He picks up an oil heater and a new can of primer in the hardware store, and a bunch of supplies including a new toothbrush at the supermarket. He doesn’t bother with milk. He’s pretty sure the kid won’t be coming back.
SIX
The next morning is all soft mist, dreamy and innocent, pretending yesterday never happened. As soon as he finishes his breakfast, Cal packs up his fishing gear and heads for the river, two miles away. On the slim chance that Trey does come back, he’ll take the empty house as an extra kick in the teeth, but Cal figures this is a good thing. Better let the kid be upset now than let him build up another head of false hope.
This is only the second time Cal has fished this river. He’s regularly gone to bed intending on fishing the next day, but the house always had more of a welcome pull on him: this needed getting under way, he wanted to see how that turned out, the fish could wait. Today that pull just feels like nagging. He wants the house far away, with his back turned on it.
At first the river feels like what he needs. It’s narrow enough that the massive old trees touch across it, rocky enough to make the water swirl and whiten; the banks are speckled orange-gold with fallen leaves. Cal finds himself a clear stretch and a big mossy beech tree, and takes his time picking a lure. Birds flip and sass each other between branches, paying no attention to him, and the smell of the water is so strong and sweet he can feel it against his skin.
After a couple of hours, though, the romance is wearing off. Last time Cal was out here, he caught himself a perch dinner in half an hour flat. This time, he can see the fish right there, picking bugs neatly off the surface, but not one of them has worked up the interest even to nibble at his lure. And he’s starting to discover what Mart meant about the sneaky cold: what seemed like a nice cool day has seeped right up through his ass to chill him from the bones out. He digs a few worms out of the rich mulch under the layers of wet leaves beside him. The fish ignore those too.
The day he planned on teaching Alyssa to fish turned out like this. She was maybe nine; they were on a log-cabin vacation in some place Donna found whose name escapes him now. The two of them sat by a lake for three hours with nothing biting but midges, but Alyssa had promised her mama she would bring home dinner, and she wasn’t leaving without it. In the end Cal looked at her red, miserable, stubborn little face and told her he had a plan. They swung by the store and bought a bag of frozen fish sticks, hooked it onto Alyssa’s rod, and came in the cabin door yelling, “We got a big one!” Donna took one look and told them that fish was still alive and she was going to keep it for a pet. All three of them were giggling like idiots. When Donna dumped the bag in a bowl of water and named it Bert, Alyssa laughed so hard she fell over.
Cal feels like, if just one damn fish would give him a good fight and then a good dinner, all the things rattling around loose inside his head would shake themselves back into place. The fish, uninterested in his emotional requirements, keep right on playing tag around his hook.
After a full half day of nothing, Cal is starting to think that the river’s reputation is a tourist-board scam and last time’s perch dinner was a fluke. He packs up his gear and starts walking home, in no hurry to get there. On the off chance that Trey does show up for another try, he needs to shoot that down without biting the kid’s head off.
Halfway home he runs into Lena, walking the other way at a good pace, with a dog rummaging in the hedges ahead of her. “Afternoon,” she says, calling the dog back with a snap of her fingers. She’s wearing a big russet wool jacket and a blue knit beanie pulled down low, so only a few strands of fair hair show. “Any fish?”
“Plenty,” Cal says. “All of ’em smarter’n me.”
Lena laughs. “That river’s temperamental. Give it another go tomorrow, you’ll catch more than you can keep.”
“I might do that,” Cal says. “This the mama dog?”
“Ah, no. She only whelped last week; she’s at home with the pups. That’s her sister.”
The dog, a smart-looking young tan-and-black beagle, is quivering and huffing with eagerness to check Cal out. “OK if I say hi?” Cal asks.
“Go on. She’s a lover, not a fighter, that one.”
He holds out a hand. The dog snuffles over every inch of him she can reach, her whole rear end wagging. “She’s a good dog,” Cal says, rubbing her neck. “How’s the mama and babies?”
“Grand. Five pups. I thought at first one of them might not make it, but now he’s fat as a fool and pushing all the others out of the way to get what he’s after. D’you fancy a look, if you’re in the market?”
Lena catches the second it takes Cal to collect his thoughts on this. “Don’t be minding Noreen,” she says, amused. “You can come see a few pups without me taking it as a proposal. Cross my heart.”
“Well, I don’t doubt that,” Cal says, embarrassed. “I was just wondering if I oughta leave it till a day when I’m not carrying all this stuff. I don’t know how far your place is.”
“About a mile and a half over that way. Up to you.”
He says, only partly to make her amused look go away, “I reckon I can manage that. Appreciate the invitation.”
Lena nods and turns around, and they head up the narrow road, hedges of yellow-flowered gorse swaying at them on either side. Cal slows his pace automatically—he’s accustomed to Donna, five foot four in shoes—before he realizes there’s no need: Lena can keep up with him just fine. She has a countrywoman’s long, easy stride, like she could keep walking all day.
“How’re you getting on with the house?” she asks.
“Not too bad,” Cal says. “I’ve started painting. My neighbor Mart keeps giving me flak because I’m sticking to plain old white, but Mart doesn’t seem like the best place to get advice on interior decoration.”
Part of him is expecting Lena to come out with suggestions for color schemes—Mart’s talk must have got into his head. Instead she says, “Mart Lavin,” with a wry twist of her mouth. “You wouldn’t want to listen to that fella. Nellie,” she says sharply to the dog, which is dragging something dark and sodden out of the ditch. “Leave it.”
The dog reluctantly drops the object and trots off to find something else. “And the land?” Lena says. “What have you planned for it?”
Ironically, Mart regularly asks Cal that same question, not bothering to hide the fact that he’s trying to pry out Cal’s long-term intentions. Cal is a little hazy on those himself. Right now he can’t imagine a time when he’ll want to do anything more than fix up his house, fish for perch and listen to Noreen explain Clodagh Moynihan’s dental history. He recognizes that that time might come around someday. If it does, he figures he can do a little bit of traipsing around Europe, before he gets too old, and then come back here when he’s scratched the itch out of his feet. There’s nowhere else he needs to be.
“Well,” he says, “I haven’t rightly decided. I’ve got that piece of woodland, I’m gonna leave that the way it is; it’s about half hazel trees, and I’d eat hazelnuts all day long. I might add in a couple of apple trees, give me something sweet to go with the nuts in a few years’ time. And I was thinking of planting out another piece with vegetables.”
“Oh, God,” Lena says. “You’re not one of them off-the-grid types, are you?”
Cal grins. “Nah. Just been sitting at a desk for too long, feel like spending some time outdoors.”
“Thank God.”
“You get a lot of off-the-grid types round here?”
“Now and again. Notions about getting back to the land, and they think this is the place to do it. It looks the part, I suppose.” She nods to the mountains ahead, hunch-shouldered and tawny, shawled here and there with rags of mist. “Most of them don’t know one end of a spade from the other. They last about six months.”