He knows he has to factor in the possibility that Johnny was telling the truth for once, but this seems like a problem for after he’s washed off some of the blood. He also knows that Johnny may not be going anywhere. Johnny’s fears right now are an intricate spread, and Cal has no idea how the odds are weighted, or what bets his private, desperate algorithms might finally land on.
The sounds of Johnny blundering away are slowly fading into the distance. Cal makes his way to the edge of the path and listens till he’s sure the little shit is gone. He tests his injuries. There’s a goose egg above his eyebrow and a swelling bruise on his jaw, his thigh hurts where Johnny’s foot jabbed deep into the muscle, something has ripped through his shirt and dug a long gouge up his side, and about every part of him has small sharp grazes and bruises, but all of it seems minor enough to mend by itself. More importantly, he’s damn sure Johnny is a lot worse off.
He wonders where Johnny is heading, whether Trey is home, what Johnny will tell her, and what she’ll make of it. He wonders whether he just fucked up bad. He has no qualms about having given Johnny a beat-down—it needed doing, and if anything he feels like he did well to hold out so long—but he’s made uneasy by the fact that he did it because he lost his temper. It feels unmanaged, and this situation needs managing.
He starts homewards, listening for any movement in the shadows.
—
Trey knows she’s not the only one still awake. Everyone else has gone to bed, Liam is snoring softly and Maeve is sleep-muttering her annoyances, but Trey can hear her mother moving about the bedroom, and the occasional loud heave and sigh as Alanna turns among the sheets, hoping someone will come see what’s wrong. The house isn’t at rest.
Trey is sprawled on the sofa, automatically rubbing Banjo’s head propped on her knee. Banjo’s paw is better, but he’s still holding it up and looking pathetic when he wants treats and fusses. Trey is giving him plenty of both.
She’s listening for her father to come home. She reckons most likely he’ll be pleased with her, but with him you can never be sure. She’s left her bedroom window open, in case he’s raging and she needs to run.
She considered doing what he said, showing Noreen or Mrs. Cunniffe the piece of gold and letting them talk. It wouldn’t have worked. Trey, like anyone from Ardnakelty, has a gut-deep understanding of the ferocious power of talk, but it’s the wrong kind of power for this: fluid, slippery, switchbacking, forging twisting channels you can’t predict. She can see why her father went that way without a second thought. He’s all those things distilled; regardless of what either he or the townland might like to think, he’s Ardnakelty to the bone. Trey isn’t and doesn’t want to be, which means she sees angles that he misses. A solid thing appearing in front of the men’s faces, brazen and undeniable, has a different kind of power, to which they’re unaccustomed and against which they have few defenses. She let the gold do its own talking.
Banjo jerks in his sleep, eyebrows twitching and paws starting to work. “Shh,” Trey says, running his soft ear between her fingers, “it’s grand,” and he relaxes again.
She went to Cal’s in the morning, to warn him. She wasn’t clear on exactly how to do that, because she doesn’t want Cal knowing too much about what way she’s thinking; there’s a chance he might consider this to be a breach of her promise to do nothing about Brendan, and tell her to back off. It made no odds in the end, anyway, because Cal wasn’t home. Trey waited on his back porch for hours, her and Banjo eating the ham slices she’d brought to make sandwiches for lunch, but he didn’t come. He was out with the men, going about the business he doesn’t want her to know. In the end she left.
She doesn’t underestimate what she’s got into. The things she’s done before, robbing off Noreen and breaking into abandoned houses with her mates and drinking their parents’ booze, those were baby stuff. This is real. It feels good.
When she hears her dad at the door, she thinks at first, from the sounds of fumbling and staggering, that he’s drunk. Then he comes into the sitting room, and she sees his face. She stands up, spilling Banjo off her lap.
Johnny’s eyes go over Trey like she’s not there. “Sheila,” he says, and then, louder and more savagely, “Sheila!” Blood is all round his mouth and chin like a bright beard, and a flood of it is stiffening his shirtfront. When he puts his right foot down, he flinches like Banjo.
Sheila comes to the doorway and looks him over. The state of him doesn’t appear to cause her either surprise or upset. She seems like she’s been expecting this to happen ever since he came back.
“Your nose is broke,” she says.
