Chapter Nineteen #3
“That young one made a hames of it, mind you,” Mrs. Duggan adds. “She shoulda pinned it on Tommy good and proper; left her mammy a note, or put something up on the internet. I won’t hold that against her, but. It’s been better entertainment this way.”
She pours herself more sherry. The heavy bottle wavers in her hand, but she doesn’t spill a drop.
“Away you run, so,” she says, leaning back with her glass.
“I’ll be watching to see what you do with this.
I’ll enjoy that, whatever it is. And I’ll tell you what I’ll do in exchange: I’ll leave you this chair in my will.
” She runs her palm down the chair’s tarnished velvet arm.
“So’s you’ll have somewhere to sit and take your amusement where you find it, if you make it this far. ”
Cal is dragged out of his catch-up sleep by knocking. It takes him a minute to work out where he is, and why his heart is slamming like he might need to spring into action. He has no idea how long he’s been asleep; the gray line between the curtains tells him nothing except that it’s not night.
The knocking comes again, a timid tap at his front door.
Cal wants to stick a pillow over his head and ignore it—whatever byzantine bullshit this place has come up with now, it can take care of itself for a few hours; even if this is Eugene coming over to the dark side, Cal is in no condition to handle the onboarding delicately.
But Rip is starting up his ferocious guard-dog rumble, and Cal can’t stifle the hope that this might be Lena.
He struggles out of bed and puts his pants on.
His phone says it’s ten-thirty in the morning.
It’s not Lena. It’s Bobby, turning his flat cap nervously in both hands, his bald spot pink from the cold.
“Hey,” Cal says.
“If you’re not talking to me,” Bobby says humbly, “you can say it. Or, I don’t know, shut the door.”
“Why wouldn’t I be talking to you?” Cal asks. He feels like he should know this, but he’s not awake enough. He has no idea how anyone keeps track of this place without an incident-room corkboard covered in sticky notes and pieces of red string.
“Senan isn’t,” Bobby says. He looks miserable.
“Or Francie either, or P.J. Mart is”—he gives a harried glance towards Mart’s land, but the little red tractor is trundling across the far field, a safe distance away—“only all he does is give out and call me an arse-licking peasant. ’Cause I didn’t come with ye to Moynihans’ the other night. ”
“Right,” Cal says. He tries to flatten his hair. “Come on in.”
The look Bobby gives him, as he wipes his boots on the mat, is pathetically grateful.
Cal sits him down at the kitchen table and sets about making the strongest coffee his machine can come up with.
He lets Rip investigate Bobby’s boots and bring him toys meanwhile, so he won’t have to start this conversation till he’s got caffeine at the ready.
“Sit,” he says, when he brings the mugs over to the table. Bobby glances up like Cal might mean him, and then realizes when Rip obediently sits down. “Milk? Sugar?”
Bobby, a tea man, looks unsure. “Ah, no,” he says in the end. “I’m grand.” He gives his coffee a dubious look, sips it out of politeness, and blinks hard.
“So,” Cal says. “How’s things?” He sinks half his coffee in one slug.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Bobby says. He takes a breath; apparently this isn’t going to come out easy.
“Go for it,” Cal says. He hopes Bobby doesn’t want more romantic advice. He misses his favorite diner in Chicago, which offered a caffeine overdose called the Jumper Cable for days like this. He can’t remember what he’s doing here.
“D’you know how I was telling you, down the pub, that there was people…you know. Saying things about Lena?”
“Yeah,” Cal says. “I appreciated that.”
“That’s all over now, but,” Bobby reassures Cal hastily. “Everyone knows ’twas bollocks. Sure, Lena and Julie Quinn were over at Sheila Reddy’s all that evening; she couldn’ta been giving Rachel antifreeze.”
“Well,” Cal says. “That’s good.” He has no idea where this came from—he’s not sure who Julie Quinn even is, let alone what she’s doing in the middle of this—but here’s another reason why Tommy has turned desperate enough to get his hands dirty. His scapegoat has been taken away.
And no wonder whatever Tommy had in mind last night was aimed at Mart or at Cal.
Lena is no use to him any more. Somehow or other, she’s safe.
Cal knows it shouldn’t come as a blow that he wasn’t the one to save her, but it does.
That was the hope he was holding on to: if he could do that, he might be able to reach her again.
“I hadn’t a clue,” Bobby says, leaning across the table with the urgency of it. “That Tommy was behind it, like, or that he was going to say Lena kilt Rachel. And I wasn’t spreading it around; I never said a word to anyone but you. I swear on my mammy’s life.”
“I know that,” Cal says. “I never thought you did.”
Bobby blinks at him. “You didn’t?”
“Nope,” Cal says.
“Everyone else does. They all reckon I’m one of Tommy’s men, and I was helping spread them rumors for him.
Noreen threw me outa the shop yesterday.
I only went in for a Turkish Delight bar, and she told me they’re reserved for people that don’t go slandering her sister.
I tried to tell her different, but…” Bobby spreads his hands helplessly.
“Yeah,” Cal says. He can picture Bobby trying to tell Noreen different when she’s mad. The blast would have blown him out of the shop and right down the road.
“And Tadhg McHugh came up to me to say I’m a sound man and he’ll buy me a pint once Barty lets him back into the pub. He patted me on the back and all.” Bobby is turning red with outrage. “That fucker usedta call me Ralph Wiggum. I don’t want him patting me.”
“Tell him to stick his pint up his ass,” Cal says. He appreciates the update, but he needs Bobby out, to make room for Eugene or someone with something useful to offer.
“I did. He just laughed—he thought I was trying to cover up, like. I was never on Tommy’s side; I just didn’t wanta be ungrateful.
But I don’t know how to prove it. I thought maybe I could do something on him, like maybe…
” Bobby stops, stymied. “Spray something on his wall?” he hazards.
“Only I wouldn’t know what to say. And anyhow no one’d know ’twas me.
Or I could call him a prick next time I see him in Seán’s, only he hasn’t been in. ”
Tommy won’t be in Seán’s for a while. “Just hang in there,” Cal says. “You’ll have plenty more chances to get in on the action.” He thinks of Tommy, in the winter dark, coming out from behind his high walls to prowl the edges of Cal’s and Mart’s land. “This shit isn’t over,” he says.
“Ah, I know it’s not. Only no one’ll want me in on it, if they think I’m Tommy’s man. In case I go squealing to him. Like no one texted me to go down to Seán’s, the other night.” Bobby blinks wretchedly up at Cal. “Could you tell them?” he asks. “Senan and Mart and alla them. And Noreen.”
“I guess,” Cal says, taken aback. “I don’t know that they’d listen to me, though.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“You guys have all known each other since you were in diapers. If this whole thing has them so wound up that they won’t take your word, they’re not gonna take the word of some guy that just jumped off the last bus.”
“You’re not a blow-in,” Bobby says. “You’re not local, like, but you’re…” He gestures vaguely, trying to find the right term. “You were at Moynihans’ with the rest,” he says. “You were in the roola-boola down the pub. How would they not listen to you?”
“Right,” Cal says. “OK.” He feels again the gravitational pull that he felt back in Mart’s sheep shed, shifting the balances all around him. “I’ll talk to them.”
Bobby lets out a breath of relief. “That’d be great,” he says. “I kept thinking…Here’s me hoping I’ll be getting married next year, you know? Imagine themens not being there. I don’t know if I’d have the guts to stand up there at the altar, without…” His voice falters.
“Hey,” Cal says. He figures Tommy Moynihan deserves to be ridden out of town on a rail for this alone. “They’ll be there. You think Senan’s gonna miss that kind of opportunity to give you shit?”
Bobby manages a smile. “Would you say it to Lena, as well? I’d hate to have her think I was talking bad about her.”
“Lena knows you better’n that,” Cal says.
“So do the rest, sure,” Bobby points out mournfully, “and they still think it. Wouldja say it to her?”
“I haven’t talked to Lena in a while,” Cal says. He drains the rest of his coffee.
Bobby is staring at him, startled and unsure. “Why not?” he ventures.
“Dunno,” Cal says. “She doesn’t want to talk to me.”
Bobby struggles to make sense of this and come up with something helpful.
“One time my mammy wouldn’t talk to me for a week,” he offers.
“I hadn’t a notion why. In the heel of the hunt, it turned out I’d broke her St. Anthony statue.
I didn’t even know I’d knocked it over. I got a new one in, and we were grand. Didja break something?”
“Not that I know of,” Cal says. Bobby, deflated, retreats into his coffee.
Cal asks, “What would you do?”
Bobby pops up out of his mug and gives Cal a round-eyed stare of pure astonishment. “Me?”
“Yeah,” Cal says. “If it was Róisín.” He’s not sure how he’s ended up asking Bobby for relationship advice, except that he apparently needs to ask someone, and all his other options are a lot worse.
“You don’t wanta know what I’d do,” Bobby assures him, alarmed. “Sure, I haven’t a notion about women. Whatever I’d do, ’tis bound to be the wrong thing.”
“Well, then you gotta tell me,” Cal says. “So I can be sure and not do it.”