Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
Unsurprisingly, Trey isn’t one little bit impressed by Mart’s plan. She shows up at Cal’s straight from school, while Cal is working on the trefoil knot for Lena. He can’t bring himself to put it aside, even though it’s come to feel as dumb and delusional as working on Con’s nursing chair.
He should update Lena. She won’t like what he has to say, but she has a right to know, and Cal feels he has a right to ask her why she kept this from him.
That isn’t a phone conversation, so he manned up and texted her to invite her over for dinner, earlier, and endured the silence before his phone beeped: Bit wrecked today but thanks.
Cal’s first instinct was to text her back, Tomorrow?
We need to talk about what’s going on. He didn’t do it.
He’s already got his answer, not with Lena’s usual clarity, but in full oblique Ardnakelty style.
Pushing would do no good; deflection comes to this place with the effortlessness of reflex.
Cal is accustomed to it from Mart and everyone else. He doesn’t want it from Lena.
Get rest, he texted instead. See you soon. Love you. A long time later the reply came through, from a million miles away: Love you.
He wants to go over to Lena’s house, fast, before it becomes too late, and haul her free of whatever dark current is pulling her away from him.
He’s stopped by the fact that he doesn’t know how; he has no idea what this current is, or whether she even wants to be freed.
He carves doggedly away at the trefoil instead, and pictures himself laying it on her doorstep, Christmas morning, and walking away.
At least Trey doesn’t ask where Lena is, this time. She’s too busy demanding to know what Mart said, and then objecting to it.
“Hang on a fuckin’ second,” she says, when Cal finishes.
Across the worktable she’s taut with outrage, ready to overturn her chair and go kick ass, Tommy’s or Mart’s, Cal can’t tell.
“So all the Moynihans haveta do is quit buying land, and they’re just gonna get away with it.
Rachel and everything. And what they said about you. The fuck?”
“Well,” Cal says. “Not get away with it scot-free. Once the dust clears, I don’t think Tommy Moynihan’s gonna be Mr. Big around here any more. I figure there’s a better-’n-even chance he’ll have to find somewhere else to live.”
“He’s not gonna go to jail. He’s not even getting bet up. He’s getting away with it.”
“I don’t like it either,” Cal says. This has been on his mind; not just all that Tommy is going to get away with, but the ease with which he himself fell into line with this plan.
Cal has always aimed to live by a moral code that doesn’t allow for letting shitbirds kill young girls and walk away based on their level of local clout, but apparently that’s shifted while he wasn’t looking; everything Mart said sounded not just rational but unarguable.
He feels like he’s been drinking the water around here for too long, or something. “But I don’t see any way around it.”
“Kill him,” Trey says promptly.
“No,” Cal says.
“Why not?”
“You can’t go killing people just because they deserve it.”
Trey looks unconvinced. “Plus,” Cal says, “that wouldn’t fix the stuff he’s been spreading around. Miss Lena has to live here.”
“She doesn’t give a shite what themens say,” Trey says, but she glances at Cal like it’s a question.
A few weeks ago, Cal would have thought the same thing.
Now he has no idea. “Maybe not,” he says, “but it can still make her life harder, and I’m still not gonna stand by while they say it.
I don’t need Tommy dead. He’s no good to me that way.
What I need is him tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, with every man and woman in this place lined up to spit on him along the way, ’cause they all know he’s a piece of shit and so is everything that comes outa his mouth. ”
His voice has a rising savagery he didn’t intend. Trey considers this and nods, with some reluctance.
“Besides,” Cal says. He focuses on smoothing a curve of the trefoil, and on bringing his voice back to normal. “Tommy’s the only guy who can stop this crap with the factory. We need to keep him around and arm-twist him into doing it, or a lot of people around here are gonna lose their land.”
Trey gives him her best blank stare. “So? Fuck ’em.”
“Well,” Cal says. He turns the trefoil to work his knife, delicately, deeper into a corner. “There’s that. But I don’t have the right to go, ‘Hey, fuck all y’all, I do what I want’ to this whole townland.”
“Yeah you do. Why not?”
“Nope. I came to live in this place, by my own free will. If you do that, you owe the place something.”
Trey blows this away with a derisive puff of air. “I never came to live here,” she points out. “Just got stuck with it.”
“Yep,” Cal says. “You can take off the minute you finish school, if that’s what you choose. Then you won’t owe a thing to anyone here.”
He shaves away tiny curls of wood and watches Trey from under his eyebrows.
He has no idea what he’s hoping she’ll say, or how he should respond, either way.
Somehow, with the kid getting older, every decision she makes seems to have taken on such weight that he can hardly breathe, in case he somehow steers her wrong and her whole life crashes and burns.
She listens to him, at least sometimes; she might listen to him in this, and the possibility is terrifying.
Cal doesn’t want her binding herself to a place that’s done her wrong, and that responds to just about any situation by producing elaborate new layers of darkness, purely because she’s got herself a girlfriend, or because of him; but then again, he doesn’t want her ditching everyone who cares about her and taking off into the world half-cocked, just because she knows this place’s flaws and doesn’t understand that no other place is innocent either.
He made the mistake, when he came here, of thinking he’d found a place that was innocent. He’s learned how that story goes.
Trey’s first rush of outrage has faded. She’s playing with a curve of scrap wood, leaning her elbows on the worktable and balancing the wood on one finger. She says, “Lena said to do that. Clear out, don’t come back.”
“Huh,” Cal says. He shoves down a helpless, painful anger at Lena, for playing at whatever the hell she’s playing at, and for shutting him out of it. He has no practice being angry at Lena, and he hates it. “That what you want to do?”
Trey shrugs. “Nah.”
After a second Cal says carefully, “I didn’t think you liked this place enough to stick around.”
Trey glances up at him, the curve of wood neatly poised on her fingertip. “You think I should go, too?”
Her eyes are intent on his. “I’m not saying that,” Cal says. “All’s I’m saying is, I wasn’t sure what to expect.”
Trey spins the piece of wood on her fingertip, digging around for words. “I usedta be set on leaving,” she says. “But I done a load around here. Feels like I earned this place.”
“You don’t need to decide anything now,” Cal says. “You’ve got time.”
That gets him another quick glance. “You do think I oughta go.”
“I don’t think anything,” Cal says. “I just want you to be sure.”
Trey doesn’t answer this. “Needs more off there,” she says, pointing her piece of wood at an angle of the trefoil.
She wants to drop the subject, which is fine with Cal. “Quit kibitzing,” he says. “You want to work, get out your own stuff and let me do mine in peace.”
“I was thinking about a cabinet yoke,” Trey says. “Outa that bitta walnut. Like, leave the outside the way it is, so when it’s hanging on the wall it just looks like a burl, only then you open it up on hinges and the front half’s all little drawers inside. Seen it on the internet.”
“Jeez, kid,” Cal says. “Your life too easy, or something?”
Trey shrugs. “Make a good showpiece. When I’m going for the apprenticeship.”
“Finish school first,” Cal says automatically. It occurs to him that one reason he’s set on her finishing school might be so the heaviest decisions can wait, just till she’s a little bit older. Trey rolls her eyes extravagantly and heads for the shelf where she left her walnut burl.
They take an inch-thick slice off the raw side of the burl, to make the back wall of the cabinet where the beauty of the grain will be on show, and then start measuring and planning how to carve out the main chunk.
Cal manages to persuade Trey away from drawers and on to cubbyholes, seeing as Christmas is only a month away, but even so, the planning takes them long enough that she decides to stay the night.
They’re cleaning up and aiming for bed when Rip lifts his head and lets out a bark.
For one heartbeat Cal thinks it’s Lena, but the steps crunching on the drive are too heavy, and there’s more than one set of them. “Wait here,” he says to Trey, throwing his handful of shavings into the garbage can, but she follows him to the front door anyway.
It’s Mart and P.J. and Senan. They stand on the doorstep, bundled to the ears against the cold.
“And you’re still up,” Mart says with pleasure. “That’s great; I woulda hated to catch you in your negligée. Evening, young one. I’ve to borrow this fella here for a while.”
Trey watches him, unsmiling, from behind Cal’s shoulder.
“I’ve a fancy for a game of cards,” Mart explains. “But sure, you can’t work up any excitement with only three. We need a fourth.”
“Mart,” Cal says. “The kid’s the one who told me what Tommy’s up to.”
Mart’s eyebrows go up and he examines Trey with new interest. She gives him a blank stare back.
“Ah, well then,” Mart says, his face crinkling into an approving grin. “Fair play to you, young one. See? You weren’t wasting your breath. We’re heading over to Tommy’s now.”
Trey shrugs.