Chapter One #3
“I’d need more info,” Lena says. She likes watching Trey in the middle of this.
Trey spent her entire childhood on the defensive against Ardnakelty, which by age-old tradition considers the Reddy family to be more trouble than they’re worth, so she turned out on the solitary side; by the time she started discovering things like mates and messing, it was late enough that Lena wasn’t confident she’d get the knack.
She enjoys the evidence that she was wrong.
“Is this fella just a pretty face, or can he do anything useful? Talk ye outa hassle? Build a house? Bake cakes? Play the guitar?”
“Kate plays bass,” Ross says, and punches Trey in the arm. Trey and Kate both hit him back at once. Lena’s eyebrows go up.
“Hear that?” Aidan tells the rest. “She says I’m a pretty face.”
“She needs fuckin’ glasses.”
“Your ma needs fuckin’ glasses.”
“Your ma needs a time machine and a johnny.”
“Your ma needs deez nuts.”
A scuffle breaks out. Lena leaves them to it.
She likes teenagers, or this bunch of them anyhow: the wildness and messiness of them, the rocket-fueled energy shooting in every direction.
They fizz with the glorious knowledge that they’re untamable, that no rules, no matter how ferociously ingrained and enforced, are strong enough to hold them.
Lena, even while knowing that’s untrue, finds a deep pleasure in it.
She takes the opportunity, while they’re occupied, to have a proper look at Kate in the rearview mirror.
She’s seen Trey’s friends here and there, mostly at football matches, but none of them are from Ardnakelty, so they’re not kids whom Lena’s known since they were born and before.
Trey likes her life compartmentalized; it’s only recently that she’s been willing to allow even this much overlap.
Lena and Cal, aware that one slipup could have their privileges revoked, are careful.
Kate is tall and long-legged, with wide, cheerful features, a dark ponytail, and a smattering of freckles.
Lena knows nothing about her except that she plays defense alongside Trey and can hold her own amid this shower, which seems like a decent start.
She wonders what Cal will make of this, whatever this is.
She reckons she’ll have to talk him down from running background checks.
The scuffle has escalated to the point where Aidan is kneeling up backwards in his seat and Ciara, thrown sideways across the rest, is squealing.
“Quit that,” Lena says, raising her voice to carry over the noise, “or I’ll drive through a pothole and give the lot of ye concussions.
” Aidan gets in one final punch and sits down, and the back seat subsides to an undertone of snorts and snickers.
Lena slows the car down further. They’re out of the spruce groves and onto open mountainside, amid wide stretches of heather; one mistake could send her wheel into a bog.
“I’m useful,” Aidan tells her, returning to the original issue. “I swapped out the light fixture in the sitting room for my mam yesterday. That’s useful.”
“Does your dad know yet?” Kate asks.
“He was in there last night watching telly. I’d say he saw it.”
“Not the light fixture, you dope.”
“I’m gonna tell him.”
“He’s gonna lose the head,” Ross says.
“That’s why you oughta tell him now,” Kate says. “Give him time to lose the head all he wants, and then get used to it.”
“Aidan’s dad thinks he’s going onto the farm,” Trey explains to Lena. “Only he’s gonna be an electrician.”
“ ’Cause Ciara doesn’t like the smell of cow shite,” Ross says. Ciara hits him.
“I’m gonna tell him,” Aidan says to Lena. “Just waiting for a good time.”
“You’re grand,” Lena says. “I’m saying nothing.
I don’t even know your dad.” She understands his worry.
Unless Aidan has brothers, coming out as an electrician is likely to be a much bigger deal than, say, coming out as bi, or as an atheist. Regardless of how old-fashioned his dad is, a bi atheist farmer can keep the land in the family. Nothing matters more than that.
Lena’s phone rings. It’s Cal. Mostly Cal goes to Trey’s matches, but today he got press-ganged into helping the McHugh brothers cut back their hedges.
With the plowing only a few weeks away, farmers are using this time to trim and mend, getting their land in order for winter.
Sonny McHugh got pinned to a wall by a heifer and has one arm in a sling, so the McHughs are a man down.
“Here,” Lena says, putting the phone on speaker and handing it to Aidan.
“You hold that. And the rest of ye, keep quiet.”
“How’s she cuttin’?” Aidan inquires into the phone, in his biggest, deepest voice. The back seat dissolves into giggles.
“Hey,” Cal says. “That your fancy man?”
“He’s spoken for,” Lena says. “I’ll stick with you a while longer.”
“They win?”
“Yeah,” Trey says, disentangling herself from the rest to lean forward between the seats.
In spite of being sixteen, Trey is unembarrassed by Cal’s existence, possibly because he’s no actual relation to her.
“Three–two.” Kate throws in a whoop of triumph.
“This horse of a one was after me the whole time, trying to take the legs out from under me. I dodged and she went on her arse. She was yelling for a card, but the ref told her to get fucked.”
“Well, congratulations,” Cal says. Lena can hear the broad grin in his voice. “You get soaked?”
“ ’M grand,” Trey says. All of them got soaked, more or less. The car smells powerfully of steaming clothes, muddy boots, and body spray.
“You gonna be here for dinner, we can celebrate? I was gonna try making a soufflé.”
“The fuck is a soufflé?” Ross demands, in an undertone.
“Eggs,” Kate tells him.
“Posh eggs,” Ciara says. Another argument, lower-pitched, starts up over whether eggs can be posh.
“Yeah,” Trey says, to the phone. Trey’s living arrangements sound complicated, but in practice they work with the ease of makeshift things that have built themselves around everyone’s convenience.
During the week she lives with her mother and the little ones, in a cottage at the foot of the mountains; at weekends she mostly stays on Cal’s pullout sofa, so they can do their woodwork, mending and making furniture for whoever wants it, and so Trey can get a bit of peace. “Going out after, but. With the lads.”
“Then we better get the soufflé right first try,” Cal says. “Lena? You joining us?”
“Why not,” Lena says. “I never had a soufflé before.” Cal, unlike her, enjoys cooking, even though he only took it up out of a belief that Trey needed to eat something other than hamburgers and grilled cheese and whatever boiled-into-submission stuff her mother came up with.
Now he tries fancy things all the time, and mostly they work out.
Even more than the food, which is good, Lena loves the care and concentration Cal puts into it.
She could watch him cook all day, and find calm in the steady movement of his hands and the low patchy sound of him humming along to Steve Earle or Emmylou Harris.
“Me neither,” Cal says. “And we might not have one tonight. I’ve got bread and peanut butter, just in case.”
“I’d eat soufflé,” Aidan tells the phone.
“Anyone Trey invites is welcome to whatever dinner we end up having,” Cal says. “You talk to her. Well done again, kid. Tell Kate good job from me.”
“See you later,” Lena says, taking her phone back.
“Can I come eat soufflé?” Aidan asks Trey. Aidan is a charmer and a messer, the type to ask adults to buy him drink and somehow bamboozle them into doing it. He hasn’t tried it on Lena yet, but she’s seen him considering it.
“Fuck off,” Trey says. “Make your own. You said you were useful.”
“What’s all this about me being useful?” Aidan demands, outraged. “Why do I have to be useful? How about the rest of ye, how are ye—”
“I made your granny that display shelf for her ornaments, that’s—”
“How about Kate, how’s she—”
“I fuckin’ scored, from defense—”
The argument gets into full swing. Lena turns the car down the mountain, gorse branches rattling along the sides.
On the sidewalk outside Noreen’s, Cal wipes mizzle off his phone and puts it away.
The days are shortening towards winter; it’s not even four-thirty, but already the sky has started to darken.
All down the street, lights have come on in windows.
Mrs. Geraghty with the red door has her grandkids over; some of them are climbing on the armchairs, while a couple more are trying to put a leftover witch hat on the dog.
Tommy and Eugene and Rachel have headed off up the road. Tommy’s big laugh, taking up as much space as possible, echoes off the houses. Cal feels like he missed something.
The instinct is a leftover, like a phantom limb that still feels the occasional twitch.
For twenty-five years Cal was a cop in Chicago, where a well-developed radar for hinkiness was an essential multitool that did everything from smoothing your day to saving your life.
He took early retirement specifically because he wanted to get rid of the job and everything about it, which mostly worked, but that instinct is still there.
The difference is that nowadays most of the things it twitches at aren’t exactly high-stakes, and aren’t his problem anyway.
After all that time on the job, Cal has a deep and heartfelt appreciation for things that aren’t his problem, but not all of him has caught up with that philosophy.
“Sunny Jim!” a voice calls. Cal’s neighbor Mart is sticking his fluffy gray head out of the door of Seán óg’s pub, which is conveniently located next to Noreen’s, in case people need some fortification after their shopping. Mart is waving Cal over. “Get in here.”
“I gotta go make dinner,” Cal says. Mart takes the pub seriously, and he expects the same respect from other people. If Cal goes in there, he’ll be lucky to get out before midnight.