Chapter 1 #2
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” The voice, for some reason, had started to sound a little annoyed; Will had found that quite irritating. After all, it was his father who’d died. And he’d been even more annoyed when, dryly, the voice had added, “I guess I figured you probably already knew his name.”
“I was only checking you had the right person,” he’d snapped back, nettled.
“It would be silly to get down to mourning my father if you were calling to report the death of a Greg Robertson, wouldn’t it?
Not that I have so much mourning to do; he isn’t much of a father.
Or… God. Wasn’t much of one, I guess.” Briefly, Will had felt the floor give out under him, the wrongness of that sentence skittering up his spine and chilling him stone-cold.
Then he gathered himself enough to add, tightly, “Thanks for telling me he’s dead—good to know. Was there anything else?”
At this, the voice had taken on a note of disgust. “You don’t want to know what happened? Or about the funeral arrangements? Or anything? Seriously? He was your father!”
And this, unfortunately, had been a step too far for Will.
Perhaps it was a little glimmer of grief remaining for an old man he himself had lost more than fifteen years before; perhaps it was the audacity of this man, whoever he was, to say this to Will at this moment.
He’d lost control of his temper; he’d snapped, “Who even are you? You’re right that he was my father, so I think I get to decide how I feel about him dying, thank you very much!
In fact, you might say I’m the only person who does, since I don’t have any siblings and my aunts and uncles are dead, and the last funeral I went to was my mother’s!
Where, by the way, my father demonstrated for what must have been the thousandth time that he wouldn’t spit on me if I was on fire, so!
I don’t actually care about your opinions, whoever you are, and you can bury him yourself if it means that much to you.
Goodbye.” And then, furiously, he’d hung up.
It had taken Will some time to cool down, but he had, over the course of several days, begun to feel rather badly about the whole incident.
After all, it was probably some hospital worker, who in all likelihood simply had the misfortune of being there for Bill’s…
well, for whatever had managed to take him down, in the end.
A rage-induced heart attack remains Will’s best guess, and probably one triggered by something that most other people wouldn’t be remotely bothered by.
Regardless, it wasn’t the person on the phone’s fault that Bill wasn’t ever exactly Father of the Year, and, guiltily, Will had tried to call back and apologize. But the number had been disconnected, and so he’d shoved the incident to the back of his mind and tried to forget about it.
Not interested in explaining all this to Selma now, Will says, “Anyway, honestly, after my mom’s funeral, I wouldn’t have gone even if they had invited me. I was planning to just roll on with my life, but…”
“But?” Selma’s tone has a dangerous note of foreboding in it; nevertheless, Will has no choice but to forge ahead.
“Well,” he hazards, grimacing dramatically and tightening his grip on the steering wheel for fortitude, “it turns out that, um… I may have… uh… inherited the farm? After all?”
“YOU INHERITED THE FARM?!” Selma shrieks this so loudly that one of the rental car’s speakers refuses to render it, spitting out static before settling down again. “The farm you—that your dad… But you… When?”
“Uh, I mean, technically when he died,” Will admits, “but I, um… missed some phone calls and letters and stuff, so I didn’t find out until two weeks ago?
And…” Will swallows hard but then forces himself ahead on the theory that he might as well rip the whole Band-Aid off in one go.
“I’m going back to Ohio because there’s someone who wants to, uh…
buy it? So I wanted to give you a heads-up since you are—technically, you understand—my lawyer.
Since I will, uh… want you to look over the paperwork, and everything. If you don’t mind.”
There’s a pause. In this pause, Will passes below yet another utterly absurd billboard—he has to wonder how much this Catherine Rose woman is spending on billboards.
This one doesn’t have her slogan or her eyeballs or her face on it: It’s just the outline of her cat-eye glasses against a completely white backdrop, hovering huge over the highway.
Will’s slightly horrified to even recognize them as an ad for this woman, but he has to admit, he does.
Then a series of odd, breathy noises begins on the other end of the line, the sound slightly reminiscent of Darth Vader.
“Sel?” Will says, a little concerned in spite of himself. “Did I actually kill you here? Why are you breathing like that?”
“I am… Lamaze breathing,” Selma says, through what sounds like gritted teeth. “It’s helpful… for stress relief.”
“Why do you know Lamaze breathing?”
“Because I dated a pregnant woman in 2014,” Selma snaps, all traces of Lamaze breathing abruptly abandoned.
“You wouldn’t remember this, because you were lost to me in studying for one of the stupid letters after your name, but she was wonderful.
For three months, anyway. After that she tragically rolled right on back to Terrible George, who we can all agree deserves fate’s cruelest agonies—”
“Oh, sure, death and ruination to Terrible George,” Will agrees readily, despite, indeed, remembering almost nothing about the year in question beyond winning the university record for “Most Often Found Asleep in the Library.”
Selma takes a deep breath, and then picks up her sentence as though Will hadn’t spoken at all.
“—and because he was never around, I used to take her to Lamaze class, and also it doesn’t matter, because the Lamaze breathing isn’t helping, because what do you mean you inherited an enormous piece of property and you are on your way to make a land deal and your father died and I haven’t looked over anything and—”
“Look, Sel, I’m sorry, I know you’re going to hate this,” Will says, and makes an unhappy face out at the road.
“But I did, uh, mostly make this call to loop you in, so you wouldn’t, um, kill me?
For not telling you about it? But I think—I think this is one of those things I just sort of have to handle…
myself?” As he expected, Selma makes a furious, wordless noise of disagreement.
Hastily, before she can start talking and inevitably, as she always does when she puts her mind to it, convince him to see it her way, Will continues, “But you know what’s so wild, is that if you look in your mailbox when you get home from work, some lunatic will have left you a gift card for a spa weekend!
On him! To apologize for dropping all this on you last minute!
At that stupid expensive place you like so much even though he’s told you a thousand times that you can get a better, cheaper massage at his favorite spot across town!
Crazy, that guy. No impulse control at all.
Speaking of crazy, service out here is nuts, sorry about this and, uh, me.
Call you later?” He hangs up on the sound of her outraged squawk.
Will doesn’t relax until his phone stops buzzing with calls and messages from her, which takes about fifteen minutes.
Only when a full sixty seconds has passed without a remonstrative rattle from the cupholder does he let out a long breath and turn up the radio.
He and Selma have been friends a long time, and she knows he has a tendency to isolate and withdraw when things get intense.
She doesn’t like it, but she’ll forgive him, the way he forgives her for what she tends to do when things get intense, which is usually more along the lines of getting into a fight at a Cubs game.
A thin tendril of guilt reminds Will that the reason Selma doesn’t like it when he does this is because she cares about him, and wants to help. He pushes it down and lets himself sink back into the drive.
He’s always liked to drive, from the very first time he learned.
He must have been—oh, ten or eleven, probably.
It hadn’t been a real car, just the farm’s old tractor, barely clinging to life and only going about fifteen miles per hour on its best day.
Still, the principles were roughly the same, and the first time he got behind the wheel of an actual car, he’d known that it was for him.
His father’s worn-down old pickup had complained every mile of every drive, but Will had loved it anyway: When he was behind the wheel, he was briefly but beautifully in control of the world around him.
Will doesn’t need a car in the city; he chose his current place quite carefully, about seven years ago.
He walks to work, which is six blocks from his apartment, and to the grocery store, which is four blocks from his apartment, and, in theory, to the gym, which is nine blocks from his apartment, although he almost never bothers to go.
Selma’s apartment is about three minutes from his, and most of their favorite bars and restaurants are within easy walking distance.
Anywhere else Will goes, he takes public transportation, or, if he has to, calls a taxi, and it’s not like he goes that many other places, anyway.
His life is small, with limited variables and little, at least outside of his upsettingly poor taste in men, that can upset his equilibrium. That’s the way he likes it.