Chapter 1 #3
But it’s nice, now, to turn up the country station that broadcasts across the top half of the state and drive the long and only semi-familiar run of Route 90, catching occasional glimpses of a distant Lake Erie through the tree line.
Though it’s only barely October, still weeks to go before the very last green leaf gives it up and blushes, all the trees have at very least begun to flirt with their autumn colors.
The golds and oranges and maroons rush past Will in a blur, tugging at a thread in his chest he does his best to keep clipped short and covered.
There’d been a time when it meant something to him, this part of the year, that was deeper and more complicated than an appreciation for the beauty of the season.
There’d been a time when Will thought his life would, in one way or another, revolve around it, and it aches more than he would have expected to be here, a few weeks shy of thirty-five, decades into a very different existence.
In spite of this Will’s glad, as he guides the car through the labyrinthine highway system that skirts the edges of downtown Cleveland, that he decided to drive.
Will doesn’t relish the idea of being stuck in Glenriver, Ohio any longer than is necessary, and when he’d had to face down the reality of visiting, the thought of being at the mercy of an airplane, or a taxi driver, or anything but his own whims and urges to flee…
rankled. But now, even after he merges onto the yawning gray sprawl of Route 77, one of America’s most boring highways, Will is glad to have a steering wheel under his hands, an engine purring in front of him.
The ongoing onslaught of Catherine Rose billboards tempers the relaxation somewhat, but only somewhat.
Very much in spite of himself, they start to grow on him.
When he hits a run clearly inspired by Burma-Shave, a series of billboards all in a row, each printed with one word (Need—To—Close?
—Call—Catherine—Rose) until the final one, which is again that extreme close-up of her face—Will has to admit, he laughs.
He can’t help it. And credit where it’s due: While her marketing has not given him any real sense of what she does, it’s made him upsettingly interested in finding out.
Of course, there’s quite a lot he’s interested in finding out.
He’s realizing only now, in the tail end of the drive, that he’s not even sure what the plan is once he gets to the farm.
Someone named Zane had set it all up through a relentless series of phone calls, always identifying himself with some long title that boiled down to “Important, High-Ranking Assistant To Someone You’re Supposed To Have Heard Of.
” Whoever it was, Will hadn’t heard of them, nor of the company Zane mentioned as the party interested in buying his father’s farm, which had some silly name that sounded like something out of a nursery rhyme.
He’d been glad someone was interested in buying—no, that’s not the truth.
If he’s honest, he’d been glad someone else was steering the decision-making process.
When Zane gave him a date and time for a meeting at the property, sent over information on the hotel reservation and car rental, Will had agreed, even though the date was a Friday, and it would mean taking time off work.
He’d marked his calendar, and let the necessary people know, and packed a bag that sat by his front door for a week and a half before being scooped up, at last, this morning.
But it’s dawning on him right now that while he knows he’s meeting someone at the farm at three, and that the goal of that meeting is Will selling, that’s…
about all he knows. Zane told him more, he’s sure, he just, well… hasn’t retained much of it.
He considers calling Zane, and decides not to. The thought of confessing to that intense, tightly wound man that he hasn’t been listening to at least five phone calls is a bit much for Will to take, just now. He’ll have to hope whoever it is does the polite thing and introduces themselves.
Once he’s made it past the Cleveland suburbs, Will abruptly finds himself in better-known territory, highway exit signs changing from half-familiar to grounded in specific memories.
There’s the Akron exit, where Will’s father had blown a flat on the way back from the county fair and screamed blue murder the whole time he was changing it; there’s the sign for North Canton, next to which Will had forced his mother to pull over so he could be violently sick at age fifteen, after which he had been relentlessly accused of underage drinking right up until the moment he ended up in the hospital with acute appendicitis.
He smiles, not entirely happily, when he passes Canton proper—in high school Will used to end up there on weekend nights, sneaking out after his parents were asleep to meet up with guys who were probably too old for him in bars that probably should have turned him away.
He’s not far from Glenriver now, and the peace he’d found in driving abruptly abandons Will, leaving him instead with what feels like a writhing ball of snakes in the pit of his stomach.
He turns off on the exit that will eventually lead him to the farm, even the muscles in his forehead tensing as he drives down the objectively picturesque road.
The trees are showing off, towering and brilliantly colorful, alive with trilling birds and chittering wildlife busily preparing for winter; Will should be happy, really.
He should feel some connection to this place, the various ways in which its beauty is singular and sewn into the very core of who he is.
He doesn’t. He feels like he should have stayed in Chicago, but it’s a bit late for all that now.
As he reaches the bridge over the Glen River, Will has to pull over briefly to the side of the road.
It’s… He’s fine, of course he’s fine. He’s an adult and this is just a visit and it’s his farm now, anyway, at least for a few more days.
Everyone who could tell him otherwise is dead and buried and there’s no reason to be feeling this way at all.
Still. “Okay, Will,” Will says to himself, a little embarrassed at needing to hear it out loud.
“It’s just a couple days, right? It’s just a couple of days.
You’re going to go to the farm, and Dad’s not going to be there, and Mom’s not going to be there, and it’s going to be fine.
Okay? It’s going to be fine, and you’re going to be fine, and all you have to do is keep it together and not freak out.
You can do that, can’t you? Keep it together for a few days?
You have to meet with this person, and walk around a little, and send the paperwork to Selma, and sign it. That’s it. Okay, Will? Okay.”
As personal speeches to the self go, this is not one of Will’s more rousing efforts. But it’s enough, at least, to force him to put the car back into drive and pull it over the bridge, into the place where he was born.
Glenriver isn’t a particularly intimidating town.
That’s part of what makes it so galling for Will to be afraid of it; it’s like being afraid of a basket of kittens, or a little old woman showing off her quilting collection.
Surrounded by the Glen River on three sides and a large, privately owned forest on the fourth, it’s the sort of place that belongs on the front of a postcard.
The houses are far apart but quaintly old-fashioned, with the heart of the town centered around a white, high-steepled church that’s also the town hall and community center, and as Will drives down the main drag, he finds he can hardly see what is for what was.
He’s here, now, driving his tetchy little rental car, but he’s four and ten and sixteen, too, skinning his knee on that patch of sidewalk and picking up a splinter off that wooden fence, making a hash of a variety of sports in that large, open field.
When he reaches the turnoff for Robertson Family Farms, the bizarre, off-kilter sense of déjà vu is so intense that Will feels as though he might choke on it.
The sign marking the route to the farm is new, but Will blinks and it’s replaced by the ancient wooden one his great-grandfather constructed.
That thing had been a hazard, more than half-rotted, always harboring bees or wasps under its peeling blue-and-white paint, but Will’s mind can’t quite seem to accept that it isn’t there anymore.
It seems impossible that it could have fallen without the whole place falling, too—as though the farm should have crumbled up in the absence of this defining piece, the way a whole building can go if the wrong support beam buckles.
Will pulls into a parking spot and tries to get a grip on himself.
It’s just a place! A location! It doesn’t have to be all this—this—this other stuff, not if Will doesn’t want it to be.
This can just be a quick weekend getaway to make, as Selma put it, a land deal.
That sounds professional, doesn’t it? Like something someone with his life together would do?
So that’s what Will’s doing, and nothing else.
He definitely isn’t, for example, sitting in the parking lot of the family farm, near tears over a sign he once harbored very real fantasies of burning to the ground.
That would be ridiculous, and pathetic, and not logical at all.
Holding firm to this thought as his guiding principle, Will gets out of the car and takes a deep breath.
The air that rushes into his lungs might as well be laced with some sort of drug; he feels a sharp spike of euphoria as he drags it in, clean and crisp and scented with the faint, grassy sweetness of fresh-cut hay.
Maybe he can hack this, unwieldy sign-based emotions aside.
He’ll take a moment to appreciate it, to enjoy something about being in this godforsaken place, and then he’ll be able to—
A hand closes on his shoulder before he can finish the thought.
*
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