Chapter Nine #4
Cal resists the impulse to get up out of his seat and remove Trey from her conversation by the back of her hoodie. “Huh,” he says. “Maybe Tommy wants a chair fixed.”
“I thought you told that fella to do his own dirty work,” Mart says.
“Yep,” Cal says. Nobody looks anything like puzzled. Evidently the guys know all about Tommy’s attempt at hiring himself a PI. “From what I know about Tommy, he might need telling more’n once.”
“Your young one doesn’t look like she’s telling him to fix anything himself,” Senan says.
Trey says a few more cheery words to Tommy, gives him a nod, and heads for the door to the bathrooms, dodging the sandwich waitress.
The amiable look falls off Tommy’s face the second she turns away.
He watches her the way a man with a flyswatter watches a fly, right up until the waitress catches his attention and he slaps on a big cheesy smile like he expects her to ask for a selfie.
“I gotta take a leak,” Cal says, standing up.
“I would if I was you, Sunny Jim,” Mart advises him. “Take your time; get the job done right.”
Cal makes his way through the crowd as fast as he can, dodging anyone who’s going to want a chat.
He knows damn well that he should postpone this conversation till he has guaranteed privacy and a cool head, but he doesn’t give a shit.
This room is filled up with grief and fear, lapping at every parent’s chin till they’re gasping for breath, they’re craning to keep above water.
People are whipping their heads back and forth to check on great big teenagers like they’re watching toddlers.
And Trey picked now to get into it with Tommy Moynihan.
Here Cal was getting all misty-eyed, thinking she was growing up; any eight-year-old without an actual concussion would know better than that.
He hangs around in the badly lit corridor outside the john like a pervert, being absorbed in his phone.
The corridor smells of drains and has the kind of wallpaper that looks like someone’s gramma put a curse on anyone who removes it.
It’s a couple of very long minutes, during which Cal gets increasingly pissed off, before Trey comes out drying her hands on her jeans.
“ ’M not getting drunk,” she says, after one look at Cal’s face. “Aidan only has a little flask between all of us.”
“Come here,” Cal says, heading for the far end of the corridor, so he can quit looking like a creep.
Trey follows him. “What?”
“What’d Tommy Moynihan want?”
Trey gives him an impossibly blank look. “Huh?”
“Kid. I’m not in the mood.”
“He didn’t want anything,” Trey says, after a second. “I was the one that went over to him.”
“Well, even better,” Cal says. “What for?”
“Asked him does he fancy a new dining-room table. Told him we’re booked up till summer, but we can fit him in then if he wants.”
“Right,” Cal says. “What’d he say?”
“He said nah, he’s grand, he’ll come find me if he needs me. I said no problem, any time, I’ll be right here.”
With her hair neat, she looks less like a wild mountain creature and more like an actual member of society. She understands exactly what Tommy Moynihan meant, and she made sure he understood exactly what she meant, too. For better or worse, she’s learning to speak Ardnakelty’s language.
“Tommy’s dangerous,” Cal says. “Get that in your head right now.”
“I know that.”
“No you don’t. You say it, but you don’t act like it. You think he’s just some old guy with stupid hair, he can’t do anything to you. If Tommy wants to mess you up, he can mess you up bad.”
“I know all that. I’m not fuckin’ thick.”
“So what the hell are you poking him for?”
Trey’s chin is set hard. “ ’M not poking him. I didn’t go in there saying hey, fuckface, who’re you gonna hire to rub shite on our door now that we bet up Donie? All I done was say I’d make him furniture. ’Cause that’s what I do.”
Cal knows that hot gray glare well. He supposes he should be grateful for small mercies—a few years ago she would have thrown rocks through Tommy’s windows or some shit like that—but he’s not.
“Right. So you’re telling me you were trying to, what?
Make nice with Tommy? Kiss and make up, after the other night? I look dumb to you?”
“I fuckin’ live here,” Trey says. “Tommy Moynihan better get used to it.”
Cal looks at her, standing there with her feet planted on the sticky carpet and her chin out, unblinking.
She’s staking her claim on her territory, starting to draw the fierce, clumsy lines that will gradually define the shape of her life.
He wants to reach out and put his hand on her head, but he doesn’t do it.
He can’t tell whether he’d be holding her steady or holding her down.
“I guess he had,” he says.
Trey watches him, seeing the anger fade. “I knew he wasn’t gonna say yes,” she tells him. “I wasn’t gonna get us stuck making a table for that prick.”
“Good,” Cal says. “The only thing I feel like making him is a knuckle sandwich.”
Trey grins. “Tomorrow me and Kate are gonna walk Banjo past Moynihans’,” she says. “ ’M hoping he’ll piss on that stupid fountain yoke. C’n I bring Rip as well?”
“Sure,” Cal says. “He could use the exercise; he’s getting chunky. Make sure you wave at the cameras.”
Trey waves with her middle fingers. “No you don’t,” Cal says. “You be—”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” Trey says, “be mannerly,” but she’s still grinning as she heads off back to her buddies.
“So tell us,” Mel says, leaning forward too far across the table to Lena. “This fella of yours. What’s he like?” They’re a few drinks in. Mel’s lipstick has worn patchy, and her curls—as red as ever, but dyed now—are starting to break loose from their twist.
They’ve covered Julie’s mammy’s chemo, Yvonne’s new boss, Mel’s husband’s refusal to get a decent cover for the slurry pit till she threatened to leave him, and the parent feud on Phil’s camogie team.
It’s Lena’s turn. “I’m saving a fortune on furniture,” she says.
Cal isn’t currency, any more than Trey is.
“I’d say you feel like a young one,” Yvonne says dreamily, “going out with him.” She’s settled back on the banquette, swirling her straw in the glass parked comfortably on her stomach. “Come here, that could be why you look younger, as well.”
“Why would she feel like a young one?” Phil says. “He’s no toy boy. What age is he?”
“The same as myself,” Lena says. “A year older.” She’s not used to being in a conversation this size, never mind being the focus of it. The speed and the overlap and the tangents, coming at her from all sides, are making her feel lightheaded.
“D’you mean ’cause she’s getting the ride?” Mel asks Yvonne. Julie squeals and slaps Mel’s arm; Mel whacks her hand away. “ ’Cause they haven’t been together long enough to get bored with it, like the rest of us?”
“You’ve a filthy mind, d’you know that? No, what I mean is, he’s foreign. Girls like us—our age, like—we never went out with foreign fellas.”
“We did,” Julie objects. “My sister married an Australian.”
“Because she emigrated to Australia,” Phil says. “Who was she supposed to marry? A fuckin’ Somali?”
“I shifted a Spanish student one time,” Mel says reminiscently.
“At a disco in Athlone. He was a fuckin’ woeful kisser, it was like shifting a Labrador”—“Oh Jesus!” from Julie—“but I was over the moon with myself all the same. I was the only one that had got off with anyone that wasn’t some kinda cousin. ”
“Exactly,” Yvonne says, waving her glass to focus everyone on her point.
A bit slops out onto her hand, but she ignores it.
“In my entire life, right, I never got off with anyone that was from outside this county. ’Cause when we were that age, there was no one around only Irish fellas.
You hadta emigrate to find anyone else. But the young ones nowadays, loads of them’d be going out with fellas from Brazil, or Nigeria, or Poland. Lena’s like a young one.”
“That’s me,” Lena says. “Young at heart.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Phil says. “If you wanta marry a foreign fella, you’re lucky you sold Sean’s land first. The Dunnes went buck wild over that, amn’t I right?”
“They had conniptions,” Lena says. She isn’t drunk, but that same reckless looseness is filling her up.
Sean’s family might as well be her currency; let them come in useful at last. For a moment she wonders what it would have been like to be able to bitch about them to these women, back in the nightmare months after Sean died, instead of gnawing herself to the bone with silent fury.
“They’da been welcome to buy the land themselves, but they didn’t want that.
They thought I oughta let his nephews work it for the rest of my life, and then leave it to them in my will.
One of Sean’s brothers, right, I’m not saying which one, but listen to this: outa the goodness of his heart, he came up with a budget for me.
An actual spreadsheet, like, for me to live by.
How I could cut back here and do a bitta overtime there, and then I wouldn’t need to charge them rent. He emailed it to me.”
Everyone’s gobsmacked and laughing at the same time, and Lena finds herself laughing too. “He’d a link in there to where I could get cheap toilet roll,” she says. “In bulk, like, and store it in the shed.”
“The brass neck on him,” Mel says, jaw-dropped. “Was that Kenny?”
“Not telling.”
“I bet it was. Didja tell him to stick his budget up his hole?”
“I couldn’t be arsed. I just went ahead and sold the land. Never heard from him and his spreadsheet again.”
“If you think they had a conniption then,” Phil says, “imagine what they’d say now, if you still owned that land, and you marrying a Yank. You could leave it to him.”
“They’d have aneurysms,” Lena says. “The whole lotta them at once. It’d sound like fireworks going off.”