Cal told her a long time back that everyone needs a code to live by. Trey only partway understood what he meant, but in spite of or because of that, she thought about it a lot. Her code has always been a rudimentary, inchoate thing, but since her dad came back, it’s been coalescing and sharpening, pointing ways and forming demands of its own. If she can’t kill anyone for what they did to Brendan, or even send them to prison, she needs a blood price.
Occasionally Lena has mild second thoughts about not having children, mainly when the even predictability of her life starts to chafe at her, but today she’s thanking God for it. Trey isn’t even hers, and she still has Lena’s head melted.
Something is happening in Trey’s world. Lena assumes it was Johnny who hit her and hurt Banjo, but from the way Trey was talking, it wasn’t just a drunk tantrum; it had something to do with Brendan. Lena has gathered the gist of what happened to Brendan, though she’s been careful not to know the details, but she can’t make any of it connect up with Johnny or his Englishman or their gold. She was almost hoping Banjo’s paw would get worse overnight, so she would have the drive to the vet’s and back to take another shot at talking to Trey, but by this morning the swelling had gone down and he could put weight on the paw, although he still felt he deserved extra fuss and food as compensation for the experience. Trey showed up before Lena left for work and took him away, with barely a word beyond a careful thank-you speech that she’d obviously been practicing. Lena had no idea what to do about her.
This is a skill she’s never learned. She loves her nieces and nephews, she’s played with them and listened to their troubles and given the odd opinion if they asked for one, but any tricky bits of handling they require fall on their mothers, or occasionally their fathers. Probably she could have done more if she had chosen to, but she never did. It never seemed necessary: their parents had things well in hand. Whatever things are going on in Trey’s life, no one has them in hand.
Lena is, at last, unsettled. Trey put the capper on it, but it’s not just Trey. It’s Cal, electric with edginess, anger smoking under his calm; and it’s Rushborough, who stopped her to make small talk about scenery when she was out walking the dogs, and whom she liked even less than she expected to. Waiting and watching aren’t enough any more. She bit her tongue and rang Noreen to make amends for their spat the other day, but Noreen, while her fund of conjecture and rumor is considerably more impressive than Lena’s, had nothing solid either. So, against most of her own instincts, Lena is headed to the one place where she might get a hint as to what the fuck is going on. She’s fairly sure that this is a bad idea, but she hasn’t got a better one.
The heat has thickened. The early-afternoon sun grips the village into immobility; the main street is empty, only the old men sitting slumped on the grotto wall, too hot to move indoors, one of them fanning himself with sluggish flaps of his newspaper.
Mrs. Duggan is in her window, as always, having a smoke and trawling the street for anything of value. Lena catches her eye and nods, and Mrs. Duggan arches an eyebrow at her. When Lena knocks at the door, there’s no movement inside, but after a moment a heavy, slow voice calls, “Well, in you come, so.”
The house smells like Noreen’s cleaning, with a thick undercurrent of something sweaty and sweet. The front room is cluttered with old brown furniture, ruffly porcelain objects, and framed photos of popes from a while back. Mrs. Duggan is settled deep into her armchair, overflowing onto the arms. She’s wearing a purple dress and battered fleece slippers; her hair, dyed a shiny black, is pulled back in a tight bun. She has the air of something geological, like the house was built around her because no one was willing to move her.
“Well, would you look at that, now,” she says, inspecting Lena with amused, hooded eyes. “Lena Dunne paying me a visit. ’Tis strange times around here, all right.”
Mrs. Duggan is one of the reasons Lena never had children. She’s a dense, ripe fermentation of all the things about Ardnakelty that Lena wanted to leave behind. In the end Lena made her own terms with the place, but she was never willing to give a child into its hands.
“I’m after making blackberry jam,” Lena says. “I brought you a jar.”
“I’d eat that,” Mrs. Duggan says. She leans forward, grunting with effort, to take the jam from Lena and examine it. “That’d go nice with a bitta soda bread. I’ll have Noreen make some tonight.” She finds space for the jar on the small table at her elbow, amid tea mugs and ashtrays and playing cards and biscuits and tissues, and gives Lena a glance. “Are you pitying your sister, now, running around making soda bread for an old woman in this heat?”
“Noreen has what she wanted,” Lena says. “I’ve no reason to pity her.”
