up with your dad much; the one time it did, I got the sense he wasn’t exactly comfortable , but he shrugged and said it wasn’t any of his business.
‘Live and let live,’ I think is how he put it.
” Perhaps in response to the suddenly thunderous expression on Will’s face, he adds, hurriedly, “Most of the time, though, I’m pretty sure he just, uh, forgot.
So I wouldn’t read into that too much or anything. ”
“ Live and let live ,” Will mutters bitterly to himself, so far under his breath he’s not sure Casey can even hear it over the purr of the still-running truck motor.
“Guess that figures.” Louder, and maybe a little too sharply, he says, “Well, I’m gay.
Known it about as long as I’ve known anything.
I think Bill knew it, too, on some deep level he didn’t want to look at too hard.
” Will swallows, and looks out the passenger window on old habit, his body hoping to see the soothing blur of passing trees even though his brain knows the car is in park.
Instead, he’s hit with nothing less than a perfect view of the Robertson Family Farms market, and he cringes as he fixes his eyes on the yellow door.
“I was never the son I was supposed to be.” Will says this to the cheerful new market door every bit as much as to Casey, as though the wood and glass and paint can hear him, as though it can apply some of the magic it used to change itself to change him, make what he’s confessing less true, or at least less painful.
“Or…I was never the son he wanted me to be, or he wasn’t the father I was supposed to have, or something.
We weren’t suited; it wasn’t a good fit.
He wanted Bill Robertson IV, another strong, strapping, outdoor-oriented man to carry on his legacy?—”
Will pauses, the words to this old story suddenly alien in his mouth, like when you repeat a phrase so often it loses its meaning and breaks down into a scattered mire of syllables.
What legacy, exactly, did Bill have to carry on?
Drummed out of the army, never happy in his marriage or in his work on the farm, constantly suffering the disappointment of his own hard-mouthed, disappointed father, and, if Mrs. Cardini is to be believed, heartbroken over a sacrifice he made at that disappointed father’s insistence— was that a legacy?
Could anyone, even Bill, want his son to follow in those footsteps?
And if that hadn’t been what Bill wanted, then…
“God, you know what, it was never about any of that,” Will says, his voice dropping to a point barely over a whisper in shock.
“All this time, I thought that I just didn’t cut it, that I wasn’t good enough—but ultimately, I did do everything he wanted me to do, all those years, didn’t I?
Even if I did it a little more slowly, or more thoughtfully, or more delicately than he would have, I did it all.
As a child , I did it. But it wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t ever going to be enough, because he didn’t just want me to be him.
He wanted me to be better than him, but if it ever looked for a second like I actually was, then…
God. Then he hated me for it.” Will shakes his head, hardly seeing the yellow door anymore, his mouth twisting.
“Mrs. Cardini said it this morning, or she almost did, anyway—that it was the curse of the Robertson men, to be disliked by their own fathers. And he didn’t like me: That’s the truth.
He didn’t like the ways I struggled, but he didn’t like the ways I succeeded, either.
He didn’t like my personality, or my sense of humor, or the way I did almost anything, even if it was exactly how he’d told me to do it.
” Remembering it at the last moment as relevant, but feeling it almost incidental, he adds, “Oh, and I mean. He didn’t like that I was gay, either, obviously.
He never came out and said that, but I never came out and…
well, came out, I guess, at least to him or my mother.
So, you know, it was all a lot of heavy implication, but there was no missing it. ”