Chapter 15
No sooner had they stepped onto Main Street than they saw a carriage—really more of an open-air wagon with a roof and several rows of bench seats—hitched to two large horses, which meant Rachel was gone. She went straight to the driver and asked if she could pet them, quickly progressing from rubbing the bridges of their noses with her hands to nuzzling cheek to cheek with the one who seemed especially receptive to her. Logic dictated that the carrots the driver gave her to feed them had something to do with their instant connection, but Will believed it would’ve been impossible for the horse not to pick up on how much genuine affection this human was displaying.
While Rachel loved on her new friends, he hung back and made a quick email check. Beatriz had said she’d write back that day, but with the three-hour time difference, there was a good chance she wasn’t even at work yet. Still, he wanted to verify there was nothing there, no details officially confirming Rachel’s interview that would officially start the countdown to when he had no choice but to tell her.
The relief he instinctively felt upon seeing that the inbox was empty made him nervous for what he’d feel when it wasn’t.
He put his phone away and refocused on getting a sense of the downtown. The no-car thing was apparent immediately. Most people stuck to the sidewalks on either side of the street, but there was also a good amount of drifting out into what anywhere else would’ve been two lanes of traffic. Here, all you had to navigate as a pedestrian were the horses and the bikes. So many bikes, in fact, that they had their own designated parking areas along the curbs. These strips were much narrower than what you’d get for parallel parking cars, and unlike when trying to squeeze in between an F-150 and a Prius, double- and triple-parking with the bikes seemed to be not only tolerated but expected.
The ferry had deposited them on one edge of downtown, such that if they went left, the stores and restaurants would soon give way to historic homes and inns and views of the lake—Huron in this case, as the Straits of Mackinac between the Upper and Lower Peninsulas mark the transition from Lake Michigan. But if they went right, the colorful downtown buildings, no more than a few stories high, would close them in on either side. It was sunny and warm that day, but Will still thought it looked like a town you might find in a snow globe.
Rachel started back toward him, and he noticed the Marquise’s sign not that far behind her. He’d missed it the first time he’d glanced in that direction, but it was right where the downtown started to thin out, probably with some sort of seating on the water that he couldn’t see from where they were standing.
“Okay,” Rachel said when she rejoined him on the sidewalk, “their names are Crayola and Pastel, and they’re brothers, and I want them.”
“How do they feel about apartment living?”
“Surprisingly open, although they were a little concerned about the bathroom situation.”
There was a spot on the street a few yards away that had yet to be cleaned, illustrating the reasonableness of this concern.
“Smart animals,” he said.
“Told you.”
Will and Rachel began walking, joining the crowd casually making its way along Main Street, which sloped gently upward as they went. This was the first pass through, so it was something of a window-shopping reconnaissance mission as they spied the shops they might want to return to. Rachel mentioned perhaps getting a new pair of Birkenstocks, Will pointed out a small bookstore that looked cool—that sort of thing. The number of bike-rental locations per capita was predictably higher than anything they’d ever seen. But make no mistake:
This was a confectionery town.
“I feel like there’s a lot of fudge,” Will said.
“Like a lot a lot of fudge.”
They kept going, eventually emerging from the downtown area on the other side at a large green space, where a steep hill to the left led up to Fort Mackinac. They remarked on what a great view it must be from up there while silently congratulating each other on being the type of people who would never subject themselves to that extreme of a climb simply to look at some water.
Past the fort, they followed the road through a mix of smaller hotels and private residences all the way down to the Mission Point District, where a resort marked the spot that the shoreline started to curve back in the opposite direction. Knowing that if they didn’t turn around here, they’d end up on the other side of the island, with a state park between them and all the places enticing them to spend their money in a montage of retail frivolity, they stepped off the sidewalk onto a patch of grass under a tree and stopped.
“What do you think?” Will said.
“It really is beautiful here. And so ... I don’t know ... chill. Even with people everywhere.”
“I had the same thought. I think it’s the lack of cars. It’s like literally not being able to rush off anywhere forces everyone to decompress more than even on a normal vacation. You could probably walk up to a total stranger and just start chatting with them about the best place to buy your fudge.”
“Nowhere should be that chill.”
“Hey, with great fudge comes great potential for awkward conversations,” he said, checking his phone. It was a little after 11:00 a.m., so they decided to head back and find somewhere to grab lunch.
“I can get on board with all these dogs, though,” Rachel said after they’d stepped around a pack of three Labs with two humans who were chatting. Another benefit of not having any cars around was that it did seemingly bring the dogs out in full force. In addition to their shared aversion to steep climbs with fleeting rewards, Will and Rachel subscribed to the theory that the higher the proportion of dogs to people in a place, the better its mojo.
Don’t peak in high school. Dogs are good. At least he knew a couple of things to teach this kid.
“You know,” he said, “since the horses expressed their reservations about our facilities, maybe we could get a dog instead.”
“I’d love that, but we can’t have something like a GSP in an apartment.” Rachel had grown up with a German shorthaired pointer. GSPs were a highly intelligent, midsize hunting breed with close to an unlimited reservoir of energy, and although her family didn’t hunt, Rachel measured every other type of dog by her memories of Pedey.
“Maybe we could get something a little less”—Will knew he had to be careful—“bouncy.”
“Eh, I don’t know,” she said, doing her best to conceal the true extent of her skepticism. “I guess I’d rather wait until we can get a bigger dog. And besides, taking one on when I’m about to have a baby doesn’t sound like our best idea. Not unlike trying to reinvent our lives in California.”
The thought of his emails with Beatriz exploded across his mind and temporarily halted all other brain function. He was just grateful his legs kept working and ensured he stayed upright.
It occurred to him that his panic then and his relief at the lack of email a little earlier were as telling of signs as any that the bad of what he was doing would outweigh any potential good, that he should tell her right then and there what he had been up to and pull the plug on the whole operation.
The Clemens house and the concert had already made her so happy. They’d had great—sorry, amazing—sex at their hotel, and he’d gotten so high in the car he’d advocated for a baby shower at the “real” Hogwarts. They’d even found little pockets of peace about what it would mean to be someone’s parents. Come clean now, and hopefully, they could just enjoy the rest of this unusually cool week he had planned for them.
But he couldn’t do that. It would’ve required admitting they weren’t going to have the life he knew Rachel deserved. That she was stuck in her boring job that he was reasonably sure she had had a dream about quitting. That outside of a week like this, their life might start feeling boring too—which would give them even more time to focus on all they didn’t know about parenting. And if she were going to be upset that he’d interfered regardless, shouldn’t he at least have confirmed the interview before telling her about it?
“I mean, it’s California, not Antarctica,” he said, regaining his mental footing enough to try to leverage some of the trip’s positive momentum into an acknowledgment that pursuing this job wouldn’t be the most preposterous thing ever. She’d said something similar about not reinventing things when she’d passed up New York after college. “It’s not like you’d have to figure out how to take a sled dog to the office or something.”
She laughed, which was encouraging. So was her not seeming suspicious of him bringing it up.
“No work talk,” Rachel said.
“You started it.”
“You’re right—my bad. How about pizza for lunch? I feel like I should get fish while we’re here, but the Marquise sounds fancy, so I think I’m going to save that for tonight.”
“Yeah, sure. I saw a place when we were walking through.”
They came up behind an elderly couple who were holding hands and walking especially slowly, so they veered out into the street to go around. When they got back onto the sidewalk, Rachel put one hand over her heart and grabbed Will’s with the other.
“How adorable was that?” she said. “Do you think we’ll be like that when we’re that old?”
“Of course.” He hoped he sounded convincing. Between worrying about how Rachel was going to react to him meddling in her career and worrying about five years from now if she was still at her university job because he didn’t meddle, he conceded to himself a more appropriate response might’ve been “Assuming we’re still together.” Rachel would’ve no doubt laughed at that, taking it as another joke. Which it was.
Except when it felt like it wasn’t.
“Speaking of pizza, do you remember talking about that last night?” Rachel asked.
“Pizza? No, I think that must be in the Smokey and the Bandit file.”
“It was actually before we got to the hotel. You were trying to explain to me how much better pizza is than hot dogs.”
Will attempted, and struggled, to give his high self the benefit of the doubt. “I mean, clearly pizza is better than hot dogs. But it seems like a strange thing to have an impassioned opinion about.”
“Oh, it was. But you were adamant. ‘It’s gooey and cheesy, Rachel; don’t you see?’”
“Did I say what the difference between gooey and cheesy was?”
“No, that remained a mystery. But when I asked you why you had such strong feelings on all this, you mentioned a phone call.”
“A phone call?” he asked once they had made it past a family reunion disjointedly debating where they could eat that could seat all of them.
“Yeah.” Rachel pulled her hand away. Will looked at her. “Sorry,” she said. “Too sweaty.”
“So much for our undying love.”
“I’ll always carry you ... in here,” she said, repeating her touch of the heart but with a healthy dose of schmaltz. “Anyway, you said your dad called you when you turned ten, and when he asked you what you did for your birthday, you told him your mom and Aunt Katie took you out for pizza.”
“Ha, yeah. There was an air hockey table there, and the two of them took turns playing me for like an hour after we finished eating.”
“You didn’t say that. But you did call him a bastard and tell me he had the nerve to go ‘Pizza’s no Reds dog, right?’”
Will went to respond. To remark that he hadn’t thought about that in years. To marvel yet again over how awful his dad could be or dismiss him with a simple “What a dick.” To reaffirm his appreciation for all the ways his mom and aunt had tried to make Will feel special even when the world was telling him he should feel anything but.
But just then, it was all a little too much.
“You didn’t deserve that, Will,” Rachel said quietly after he hadn’t spoken in a while. “None of what he did. None of it was you.”
“I know.”
“And none of it is you.”
“I know.”
“You say that, but sometimes I don’t think you really believe it.”
He got quiet again, not understanding how she could have such faith in him. Presumably his dad hadn’t set out to be a bad father. He just was.
Then there was his sister- and brother-in-law. Isa’s miscarriage had been two years before. She’d lost the baby when she was six months pregnant. First there was the heartbreak, which had been bad enough on its own. They’d just put the crib together the weekend before they found out. It had taken months for them to bring themselves to take it back apart.
And in those months, something had changed between her and Owen too. It wasn’t like either of them had blamed the other for what had happened. It was more that some sort of fundamental optimism about their life together, their marriage itself, had been snuffed out. Will had never thought they were a great match for one another, but they’d worked. Or at least they had. Now she was trying to convince him to go to marriage counseling, and he was refusing.
Will remembered his dad telling his mom the same thing a few months before he’d left.
The crowds were growing thicker the closer he and Rachel got back to downtown, and there were plenty of things to see and snippets of conversation to overhear. They spent several hundred feet on either side of a glittering white Catholic church looking for an opening to get around a man, in a Declaration of Independence T-shirt, lecturing his reluctant companions on the finer points of the surrounding architecture, which included misidentifying the church as a cathedral.
The group eventually turned down a side street, and Rachel and Will were able to resume moving at an average pace. Without saying anything, she took his hand again.
“I thought it was too sweaty,” he said.
“It is.” She looked over at him. “But you’re worth it.”