“OK,” Cal says. “OK.” He takes another breath. He doesn’t know how to highlight the things Trey values in order to make his argument, because right now he has very little sense of what those are, apart from Banjo, and apparently neither does she. “Regardless of what I do, if you stay mixed up in this, things are gonna change after. This place thinks pretty highly of you, these days. You talk about wanting to go into carpentry when you’re done with school; the way you’ve been going, you could start up your own shop tomorrow, and have more business’n you could handle.”
He thinks he sees her lashes flicker, like that caught her. “If you keep on helping your dad,” he says, “all that’s gonna be out. People round here won’t treat you the way they do now. I know you don’t want to give a shit about them, but things aren’t the same as they were two years ago. You’ve got stuff to lose now.”
Trey doesn’t look up. “Like you said,” she says. “He’s my dad.”
“Right,” Cal says. He rubs a hand over his mouth, hard. He wonders whether she’s thinking that, when Johnny skips town, he’ll take her with him. “Yeah. But like you said, you’re not a baby. If you don’t want to be mixed up in his doings, you’ve got a right to make that call. Daddy or not.” He has a crazy impulse to offer her things, pizza, a fancy new lathe, a pony, whatever she wants, if she’ll just step away from the lit fuse and come home.
Trey says, “I wanta do it.”
There’s a small silence in the room. Sunlight and the lazy burr of haying machines come in through the windows. Rip has rolled over to have his belly rubbed.
“Just remember,” Cal says. “You can change your mind anytime.”
“How come you even care if those lads get fucked over?” Trey demands. “They’re nothing to you. And they done plenty on you, before.”
“I just want peace,” Cal says. All of a sudden he’s exhausted, down to his bones. “That’s all. We had that, up to a couple of weeks ago. It was good. I liked it.”
“You can have peace. Just get outa it. Leave the rest of them to it.”
That leaves Cal stymied again. He can’t tell Trey that he won’t walk out while she’s in; it would be unfair to put that on her. This barely even feels like a conversation, just a series of stone walls and briar patches.
“It’s not that simple,” he says.
Trey blows out an impatient puff of air.
“It’s not, kid. Say I pull out: what are the rest of them gonna think, when it all goes belly-up? They’re gonna think I knew and didn’t tell them. That’s not gonna be any kind of peace.”
She says, still not looking up from the dogs, “My dad said to tell you to back off and mind your own business.”
“Did he now,” Cal says.
“Yeah. He says you’ve got nothing, and if you go talking you’ll only land me in shite.”
“Huh,” Cal says. He wishes he had just dumped Johnny in a bog while he had one handy. “I guess that’s one way to look at it.”
Trey shoots him one brief glance he can’t read. She says, “I want you outa it as well.”
“You do,” Cal says. He feels like a stone just dropped into his stomach. “How come?”
“Just do. ’S not your business.”
“Right,” Cal says.
Trey watches him, rubbing Rip’s belly and waiting for more. When Cal has nothing else to offer, she says, “So will I say to my dad that you’ll leave it?”
“Anything I’ve got to say to Johnny, I said last night. And,” Cal says, even though he knows he should shut his mouth, “if I find something to add, I’ll tell him myself. I won’t use you as a goddamn go-between.”
For a minute he thinks Trey’s going to argue. Instead she says abruptly, standing up and spilling dogs everywhere, “Can we just do that chair?”
“Sure,” Cal says. Out of nowhere he feels, crazily, like tears might be stinging his eyes. “Let’s do that.”
They give the chair more care and delicacy than it really deserves, going back three times over the turning of the leg, sanding it finer and finer till a baby could suck on it. Mostly they work in silence. Summer air wanders in and out of the window, bringing the smells of silage and clover, picking up sawdust motes and twirling them idly in the wide bars of sunlight. When the sun moves off the window and the heat starts to mellow towards dinnertime, Trey dusts off her outgrown jeans and goes home.
That night the house is still: everyone is hard asleep, after last night’s disturbances. Trey doesn’t want to be in bed. Her life has stopped feeling normal; it’s crowded with too many people and too many wants, till she doesn’t feel safe taking her eye off it, even to sleep. Instead she stays on the sofa, being hot and watching worn-out late-night telly by the dirty yellow light of the standing lamp. Some smarmy tosser is trying to make an unhappy-looking couple build an extension shaped like a box even though they hate it. Trey is in no humor for the likes of him. She hopes the couple give him a kick up the hole and build whatever they want.
