Chapter Five #3
Cal understands what he’s just done. Even without what Mart said, he would have turned Tommy down—he’s not going to run around hassling grieving people just to soothe Eugene’s delicate feelings, let alone for whatever reason Tommy is keeping to himself.
But a few days ago, he would have turned him down differently.
Up until today, Tommy had him pegged as a clueless Yank who was humming along in the pub because he thought it was one of those quaint Irish singsongs.
That’s gone for good. Whatever’s going on, Cal is inside it now.
He’s OK with that. Cal doesn’t like guys like Tommy, who carefully collect power and use it to force their will down other people’s throats.
He worked with enough of them, back on the job, to develop an allergy.
If the rest of Ardnakelty is dealing with one of those guys, Cal might as well deal with him too.
Tommy was talking out of his ass about the rain.
The layer of cloud hangs sulky and apathetic, like it could stay put forever without doing anything to justify its existence.
Out in his top field, Mart is moving sheep, guiding Kojak with sharp calls and neat flicks of his crook.
He spots Cal on the roof and waves, and Cal lifts a hand back. He needs to talk to Mart.
The rooks, deprived of their windshield wiper, are sneaking up on Rip, who’s too busy sprawling in a martyred attitude at the foot of the ladder to notice. Cal pulls off another broken slate and tosses it at them, and they scatter, yelling rude words, while Rip leaps up to chase after them.
It’s Trey, of all people, who brings the next piece of news.
By five o’clock it’s dark enough that Cal has finished up with his roof, under a thickening sky, and gone inside to thaw his fingers.
Lena has come over for dinner; she’s setting the table and telling Cal the latest story about her boss, whose people skills don’t match her horse skills and who may be about to go viral after losing the head with some woman who went into a stall to make a TikTok with the cute horsey.
Lena tells a story well, and Cal appreciates it; he needed the laugh.
He’s found himself not in the mood for cooking, but he’s dug a chicken casserole out of the freezer and stuck it in the oven, so at least the place smells good.
Trey bangs in with Banjo, both of them damp, and Banjo looking muddy and guilty. “He went in the ditch after a rabbit,” Trey says, dropping her bike helmet and kicking her schoolbag into a corner. “And Mr. Moore gave us fuckin’ weekend homework. Entire essay on Yeats.”
“You’re not into Yeats?” Cal asks. He’s at the fireplace, arranging kindling and firelighters.
Trey, digging an old dish towel out of the cupboard under the sink, rolls her eyes.
“I never was either,” Lena says, laying out plates. “The man sounds like an awful dose.”
“Up his own hole,” Trey says. She sits down on the floor to get the mud off Banjo’s legs before he can spread it everywhere. The other three dogs have come stampeding over to greet them and check out what scents they’ve brought in, so Trey is half-submerged in a wriggling mass.
“Hey,” Cal says, turning to snap his fingers at the dogs. “You can say hello once he’s clean. Bed.” He points to the corner by the fireplace.
“Get back here,” Trey says, grabbing Banjo as he makes to follow the others. “What’s that?”
She’s pointing her chin at the Virgin Mary bottle, which is on the mantelpiece.
Cal originally stuck it in a drawer, but he figures Bobby might stop by for romantic advice at some point—Bobby considers Cal to be an authority on these matters, seeing as he’s managed to get together with two different women and only one of them has dumped him so far—and his feelings would be hurt if the bottle was nowhere to be seen.
“Bobby brought it back for me from France,” Cal says. “Got holy water in it.”
Trey rolls her eyes again, more elaborately this time. “Hey,” Cal says, balancing one of his split logs on top of the kindling pile. “The guy was being nice.”
“Bobby’s a fuckin’ dope,” Trey says. She appears to be in the mood to bite someone, possibly due to Yeats.
“Maybe, but he’s a dope who did a kind thing. Don’t knock that.” Trey lets out an extravagantly irritated sigh and concentrates on Banjo, who wants to play tug-of-war with the dish towel.
“God, that takes me back,” Lena says, pausing with a handful of forks to look at the bottle. “My granny had one a them. She used to put some on us before exams.”
“You can put some on your Yeats essay,” Cal tells Trey.
“Mightn’t even do it,” Trey says.
“You gotta do your homework. Do it right after dinner, then you can forget about it.”
“Nah. Gotta head.”
“You going out with the guys?” Cal asks.
“Nah. Home.” Trey wards Banjo’s paws off her jeans. “I’ll do the essay tomorrow. C’n I come round before lunch?”
It’s Friday. It’s been more than two years since Trey spent a Friday night at her mama’s place. “Sure,” Cal says. “Any time.”
He can’t find anything else to say. Just a month or two ago, he about had to roust Trey out of his place when he felt she’d been there long enough.
He wonders if she’s dodging another conversation about staying in school, or if her buddies have been giving her shit for sleeping at his place.
Either of those is possible, but he can’t escape the feeling that he’s making up fancy hidden reasons where none are needed, looking for something that would be fixable.
The kid is sixteen; she has friends her own age, a social life, just like he wanted for her.
She doesn’t want to spend her weekends hanging around with some old guy.
At some point he should find a careful way to let her know that, if she’s got better things to do than help him build Con McHugh’s wife’s nursing chair, she doesn’t have to.
“Here,” Lena says. She sits down on the floor beside Banjo, so she can distract him while Trey cleans him up. Banjo, delighted with all the attention, rolls over to let her at his belly.
Trey, rubbing at Banjo’s back leg, says, “They’re sending Rachel Holohan home.”
Cal and Lena both stop what they’re doing.
“The medical examiner said suicide,” Trey says. She hasn’t looked up. “She drank antifreeze.”
“Where’d you hear this?” Cal asks.
“Ross’s cousin’s a Guard. He said it to Ross’s da, ’cause Ross’s da was freaking out that there was some mad serial killer around, and Ross’s sisters weren’t allowed go anywhere so they were freaking out. And Ross heard.”
“Jesus,” Lena says. “Look who’s getting the news fresh off the tree these days. You’ll be giving Noreen a run for her money.”
Trey makes a face. Her relationship with Noreen has improved a lot since the days when she routinely stole stuff from the shop, but both of them still hold a certain level of grudge.
“You sure Ross got it right?” Cal says. “Something like this, I’d’ve thought Noreen would’ve heard about it.”
“She probably did,” Lena says. “She’s not speaking to me ’cause I didn’t call round to Claire Holohan, and ’cause this one here hangs out with foreigners from the wilds of Knockfarraney. Or something.”
“None a her business who I hang out with,” Trey says.
“That’s what I told her,” Lena says. “Noreen has trouble with the idea that anything in this world isn’t her business.”
Trey makes a pfft noise that dismisses Noreen and her opinions. “Ross got it right,” she tells Cal. “He’s sharp.”
“Well,” Cal says. “That explains some stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Something Tommy Moynihan said. He was over here this afternoon, him and Eugene.”
Lena raises her head from Banjo.
“Tommy sounded pretty sure Rachel did it herself,” Cal says. “I was wondering why he didn’t pitch it as an accident, so no one could blame Eugene. He must’ve heard the news already.” Going by Mart, Tommy has at least a couple of Guards in his pocket.
Lena is watching him. She says, “What did Tommy want here?”
“Tommy wanted me to go poking around and figure out why Rachel did what she did,” Cal says. “And whether she was stepping out on Eugene.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him to shove it where the sun don’t shine,” Cal says. Trey looks up, startled and grinning. “Not in those exact words, but he got the idea.”
“Ah, cool,” Trey says. “And you keep telling me to be mannerly.”
“I was mannerly. I just don’t like the Moynihans much.”
“Lotsa people don’t,” Trey says. “I heard Tommy and Eugene got drummed outa Seán’s, the other night.”
“Well,” Cal says. Lena has gone back to Banjo; he goes back to the fire. “Not exactly. We sang ’em a song, is all. Maybe they just didn’t enjoy our singing.” He’s not looking at Lena, but he feels her head turn sharply again.
“You were there?” Trey says.
“Yep,” Cal says. He holds a long match to a firelighter and watches it catch.
“What’d they do?”
“Left.”
Lena says, “Was Mart Lavin there?”
Lena has never liked Mart, or trusted him.
Cal isn’t entirely clear on whether he likes Mart himself—the things he knows make that question a complicated one—and by most definitions of the term, he doesn’t trust Mart as far as he could throw him; he relies on him, when he has no choice, but that’s not the same thing.
Somewhere along the way, though, that’s stopped being the part that matters. “Yep,” he says.
“Didja tell him about Tommy calling round?”
“Not yet,” Cal says. “He’s been out on his land all afternoon.”
“Don’t say it to him,” Lena says.
Cal is taken by surprise. Regardless of Lena’s views on Mart, her position has always been that Cal’s choices are his problem; when he wants her opinion on them, getting it out of her is like pulling teeth.
Cal has always believed that if he started living his life in some way she couldn’t accept, she would simply walk away from him, sooner than ask him to change it.
“He must’ve seen Tommy’s car,” he points out. “You could see that thing from space.”
“Then he already knows, and you’ve no need to tell him.”