Chapter 15 #3
Casey smiles, and makes a noise Will’s not sure how to parse, a low hum of not-quite-disagreement.
“Probably was. I don’t remember a lot of it all that well; in retrospect, I think my mental health probably took kind of a nosedive, and I should’ve stayed put before I went changing my whole life around.
But I just had to get out of there, so I pretty much drove three days straight across the country.
After that I promised myself I’d never do it again, get so attached to the idea of something, some possible future.
” He runs a hand through his hair, shakes his head.
“But then I ended up here. If you’re trying to get over a young woman, you really can’t get further away than helping out an old man, so I thought, for a while, that it was all fine.
I’d just stick to the farm, and to myself, and help your dad, keep any dating I did out of Glenriver, not that I did much.
I thought that way I wouldn’t get hurt again.
” He shrugs, a little despondent. “But then Bill needed so much help, and the whole farm did, too, and I’d worked enough construction jobs and handled enough broad-scale projects to see what needed to happen, so I just got to work.
It had to get done, right?” He pauses, and, wryly, adds, “My mom always says that’s my thing , when she sees me.
My ‘troubled life pattern,’ or however she phrases it—feeling like I have to be the one to do something, just because it needs doing.
Never quite manages to ask herself what might’ve made me that way, though. ”
“Oh, of course not,” Will says, waving a hand.
“Obviously, I’m no expert, but from what I hear, parents rarely do.
And God knows mine left me some fun little surprises like that; you should ask my friend Selma about my taste in guys sometime.
She’ll give you a whole master’s-level psychotherapy thesis on how I’m seeking out destructive patterns while the sheer enormity of the embarrassment drives me to drink. ”
“Spoken like someone very committed to disproving her thesis,” Casey says dryly.
“You shut up ,” Will says, but undercuts it by smiling at him without entirely meaning to. “But don’t, actually, because my point is, I get it. Thanks for telling me.”
“Oh,” Casey says, and blinks, and, to Will’s surprise, flushes slightly. “Well, sure. Thank you for…listening, I guess.”
“My pleasure,” Will says, and waits what he hopes is an appropriate amount of seconds before letting his curiosity get the better of him: “So did you like… happen to end up stopping here, in the end? From Boise? That’s crazy ?—”
“What? Oh, no,” Casey interrupts, shaking his head. “That would be crazy, but, uh, I saw the billboards for Cedar Point—you know about Cedar Point, right? ”
Offended, Will draws himself up to his full sitting height and says, “ Excuse me? Of course I know about Cedar Point. I did grow up here, nobody makes it out of Northern Ohio without at least one trip to?—”
“All right, all right, I get it,” Casey says, laughing now.
“The point is, I was there, and I saw an ad for this place and—I know how stupid this sounds, by the way, but it’s the truth—I liked the name.
Robertson Family Farms. I know it’s dumb, but that’s what I wanted, what I felt like I’d lost, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.
” His mouth twists, and he adds, sounding sorry about it, “But then I got here, and the ‘Family’ in ‘Family Farms’ was just this one old man, clearly in over his head, couldn’t even afford to staff the place because sales were so low.
I talked him into hiring me as counter help and just started—fixing stuff.
Making it work better.” Casey shrugs, looking away.
“We… Sorry, Will, but we got on pretty well, me and Bill, right from the start. I don’t want to rub it in, that the two of you—that it was so?—”
“Oh, God,” Will says, waving a hand and pulling a face.
“You don’t have to do that; it’s fine. I figured you probably did.
” He meets Casey’s eyes and, slightly more honestly, says, “Okay, I mean, it might have made me go for your throat two weeks ago, but I don’t mind so much now.
I guess.” Will pauses, chews his lip, clears his throat.
“I guess I’m glad he had someone he did get along with, in the end.
Someone to help.” Finally, and so honestly it’s a little agonizing, he adds, “And, I mean. No offense or anything, but I’m still pretty glad that person wasn’t… me.”
This does make Casey laugh, a proper laugh, and when he finishes, he says, “Yeah, that’s fair. Probably helped that I wasn’t blood—less history, right? And different stakes.” He looks at Will, and sighs. “Speaking of which, that’s the other thing: the dementia.”
“Yeah,” Will says, his voice low. “From what you’ve said, and what I remember from my grandfather, I kind of figured it probably—came up, between the two of you? I have to imagine at a certain point it would have been impossible for it not to.”
“I should have called you,” Casey says, quiet.
“I’m sorry—the first day I realized Bill had living family, I should have found your number, or your email, or whatever.
Before he got diagnosed, probably, right when I first moved in with him to make sure he didn’t hurt himself in there alone.
But definitely when he got diagnosed and I started making decisions.
That wasn’t right. They were your calls to make, if they were anyone’s, and at the very least you had the right to know.
But…Bill didn’t talk about you, except, uh.
Except when he was…a little confused, right, about who he was, and who I was, and when…
it was, overall. There were a couple of times he said things to me and I knew he was talking to you.
And, well, between that and the people in town I asked about what happened—they were all perfectly polite, you know, but they all said things like, ‘Oh, better to leave well enough alone there,’ and in retrospect they were trying not to out you, probably, but.
” Casey takes a deep breath, squares his shoulders, and, like a confession, says, “I got the impression that you were, maybe, a mean and spiteful person who willfully turned his back on his family and wouldn’t want to hear from me. ”
“Ah,” Will says, surprised to find he feels oddly sanguine about all of this. Perhaps even, dare he say it, slightly amused, if in a grim, maudlin way. “Well, I gotta say: That checks out.”
Casey’s eyebrows shoot to his hairline. “Really? You don’t want to, I don’t know, punch me in the mouth for making that decision without you? For deciding you were a jerk and then acting accordingly, without bothering to find out?”
“Nah. I’m not a violence-oriented person,” Will says, after a second’s thought.
“Why attack something when you could put it under a microscope instead, you know? Also, I mean, in the days after I met you, I may or may not have told someone you moved here from your previous address of Satan’s Butthole, so.
I’m not sure anyone comes out of this totally innocent. ”
Casey laughs again, and then surprises Will by saying, “It wasn’t my last address, but I did live in Hell for about six months once,” and they lose about ten minutes to a discussion of Hell, Michigan, a place Will has always wanted to visit.
Casey, who had moved there primarily because he thought it would be fun, later in his life, to be able to say that in his youth he’d worked in Hell’s gift shop, seems to have wonderful memories.
It’s nice, to hear him talk for a moment about wonderful memories, the cool people he met, the dear friends he made.
Will knows enough—about life, about the people involved, about how these things usually go—to know that what’s to come won’t be an easy listen.
He wants to hear it, anyway, though; in some ways, he feels like he came all the way down here, got trapped here, spent all this time stuck here, just to hear it.
So when Casey winds down in his recollections, Will steadies his palms against the sun-warmed metal of the truck bed and, quietly, says, “Will you tell me what happened? With Bill, at the end?”
And Casey sighs, and nods, and does.
Will takes in the story as best he can, although it’s a little helter-skelter, both in terms of Casey’s telling and in terms of Will’s internal experience of the words.
He can almost feel some little part of himself running around in the back of his mind, trying frantically to file everything that’s coming in and, finding no place to put it, becoming slowly buried in a heap of new information until nothing but one twitching finger is visible.
And he knows, even as it happens, that he’s putting pieces of it away incorrectly, in places that they don’t go.
That, weeks from now, he will reach for something little and barely related, like the name of a particular brand of cereal Bill happened to like eating, and be walloped, gut-punched, by a wave of nauseating sadness and grief.
It’s that kind of story; it’s that kind of day.
Will thinks that once it would have really upset him, but here in the heart of autumn’s vibrant, dying resplendence, he feels calm, at peace.
Things hurt, sometimes, even when you don’t expect them to, or wish they wouldn’t.
Things hurt, and you feel it, and you carry on.
What else is there? What other choice does life offer?