“Well, God almighty,” Johnny Reddy says, his eyes twinkling at Trey. “Would you look at that. Little Theresa’s after growing up. What age are you now? Sixteen? Seventeen?”
Trey says, “Fifteen.” She knows that, if anything, she looks younger.
Johnny shakes his head, marveling. “I’ll be beating the young lads away from the door with a stick before I know it. Or am I too late? Have you got yourself a fella already? Or two or three?” Maeve giggles sharply, and looks up at his face to check if that’s right.
“Nah,” Trey says flatly, when it becomes clear he’s waiting for an answer.
Johnny lets out a sigh of relief. “I’ve time to find myself a good stick, so.” He tilts his chin at the chair, which Trey has forgotten to put down. “What’s that? Didja bring me a present?”
“Gonna mend it,” Trey says.
“She makes money at it,” Sheila says. Her voice is clearer than usual, and there are high spots of color on her cheekbones. Trey can’t tell whether she’s glad or angry about him being back. “That’s what bought the new microwave.”
Johnny laughs. “A chip off the old block, hah? Always got a bitta something on the go. That’s my girl.” He winks at Trey. Maeve wriggles under his arm, to remind him she’s there.
Trey remembered him big, but he’s only a middling-sized man, and slight with it. His hair, which is the exact same mousy brown as hers, flops across his forehead like a teenager’s. His jeans and his white T-shirt and his black leather jacket are the newest things in the house. The sitting room looks even messier around him.
She says, to her mam, “Taking this to Cal’s.” She turns around and goes out to the kitchen.
Behind her she hears Johnny say, with a laugh in his voice, “Cal, is it? Is that one of Senan Maguire’s young lads?”
Banjo is still at his water bowl, lapping noisily, but when Trey comes in he bounces up, wagging his whole rear end and looking hopefully at his food bowl. “Nah,” Trey tells him. She puts her face under the tap and rubs at it, stripping off sweat and dust. She rinses her mouth and spits hard into the sink. Then she cups her hand again and drinks for a long time.
She turns quick when she hears a sound behind her, but it’s Alanna, holding her limp stuffed rabbit under one armpit and swinging the door back and forth with the other hand. “Daddy came home,” she says, like it’s a question.
Trey says, “Yeah.”
“He says to come on back inside.”
“Going out,” Trey says. She rummages in the fridge, finds ham slices, and shoves a thick wad of them between two slices of bread. She wraps the sandwich in kitchen roll and crams it into the back pocket of her jeans. Alanna, still swinging the door, watches her as she hoists the chair onto her back, snaps her fingers for Banjo, and heads into the expanse of sunlight.
—
Cal is ironing his shirts on the kitchen table and considering shaving his beard off. When he grew it, back in Chicago, his idea of Irish weather was based on tourist websites, which were heavy on lush green fields and happy people in knit sweaters. For his first two years here, the climate lived up to the advertising, more or less. This summer appears to have snuck in from an entirely different website, maybe one about Spain. The heat has a brazen, unbudging quality that Cal, who has become accustomed to any given day containing a few scraps of sunshine, numerous degrees of cloud, and several varieties of rain, finds slightly unsettling. It’s at odds with the landscape, whose beauty is founded on subtlety and flux, and it’s pissing off the farmers: it’s messed up their schedule for silage and hay, it’s making the sheep irritable, and it’s threatening the grazing. Among the guys in the pub, it’s become the main topic of conversation, pushing aside the upcoming National Sheep Dog Trials, the woman Itchy O’Connor’s eldest brought in from Dublin to marry, and the probable bribery involved in the construction of the new leisure center up in town. One of its minor inconveniences is that Cal’s beard has turned into a heat trap. Whenever he goes outside, the lower half of his face feels like it has its own tropical climate.
Cal is fond of the beard, though. It was originally connected, in a hazy way, with his early retirement: he had had enough of being a cop, and of looking like a cop. In terms of the people round Ardnakelty, the beard turned out to be pointless—they had him pegged before he even got unpacked. To him, though, it means something.
Even in the heat, his house is cool. It’s an undersized 1930s cottage with nothing noteworthy about it, but the walls are thick and solid, built to do their job. When Cal bought it, it was on the verge of falling apart, but he’s brought it back, taking his time, since he doesn’t have much else that needs doing. The room he’s in, which is mainly living room and a little bit kitchen, has reached the point where it no longer feels like a project; it’s turned into simply a good place to be. He’s painted it white, with the east wall pale yellow-gold—Trey’s idea—to match the sunset light that hits it. Along the way he’s acquired furniture, to expand on the previous owners’ leftovers: he now has three chairs around the kitchen table, an old desk where Trey does her homework, an armchair, a faded blue sofa that could use reupholstering, and even a standing lamp. He’s also acquired a dog. In his corner beside the fireplace, Rip is being thorough with a rawhide bone. Rip is small, floppy-eared, and built like a brick shithouse. He’s half beagle, with a beagle’s sweet face and a beagle’s haphazard patches of black and tan and white, but Cal hasn’t worked out the other half. He suspects wolverine.
Through the open window comes the exuberant riot of birds, who, unlike the sheep, are glorying in the heat and the abundance of bugs it’s brought them. The breeze flows in soft and sweet as cream. A bumblebee blunders in with it and bumps itself against cupboards. Cal gives it a little time to think, and eventually it figures out the window and swerves off into the sunlight.
Outside the back door, there’s a scuffle and a burst of happy barking. Rip shoots out of his corner and hurls himself down the hall to plaster his nose against the door firmly enough that Cal won’t be able to open it. This happens every time Trey and Banjo arrive, but Rip, who is a sociable creature, gets too overexcited to remember.
“Back,” Cal orders, nudging Rip out of the way with his toe. Rip manages to restrain himself, quivering, long enough that Cal can get the door open. Two young rooks rocket up off the step and head for their oak tree at the bottom of the garden, laughing so hard they tumble in the air.
Rip streaks after them, vowing to tear them apart. “Well, sonofabitch,” Cal says, amused. He’s been trying to build up a relationship with his colony of rooks ever since he arrived. It’s working, but the relationship isn’t exactly what he had in mind. He had some Disney idea of them bringing him presents and eating out of his hand. The rooks definitely feel he’s an asset to the neighborhood, but mainly because he leaves them leftovers and because they like fucking with him. When they get bored, they yell down his chimney, drop rocks into his fireplace, or bang on his windows. The barking is new.
Almost at the tree, Rip does a 180 and tears off around the house towards the road. Cal knows what that means. He heads back into the house, to unplug the iron.
Trey comes in the door alone: Rip and Banjo are playing tag around the yard, or hassling the rooks, or rooting out whatever they can find in the hedges. The dogs know the boundaries of Cal’s land, which is ten acres, more than enough to keep them occupied. They’re not going to go chasing sheep and getting themselves shot.