“Doesn’t like it one little bit,” Cal says. “But he’s stuck with me. Specially if he doesn’t want me.”
Even if Lena had any inclination to try and turn him from this, she would get nowhere. “It’ll do him good,” she says. “He’s too fond of getting his own way, that fella.”
“Yeah, well,” Cal says. “Not this time.”
Lena eats her sandwich—the mustard is good and strong—and examines what she’s learned. Her first guess was right, and Noreen’s was wrong. Johnny didn’t just drift home because his girlfriend had dumped him and he couldn’t figure out how to work himself on his own. Johnny needs money, badly. For him to go to this much trouble, it’s not just rent arrears or an unpaid credit card. He owes someone; someone dangerous.
Lena doesn’t give a shite what Johnny personally is facing. What she wants to know is whether the danger is going to stay over in London, waiting trustingly for him to show up with the cash, or whether it’s coming after him. Lena wouldn’t trust Johnny to come back with her cash from down the road, let alone from over the water. If she wanted the money, she’d be going after him.
Cal, not knowing Johnny as she does, is unlikely to have reached the same conclusions yet. Lena considers sharing hers with him, and decides against it for the moment. It’s one thing to refuse responsibility for Cal’s moods; it’s another to deliberately whip up his fears and his anger, when she has nothing to go on but conjecture.
“Next time I see Trey,” she says, “I’ll ask her to come stay with me for a few days.”
Cal throws the rooks another piece of crust and shifts, trying to get the sun to attack a different part of his face. “I don’t like this weather,” he says. “Back on the job, this kind of heat was when we knew things were gonna get messy. People lose their minds, do the type of crazy stuff where you figure they must’ve been high on half a dozen things at once, till the tests come back and nope, stone-cold sober. Just hot. Whenever it stays hot for too long, I’m just waiting for things to get messy.”
Lena, although she doesn’t say this, has been liking the heat wave. She appreciates the change it brings to the townland. It transforms the muted blues and creams and yellows of the village houses, lifting them to an expansive brightness that barely seems real, and it rouses the fields from their usual soft somnolence to a spiky, embattled vividness. It’s like seeing Cal in a new mood: it lets her know the place better.
“That’s a different class of heat, sure,” she says. “From what I’ve heard, the summer in America’d melt your brains. This is just the kinda heat you’d get on holiday in Spain, only for free.”
“Maybe.”
Lena watches his face. “I suppose there’s a few people getting edgy, all right,” she says. “Last week Sheena McHugh threw Joe outa the house, because she said she couldn’t stand the way he chews his food one minute longer. He had to go to his mammy’s.”
“Well, there you go,” Cal says, but his mouth has quirked in a smile. “You’d have to be losing your mind to dump anyone with Miz McHugh. Did Sheena let him back in yet?”
“She did, yeah. He went into town and bought one of them fans, the big tower ones. It’s got an app and all. She’da let in Hannibal Lecter if he was carrying one of those.”
Cal grins. “The heat’ll break,” Lena says. “Then we’ll all be back to giving out about the rain.”
The two rooks are still fighting over Cal’s sandwich crust. A third one sneaks up on them, gets within a couple of feet, and lets loose an explosion of barking. The first two shoot into the air, and the third one grabs the chunk of crust and heads for the hills. Lena and Cal both burst out laughing.
—
Late at night, Trey’s parents are arguing in their room. Trey extracts herself from the sweaty tangle of sheets and Banjo and Alanna, who’s come into her bed again, and goes to the door to listen. Sheila’s voice, low and brief, but sharp; then a load of Johnny, with a note of outrage, controlled but building.
She goes out to the sitting room and turns the telly on, to give herself an excuse for being there, but muted so she can keep an ear out. The room smells of food and stale smoke. The mess has started to silt up again, since she and her dad tidied it the other night—half the carpet is taken up by an arrangement of small staring dolls, and there are a bunch of Nerf bullets and a dirty sock stuffed with sweet wrappers on the sofa. Trey throws them in a corner. On the telly, two pale women in old-fashioned clothes are looking upset about a letter.
Cillian Rushborough came for dinner. “I can’t be cooking for some fancy fella,” Sheila said flatly, when Johnny told her. “Bring him into town.”
