“Went and got this,” Trey says, swinging the chair off her back. “Your woman over the mountain.”
“Good job,” Cal says. “You need lunch?”
“Nah. Had it.”
Having grown up dirt-poor himself, Cal understands Trey’s prickly relationship with offers. “Cookies in the jar, if you need to top up,” he says. Trey heads for the cupboard.
Cal puts his last shirt on a hanger and leaves the iron on the kitchen counter to cool off. “Thinking of getting rid of this,” he says, giving his beard a tug. “What do you figure?”
Trey stops with a cookie in her hand and gives him a stare like he suggested walking naked down what passes for the main street in Ardnakelty. “Nah,” she says, with finality.
The look on her face makes Cal grin. “Nah? Why not?”
“You’d look stupid.”
“Thanks, kid.”
Trey shrugs. Cal is well versed in the full range of Trey’s shrugs. This one means that, having said her piece, she no longer considers this her problem. She shoves the rest of her cookie in her mouth and takes the chair into the smaller bedroom, which has turned into their workshop.
The kid’s conversational skills being what they are, Cal relies on the timing and quality of her silences to communicate anything he ought to know. Normally she wouldn’t have dropped the subject that fast, not without giving him more shit about what he would look like clean-shaven. Something is on her mind.
He puts his shirts in his bedroom and joins Trey in the workshop. It’s small and sunny, painted with the leftovers from the rest of the house, and it smells of sawdust, varnish, and beeswax. Clutter is everywhere, but it’s ordered. When Cal realized they were getting serious about carpentry, he and Trey built a sturdy shelving unit for boxes of nails, dowels, screws, rags, pencils, clamps, waxes, wood stains, wood oils, drawer knobs, and everything else. Pegboards on the walls hold rows of tools, each one with its shape traced in its proper place. Cal started off with his granddaddy’s toolbox and has since accumulated just about every carpentry tool in existence, and a few that don’t officially exist but that he and Trey have improvised to suit their needs. There’s a worktable, a lathe bench, and a stack of mixed scrap wood in a corner for repairs. In another corner is a dilapidated cartwheel that Trey found somewhere, which they’re keeping on the grounds that you never know.
Trey is kicking a drop cloth into place on the floor, to stand the chair on. The chair has good bones. It was handmade, long enough ago to have a dip worn into the seat by many rear ends, and another worn into the front stretcher by many feet. The back and the legs are delicate turned spindles, ringed and beaded here and there for decoration. It’s spent much of its life near cooking or burning, though: smoke, grease, and layers of polish have left it covered in a dark, tacky film.
“Nice chair,” Cal says. “Gonna have to clean it up before we do anything else.”
“I told her that. She said good. Her granddad made it.”
Cal tilts the chair to inspect the damage. “On the phone she said the cat knocked it over.”
Trey makes a skeptical pfft noise. “Yeah,” Cal says.
“Her Jayden’s in my school,” Trey tells him. “He’s a prick. Hits little kids.”
“Who knows,” Cal says. “All these are gonna need replacing. What wood do you figure?”
Trey examines the seat, which all those rear ends have kept clean enough to show the grain, and the insides of the breaks. “Oak. White.”
“Yeah, me too. See if we’ve got a piece thick enough to turn. Don’t worry about matching the color; we’re gonna have to stain it anyway. Just get the grain as close as you can.”
Trey squats by the assortment of scrap wood and starts poking around. Cal goes out to the kitchen and mixes white vinegar and warm water in an old jug. Then he dusts off the chair with a soft cloth, leaving space for the kid to talk into if she feels like it, and watches her.
She’s grown. Two years ago, when she first showed up in his backyard, she was a scrawny, silent kid with a self-inflicted buzz cut and a half-grown bobcat’s urge towards both flight and fight. Now she’s up past his shoulder, the buzz cut has relaxed into a rough crop, her features are getting a new clarity, and she rummages and sprawls around his house like she lives there. She even has entire conversations, or at least most days she does. She’s got none of the polish and artifice that some teenagers start developing, but she’s a teenager all the same, both her mind and her life getting more intricate every day. The things she says, just about school and her friends and whatever, have new layers underneath them. Cal is having more trouble with it than she seems to be. These days, every time he picks up a whiff of something on her mind, the bloom of terror inside him spreads wider and darker. Too many things can happen, at fifteen, and do too much damage. Trey seems solid as hardwood, in her own way, but she’s taken too many knocks in her life not to have cracks in there somewhere.
Cal finds a clean rag and starts rubbing down the chair with the vinegar mix. The sticky coating comes away well, leaving long brown streaks on the rag. Outside the window, blackbirds’ rambling songs carry from far across the fields, and bees revel in the clover that’s commandeered Cal’s backyard. The dogs have found a stick to play tug-of-war with.
Trey, holding two pieces of wood side by side to compare them, says, “My dad came home.”
Everything in Cal comes to a dead stop. Of all the fears that were milling inside him, this wasn’t one.
He says, after what seems to be a long time, “When?” The question is a dumb one, but it’s all that comes into his head.
“This morning. While I was getting the chair.”
“Right,” Cal says. “Well. He here for good? Or just for a while?”
Trey shrugs extravagantly: no idea.
Cal wishes he could see her face. He says, “How’re you feeling about it?”
Trey says flatly, “He can fuck off.”
“OK,” Cal says. “That’s fair.” Maybe he ought to be giving the kid some bullshit speech that includes the words “but he’s your daddy,” but Cal makes it his practice never to bullshit Trey, and his feelings on Johnny Reddy happen to coincide with hers.
Trey says, “Can I stay here tonight?”
Cal’s mind stops again. He goes back to rubbing down the chair, keeping his rhythm even. After a moment he says, “You worried about something your dad might do?”
Trey snorts. “Nah.”
She sounds like she’s telling the truth. Cal relaxes a little bit. “Then what?”
Trey says, “He can’t just walk back in.”
She has her back to Cal, rummaging among the wood, but her whole spine has a taut, angry hunch. “Right,” Cal says. “I’d probably feel the same way.”
“Can I stay, so?”
“No,” Cal says. “Not a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Well,” Cal says. “Your dad might not be happy about you taking off the minute he’s back in town. And I figure I’d best not start out by pissing him off. If he’s gonna stick around, I’d rather he didn’t have a problem with you hanging out over here.” He leaves it at that. She’s old enough to understand some, at least, of the other reasons why not. “I’ll call Miss Lena, see if you can spend the night there.”
The kid starts to argue, but she changes her mind and rolls her eyes instead. Cal finds, to his surprise, that he feels shaken, like he just fell off something high and he needs to sit down. He props his ass on the worktable and pulls out his phone.
On reflection, he texts Lena rather than calling her. Could Trey stay at your place tonight? Don’t know if you heard but her dad just came home. She doesn’t feel like hanging out with him.