She watches from her kitchen window, staying well back, as Johnny moseys off across the field to find someone else to smile at. His accent hasn’t changed, anyway; she has to give him that. She’d have bet on him coming back talking like Guy Ritchie, but he still sounds like a mountain lad.
Something that was nudging at her mind has made it to the surface, now that her anger is fading and leaving room. Johnny always liked to make a fine entrance. When he turned up outside her window, he came smelling of expensive aftershave—robbed, probably—with his jeans ironed, every hair in place, and the Cortina waxed to a sparkle. He was the only fella Lena knew who never had broken fingernails. Today, his clothes are shiny-new right down to the shoes, and not cheap shite either, but his hair is straggling over his ears and flopping in his eyes. He’s tried to slick it into place, but it’s too overgrown to behave. If Johnny Reddy has come home in too much of a hurry to get a haircut, it’s because he’s got trouble following close behind.
—
By the time Trey and Banjo head to Lena’s, it’s gone ten o’clock, and the long summer evening has run itself out. In the vast stretch of darkness, moths and bats are whirling; as Trey passes between fields, she can hear the slow shifting of cows settling themselves to sleep. The air still has the day’s heat left in it, coming up off the earth. The sky is clear, packed with stars: tomorrow is going to be another hot one.
Trey is going over the things she remembers about her dad. She hasn’t used up a lot of thought on him since he left, so it takes her a while to find things to go over. He liked to distract their mam, grab her when she was scrubbing the cooker and dance her around the kitchen floor. Occasionally, when he had drink taken and something had gone wrong, he hit them. Other times he would play with them like another kid. He and Trey’s big brother, Brendan, would take the little ones on their backs to be cowboys and chase Trey and Maeve around the yard, trying to capture them. He liked to promise them things; he loved to see their faces light up when he said he’d bring them to the circus in Galway, or buy them a toy car that climbed up walls. He didn’t seem to feel any need to follow through on his promises; in fact, he always seemed a little bit surprised and aggrieved when they asked. After a while Trey stopped playing the cowboy games.
Lena’s house is lit, three small clean rectangles of yellow against the great black fields. Her dogs, Nellie and Daisy, let her know Trey and Banjo are coming; before they’re in the gate, she opens the door and stands waiting in the light. The sight of her loosens Trey’s muscles a little. Lena is tall and built strong, with deep curves, wide cheekbones and a wide mouth, heavy fair hair and very blue eyes. Everything about her has a heft to it; nothing is half there. Cal is the same: he’s the tallest man Trey knows and one of the broadest, with thick brown hair and a thick brown beard, and hands the size of shovels. Trey herself is constructed for agility and inconspicuousness, and has no issue with this, but she takes a deep pleasure in Cal’s and Lena’s solidity.
“Thanks for having me,” she says on the doorstep, handing Lena a Ziploc bag full of meat. “Rabbit.”
“Thanks very much,” Lena says. Her dogs swivel between Trey, Banjo, and the bag. Lena palms their noses away from it. “Did you get it yourself?”
“Yeah,” Trey says, following Lena inside. Cal has a hunting rifle, and a warren on his land. The rabbit was his idea: according to him, it’s mannerly to bring your hostess a gift. Trey approves of this. She dislikes the thought of being indebted, even to Lena. “Fresh tonight. Hasta go in the fridge for a day, or else it’ll be tough. Then you can put it in the freezer.”
“I might eat it tomorrow. It’s been a while since I had rabbit. What’s that way you and Cal fry it up?”
“Garlic and stuff. And then tomatoes and peppers in with it.”
“Ah,” Lena says. “I’ve no tomatoes. I’d have to get them off Noreen, and then she’d want to know what I was cooking, and where I got the rabbit, and what you were doing over here. Even if I told her nothing, she’d smell it off me.” Lena’s sister Noreen runs the village shop, and the rest of the village while she’s at it.
“Probably she knows already,” Trey says. “About my dad.”
“I wouldn’t put it past her,” Lena says. “No need to give her a leg up, though. Let her work for it.” She puts the rabbit away in the fridge.
They make up a bed for Trey in the spare room, which is big and airy, painted white. The bed is a broad solid thing with knobbed bedposts, seventy or eighty years old by Trey’s guess, made of battered oak. Lena pulls off the patchwork quilt and folds it up. “You won’t be wanting that in this heat,” she says.
“Who else stays here?” Trey asks.
“No one, these days. Sean and I used to have friends down from Dublin for weekends. After he died, there was a while when I’d no wish to see anyone. I never got back into the habit.” Lena dumps the quilt into a chest at the foot of the bed. “Your dad called round this afternoon,” she says.
“Didja tell him I’d be coming here?” Trey demands.
“I did not. I texted your mam, though.”
“What’d she say?”
“ ‘Grand.’ ” Lena takes a sheet from a pile on a chair and shakes it out. “I had these out on the line for a while; they should be aired enough. What do you reckon about your dad coming home?”
Trey shrugs. She catches two corners of the sheet when Lena flips them to her, and starts stretching it over the mattress.
“My mam coulda told him to fuck off,” she says.
“She’d have had every right to,” Lena agrees. “I wouldn’t say he gave her a chance, but. I’d say he showed up on the doorstep with a big smile and a big kiss, and waltzed inside before she could get her bearings. By the time she’d her head together, it was too late.”
Trey considers this. It seems likely. “She could do it tomorrow,” she says.
“She might,” Lena says, “or she might not. Marriage is an odd thing.”
“I’m never gonna get married,” Trey says. Trey has a bone-deep mistrust of marriage or anything resembling it. She knows that Lena sometimes stays the night at Cal’s place, but Lena also has a place of her own, which she can go back to whenever she wants, and where no one else has any say or any right of entry. To Trey, this seems like the only possible arrangement with any sense to it.
Lena shrugs, tucking a corner in more tightly. “Some people would tell you you’ll change your mind. Who knows. Marriage suits some people, for some of their lives, anyway. It’s not for everyone.”
Trey asks abruptly, “Are you gonna marry Cal?”
“No,” Lena says. “I loved being married, mostly, but I’m done with it. I’m happy as I am.”
Trey nods. This comes as a relief. The question has been on her mind for a while. She approves of Cal and Lena being together—if one of them went out with someone else, it would complicate matters—but she likes things the way they are, with them in two separate places.
“I’ve had offers, mind you,” Lena adds, snapping the top sheet out across the bed. “Bobby Feeney came down here a coupla years back, all spruced up in his Sunday best and carrying a bunch of carnations, to explain why he’d make a fine second husband.”
Trey lets out a crack of laughter before she knows it’s coming. “Ah, now,” Lena says reprovingly, “he was dead serious. He’d it all thought out. He said I’d be handy with the sheep, since I know my way around livestock, and he’s great at mending things, so I’d never have to worry if a fuse went or a handle came off the door. Since I was getting too old for babies, I wouldn’t be expecting him to be a daddy; and he’s no spring chicken himself, so he wouldn’t be always at me. And most evenings he’s down the pub or else up the mountains looking for UFOs, so he wouldn’t be under my feet. His only worry was that his mam didn’t approve, but he was certain we’d get round her in the end, specially if I could make a good rice pudding. Mrs. Feeney’s a martyr to the aul’ rice pudding, apparently.”