Epilogue #2
He doesn’t mind the walk. In fact, he’d had Meredith drop him off here with the goal of walking, after a leisurely birthday lunch and a long chat in the upstairs office at Gunderson’s.
It’s become something of a tradition in the last few years, for his birthdays and hers, to do a bit of a Year in Review; the results are always hilarious, and often oddly heartwarming, and it reminds Will of their teenage years in a way that brings him a small, almost comforting pang.
Back then, every birthday had felt like turning a page in a new, exciting book, breathless with excitement to see what was going to happen, and they’d celebrated together by imagining what the next chapter would hold.
Now that Will’s reached that awkward point in his life where he’s probably read at least as much of the metaphorical book as there’s remaining to go, it’s nice to look back on the year he’s left behind him, savor it for the utterly singular delicacy it was.
Will takes, now, the route he would have taken as a teenager, ignoring the various objections his adult self has woolgathered over the years, to petty things like “trespassing” and “traffic laws” and “not climbing the fence into someone’s vegetable garden just because it will save you .
27 seconds of walking time.” He cuts across the Northside Creek, and walks briefly the wrong way up Poplar Road, before he grins and, for the first time in twenty-plus years, cuts through what used to be old Mrs. Quincey’s yard.
No one’s lived here since before Will left, Mrs. Quincey having died sometime around Will’s fifteenth birthday and the house having slipped into the kind of chaotic mess of disputed wills and mismanaged estates that leads a place to fall to ruin.
Her farmhouse, which had been cut from a similar cloth to Will’s own home, is dilapidated now in a way that would have horrified the old woman.
Will hadn’t known her well, but what impression she did leave was all rooted in the pride she took in keeping her home and garden pristine.
Well, that and the truly pervasive, utterly inescapable scent of mothballs.
Feeling slightly guilty about the mothballs thought, Will smiles to notice that the old woman’s prize-winning rosebushes are still here.
They’re wilder and more unkempt than Will remembers them, certainly, but they’ve survived all the same, the fancy varietals cross-pollinating with one another to create all sorts of interesting one-off blooms. Intrigued, Will can’t help but pull out his pocketknife—an anniversary gift from Casey, a few years ago now—and take a couple of cuttings, careful to carry them without gripping the thorns.
The blooms are lovely, and Will’s interested to see if he can reproduce them if he plants these at home, or if they’ll just default back to whatever their base varietal was once separated from the thicket.
He turns before he carries on and looks back at the old place: the holes in the roof, the broken glass in the windows, the way nature is creeping up, as she always does eventually, to reclaim whatever territory humanity will cede.
This might have happened to his own farmhouse, once a prison and now a paradise; it might have happened to the ancient barn, now a beloved local petting zoo, or to the collection of ill-maintained outbuildings, replaced now by Will’s perfect, exactingly constructed laboratory.
The thought twists Will’s heart in his chest, but even as it does, the vines crawling up the support beams of the porch, the grasses shooting up from between the floorboards, bring him solace.
The apple trees, at least, would have figured it out.
He walks the rest of the way home humming, an old song he hardly remembers the words of, but that he’d liked when he was young.
As he goes, he can almost imagine the teenage version of himself walking with him, slouched and awkward, cringing away from the world before he could disappoint it; the Will of today walks with his shoulders back, his head high, an ease in the swing of his arm and the bend of his leg that’s hard to quantify, but undeniable.
He wishes he could reach through time and speak to that version of himself and offer—well— anything .
A glimmer of hope; a glimpse of a better future; a good long hug, maybe, if nothing else.
On the other hand, he’d had to live through that part of his life to get to this one. So maybe better to leave well enough alone.
Twilight’s starting to fall in earnest when Will gets back.
The Robertson Family Farms sign is lit up tonight, in preparation for the Halloween Fright Night event Casey cooked up a few years ago; as he always does, Will gives it a slightly wistful smile.
He’d thought so hard about changing the name that sometimes he still expects to see Reeves Family Farms, or just Reeves Farms, or even R it was safer, that way. A place was better equipped than a person to bear them.
Will’s a better Reeves than he ever was a Robertson; he proves it as he walks around the front half of the property, checking in on employees setting up for the event, and customers heading out for the day, and making sure everything’s all right at the market before he actually goes home.
That wasn’t the Robertson way; the Robertson way would have been to bellow that everyone better be doing their jobs before sitting to sulk on the porch.
It’s a wonder to Will these days that anyone could have spent so much time sulking here, in this place, where joy seems to flutter out of every crack and crevice if you just know how to look for it.
But then, Will knows, they hadn’t known how to look for it, or how to cup it gently in their hands when it did dare to approach them, instead of stomping on it or scaring it off.
As he walks through the little grove of trees that separates the rest of the farm from the house, Will looks for his own joy, and finds it.
Casey is backlit in the kitchen window, aproned and streaked with something that looks like chocolate; Will grins, biting down on a laugh, and shakes his head.
Casey’s no chef and even less of a baker, having grown up nearly entirely on things like TV dinners and Hot Pockets and pizza; he’d confessed to Will, sometime around the six-month mark of their relationship, that he’d been in his early twenties before he realized that cake did not, traditionally, come from a box.
But in spite of this, every year he determinedly pulls up a recipe—never, Will has noticed, the same recipe twice, not that he’s judging or complaining in any way—and attempts to make Will a birthday cake.
It’s never once been a beautiful birthday cake, and the first two years it was neither beautiful nor edible, as in the first case Casey had mistakenly used salt for sugar, and in the second, he’d forgotten it in the oven until it was more or less charcoal.
But these last few years he’s managed to produce something that tastes quite good, provided you don’t mind that it looks as though it was assembled by a couple of half-drunk raccoons.
Will doesn’t mind if his cake looks like it was assembled by a couple of half-drunk raccoons.
He hadn’t even minded the inedible ones; blowing out the candles on that charcoal cake, gripping Casey for dear life as they both howled and wheezed with laughter, was and remains one of Will’s favorite birthday memories, something he reaches for in moments he feels grim about getting older.
It’s why he’s so sure that whatever Casey’s made, this will be another of his favorite birthdays, as all his birthdays with Casey seemingly are.
They’ll have dinner, and cake, and the dinner might be a little over-seasoned and the cake might be a little malformed and that will be lovely, and perfect, and just right.
Casey will tell him some absurd story from his day and Will won’t be able to help laughing; Will’s own stories, which Casey will be genuinely interested in, will fall out of his mouth without his even meaning them, too, pulled loose naturally by Casey’s easy, comfortable curiosity.
And then, afterwards, they’ll go back down to the front of the farm and join their friends and neighbors, who will be singing, and laughing, and dancing.
They’ll build a bonfire, a local tradition of sorts since the flood that had the good grace to trap Will here and force him to see what was in front of him; in the flickering orange glow of the firelight, Casey will wrap an arm around Will’s waist, put his chin on Will’s shoulder, and let Will lean back against him.
Together, they will exchange greetings and pleasantries with the people they’ve come to know and love, who have come to know and love them.
Some of those people will say, “Happy birthday, Will!” and some of them will just smile and nod, but no one, not one of them, will look at him like they were hoping to see someone else.
As Will stands there, Casey, in the kitchen, looks up, sees him, and grins.
He lifts his spatula to his chest in mock-shock and waggles his eyebrows salaciously, as though he’s caught Will doing something scandalous; Will snorts, and rolls his eyes, and grins back at him as he starts walking again, eager to get inside.
And as he takes the porch steps two at a time, a memory springs up like the grasses bursting from between the cracks in Mrs. Quincey’s rotting wooden floorboards: that night in the bar with Selma, half a decade ago now, where she told him he wasn’t a happy person.
At the time, Will hadn’t quite been able to believe her, although he hadn’t quite been able to mount a defense, either—it had just seemed like such a ridiculous notion, such an absurd, impossible thing.
No one , he’d been sure, was really happy, was walking the world with a song in their heart and a spring in their step every bright blue day of their blissful, blessed life.
Even Selma wasn’t happy, at least when she’d asked—these days, two years into a serious relationship with someone she met on a lesbian cruise, Will thinks maybe she is.
But back then, at least from where he was standing, happiness wasn’t realistic, and so, as far as Will had been concerned, the idea that it might be achievable simply wasn’t a hypothesis that merited further study.
After all, Will encountered miserable people every day: in his job and daily routines, in the halls of his apartment building, in passing on the street.
The world was brimming with miserable people; miserable people had raised him.
It had just seemed like the better part of rationality, at least in that arena, to avoid shooting for the metaphorical moon.
So Selma had been right, at the time. She’d been right about William Josiah Robertson IV, who’d been unhappy so long as to have confused despair for neutrality and loneliness for safety, who was comforted by the familiar touch of a harsh word.
He had, no doubt, been an unhappy person.
Probably, if Will could go back in time and ask them, it would turn out that none of the previous William Josiah Robertsons were happy people—that they were all lugging along the same old, tired sack of broken garbage, insisting that it was their treasured birthright.
But Will hasn’t answered to that name in years.
He’s Will Reeves, and he isn’t happy every minute of every day; life’s still harsh and bitter sometimes, overwhelming, exhausting, hard to bear.
He still wakes up some mornings with dread thick in his throat, anticipation for a punishment that isn’t coming pounding in his ears, and has to wince his way gingerly into his day.
But no matter how complicated, or unanticipated, or downright screwed up that day happens to be—no matter how irritated Will ends up, how physically spent, how twisted up in the sweaty bedsheets of his own anxieties—Casey’s still there, offering a hand or a smile, whistling a tune under his breath.
There’s still a chance for Will to reset, to take a beat, to hear that smooth, beloved baritone remind him that he’s not alone.
There’s still the way Casey always grins and shrugs like it’s nothing, whatever’s gone wrong, and says that they’ll figure it out together.
That there’s going to be another opportunity, when the sun breaks in through their bedroom window tomorrow morning, to run at it all again.
In five years, Will can’t remember a day he hasn’t laughed. He hasn’t bothered asking Selma lately if she thinks he’s a happy person; though he’s sure she’d be thrilled to offer an opinion, he’s pleased enough knowing the answer for himself.