Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
In the end, after several minutes of companionable silence and then several more minutes of slightly awkward silence, it becomes apparent to Will that they need—or, at least, he needs—to get off the truck bed and do something physical.
If he doesn’t, one of two things is going to happen.
The first, likeliest, and worst option is that the weight of what’s been said in the last few hours will come crashing down, and Will just doesn’t think he can take that right now.
On top of everything else, being flattened like a bug under the enormous, crushing shoe of his own emotions seems a bit too much.
The second option is that—faced with nothing left to say to one another and the nearly empty, perfectly serviceable bed of Casey’s pickup behind them—they might succumb to temptation, and try out the practicalities of the phrase “A roll in the hay.” Granted, it wouldn’t exactly be a roll in the hay so much as a roll in the hay, mud, twigs, leaves, dirt, and various tools, but Will doesn’t actually think that would be their biggest problem.
Their biggest problem would be that this is the market parking lot and it is Saturday morning , so anything they got up to would be giving the good citizens of Glenriver quite the show.
Even the ones who weren’t here to see it would have heard about it by the time Will next talked to them, and every one of them would have something to say, some joke to make, some comment about how Will’s the one who finally bagged him, eh?
The thought of that, just at this moment, is stomach churning, and yet Will is upsettingly sure that if he sits here much longer, he’ll lose sight of it entirely, too distracted by Casey’s gently parted lips, the jut of his square chin, the curve of his jaw.
Casey must come to a similar conclusion, because after a long, charged look at Will, he glances away and, somewhat sheepishly, says, “Hey, not to thank you for telling me all that with asking you to do a bunch of manual labor, but any chance you might, ah. Be willing to help me break that fallen tree down into mulch? I went and got the woodchipper from Greg three days ago, but it’s just sitting back there, next to where we hauled the stupid tree last week, because… well, because I’ve been lazy, mostly.”
Will groans, but good-naturedly, not meaning it, as he hops off the back of the truck. “I swear to God, nobody back in Chicago is going to believe me when I tell them how much of this trip I spent using a chainsaw.”
“Are you kidding? They’ll probably be jealous,” Casey says.
He hops down, too, closing the truck bed up before starting off in the direction of the outbuildings, glancing back briefly to make sure Will is following him and grinning when he is.
“I’d want to get my hands on a chainsaw if I spent all day in a cubicle. ”
“My coworkers don’t spend all day in a cubicle!
” Will says, and then, in the tones of an admission, has to concede, “But, it is. You know. A lab, so. A little sterile, I guess. And some of them probably would like to get their hands on a chainsaw, although…it might better if they very emphatically did not, especially in, uh. A few…notable cases. ”
“Mm,” Casey says, and, only half-jokingly, “sounds serious,” and Will, more or less accidentally, finds himself telling Casey about the flaws and foibles of his various colleagues as they walk to the far corner of the farm.
Casey’s just…upsettingly easy to talk to, that’s the problem, and before he knows it, they’ve reached the tree and the woodchipper and Will’s told Casey all of his fears about what his second-in-command, Bartholomew, gets up to while he’s away, but has not once cycled back to:
“Catherine Rose,” Will remembers, with a groan, as Casey reaches towards one of the chainsaws to start breaking down the tree trunk, which he more or less strapped whole to his truck and dragged down the road last week.
“God, I forgot to—look, I’ve been dodging her calls for the last two weeks, all right?
I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I know I don’t want to…
well, to screw you over, or anyone else, either.
I just need some time to think, and talk to my friend Selma—she’s a lawyer, you know—and I tried to talk to Mere and some of the other business owners in town, but?—”
“All clammed up on you, right?” Casey says, and shakes his head.
“That stupid company—I can’t prove it, but I’d bet anything they got the locals to sign something, promising them some payout if they go along, and making sure they know they’ll feel it if they opt not to.
When they first rolled into town, a lot of folks around here were on my side—Mere and Sandy, Noah Anderson, a lot of the older guard.
They said they didn’t want some outside corporation having such a significant stake in the town any more than I did, and if Nimbletainment did try to make an aggressive move for the farm, they’d vote down the business license when it came before the council.
” He sighs, rolling his shoulders back. “But, you know. Suddenly they were getting visits from your buddy Catherine Rose, and one by one, they all kinda faded out on me. Real awkward, every time, even with Mere— still , sometimes, you notice that? After everything? ”
“Yeah,” Will says, because he has. “Sometimes, it’s like she’s—embarrassed, I guess, is how it comes off.”
“I wish she wouldn’t be,” Casey mutters.
“It’s not her fault, and I don’t blame her.
I don’t blame any of them, you know? They’ve got kids and livelihoods, and they don’t know what I know; I couldn’t expect them to.
But if they did know, they wouldn’t accept the payout—it’s worthless in the long run. ”
“How so?”
“Oh, the festival will come in and take it all over,” Casey says, waving a hand.
His tone and body language are light; only the grim twist to his mouth, the tightness in his jaw, betrays how angry the very idea makes him.
“Seen it all before, in other little towns. They get enough space that it’s a big-deal venue, and suddenly, it’s, hey, why stick to holding a little festival once a year when they could have music playing here every weekend?
And, hey, that’s a cute local restaurant, but it’s a little far from the venue; why don’t they open one almost exactly like it, just a little bit worse, right on the venue grounds?
And, hey, it seems like the locals aren’t loving the constant congested traffic through town, and the way no one wants to bother coming out to Main Street on a night with a venue show, and people are starting to shutter their businesses after all—might as well buy that real estate up cheap, right?
Turn some of it into short-term rentals for festival-goers, and otherwise sell it out to big-name retailers, who don’t live and die on their weekly sales the way smaller operations do?
And hey, while we’re at it, who needs these old apple trees, anyway, right? ”
Casey’s breathing hard by this point, and he seems to realize it; he cuts himself off, and Will can almost see him reeling himself back in to say, trying unsuccessfully for nonchalance: “Or, at least, that’s how I’ve seen it go in the past. Maybe it’ll be different this time! But I doubt it.”
“Jesus,” Will says, alarmed. “Why didn’t you just say that two weeks ago? ”
Casey shrugs, discomfited. “Would you have believed me? Nobody else does, and they’re my friends and neighbors!
You were a stranger, and I had a…let’s call it an incorrect impression of you, on top of it.
” He casts a slightly helpless look at Will and adds, “And then I realized pretty quickly that I’d maybe gotten the wrong end of the stick from Bill, but I didn’t want to—I don’t know.
It felt like if I said something, it would all go wrong; it was all a lot more fun than I expected, honestly, and I couldn’t bring myself to ruin what I thought was—ugh.
” He scowls, and mutters, “Jesus, this isn’t coming out right.
In a lot of ways, we hardly know each other and I don’t want you to think I’m, Christ, expecting anything from you because of last night.
If it was just a one-off for you, a bit of fun before you go, then that’s?—”
“It wasn’t,” Will says, very quietly, because even for him, it’s hard to interpret that particular statement in a way that doesn’t line up, quite precisely and on a number of the more vulnerable particulars, to Will’s own reasons for not wanting to talk about it.
“Or, I mean… it was fun, it was really fun, but it wasn’t, uh.
Just fun. I—understand what you’re driving at, I think. I’ve felt…similarly.”
“Do you?” Casey says this sharply, and whips his head around to look at Will with such intensity that Will flushes. “ Have you?”
Still, flushed or not, Will can’t entirely help being his father’s son: His chin lifts defiantly, of its own inherited accord, even as he swallows hard and admits, “Yes.”
For a moment, they stare at each other, small in comparison to the corpse of the tree sprawled in front of them, and yet each of them seeming slightly larger, more substantial, than they did just a moment before.
Then Casey grins, wide and slow and lazy, and says, “Well, okay, then. I guess we should get to cutting this tree up, huh?”
“That mean I can stay?” Will asks this before he can even ask himself if it’s what he wants; he knows it is, though, the minute the words hit the air. “Until I decide what I want to do, anyway? I promise I’m not going to screw you over, at least not on purpose.”
“It’s your house,” Casey reminds him.
“I don’t know that it is,” Will says, shrugging. “Not by rights, anyway. You could make the argument that Bill promised it to you long after he told me to stop thinking of myself as his son—there’s a lot of people, I think, who’d hear this story and say it was yours.”