Cal leans on the countertop, keeping a respectful distance, and nods along, taking stock of Caroline. She hasn’t scraped off her accent for college, the way Eugene has; it’s almost as strong as Trey’s. Cal, who after nearly thirty years in Chicago still sounds like a North Carolina boy, approves of that. He likes her readiness of response and the efficiency of her movements, too. Brendan went for confident and competent. And if this girl wanted him, then he was no dummy, either.
“Or you can’t go wrong with a claddagh necklace. It’s the traditional Irish symbol for love, friendship and loyalty.”
“This is pretty cute,” Cal says, picking up the sheep. Alyssa used to love small soft creatures. Her room had them on every surface, neat clusters arranged with care to look like they were having conversations or playing games. He would pick up a couple of them and make them talk to each other, while Alyssa giggled her head off. There was a raccoon who would sneak up on the others and tickle them and then bounce away.
“They’re as local as you can get,” Caroline tells him. “A lady in Carrickmore hand-felts them with wool from her brother’s sheep.”
Cal glances up at her with his brows twitching together. “I got a feeling you live round my way,” he says. “Did I see you helping Noreen out in Ardnakelty store, one time?”
Caroline smiles. “You probably did, yeah. It’s hard to say no to Noreen.”
“Tell me about it,” Cal says, grinning and putting out a hand. “Cal Hooper. The American that’s bought the O’Shea place.”
His name gets no reaction from Caroline, for whatever that’s worth. Her handshake is older than she is, a professional’s. “Caroline Horan.”
“OK,” Cal says, “lemme see if Noreen’s taught me anything. If you’re Caroline, then you’re the one that broke her wrist falling off Noreen’s ladder trying to snitch some cake sprinkles. I get that right?”
Caroline laughs. “God, I was six. I’ll never live that down. And I didn’t even get the sprinkles.”
“Don’t worry,” Cal says, grinning back. “That’s as bad as it gets. Only other things I know are you used to date Brendan Reddy, the guy who’s not available to do my wiring because he took off somewhere, and you’re in college. What’re you studying?”
Brendan’s name does make Caroline blink. “Hotel management,” she says, easily enough, turning away to get more sheep off the shelf. “You can go anywhere with that, you know?”
“Planning on traveling?”
She smiles over her shoulder. “Oh God, yeah. The more the better. And this way I can get paid for it.”
Cal reckons Brendan’s big mistake, or one of them anyway, was doing whatever he did to make Caroline dump him. This girl has the spark of a woman who’s going places. She would have taken the pair of them as far as Brendan could dream of, and then some.
“Now,” she says, lining up half a dozen more sheep in different colors on the counter. “Take your pick. I like the expression on this one.”
“Looks kinda loco to me,” Cal says, examining the sheep’s white-rimmed stare. “Like it’s waiting for the right moment to attack.”
Caroline laughs. “It’s just got personality.”
“If I give my niece nightmares, my sister’s gonna come over here and beat me up.”
“How about this one?” She picks out a cream-colored one with a black head. “Look at the face on that. It wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“That one’s scared of the crazy one. Look.” Cal puts the timid sheep hiding behind the others, with the loco one staring them down. “It’s shaking in its hooves.”
Caroline is laughing again. “Then you oughta get it out of here. Give it a safe new home and it’ll be grand.”
“OK,” Cal says. “I’ll do that. My good deed for the day.”
“You can tell your niece it’s a rescue sheep,” Caroline says. She starts putting the extra sheep back on their shelf.
“You know,” Cal says, turning the green baseball cap in his hands, “I don’t want to interfere, but I was talking with Brendan Reddy’s mama the other day, and she’s pretty worried about him. If you’ve heard from him, maybe you might take a minute to let her know he’s OK.”
Caroline glances back at him, but only for a second. She says, “I haven’t heard from him.”
“You don’t need to tell me. Just tell his mama.”
“I know. I haven’t, though.”
“Even if he mentioned somewhere he might be headed. She’s not handling it too well. Anything would help.”
Caroline shakes her head. “He never said anything about it to me,” she says. “There’s no reason he would, sure. We weren’t really in touch, after we broke up.”
The hurt in her voice hasn’t healed over. Whatever went wrong between the two of them, she liked Brendan a lot.
“He took it hard?” Cal asks.
“Sort of. Yeah.”
“You worried about him too?”
Caroline comes back to the counter. She runs a finger down the sheep’s nose.
“I’d like to know,” she says.
“You got any guesses?”
Caroline picks a curl of gray fuzz off the sheep’s back. “The thing about Brendan,” she says. “He gets ideas, and he gets carried away by them. He forgets to take other people into account.”
“How’s that?”
“Like,” Caroline says, “OK, we both really like this singer Hozier, right? And he was playing in Dublin last December. So Brendan picked up any bits of work he could find, to get together the money for tickets and the bus and a B and B. For my Christmas present. Which would have been amazing, only he got them for the night before my last exam.”
“Oh, man,” Cal says, grimacing.
“Yeah. Not on purpose, like; he just forgot to check with me. Then when I said I couldn’t go, he was genuinely shocked. And angry. Like, ‘You only care about college, you think I’m not worth the hassle because I’m going nowhere . . . ’ Which I didn’t think at all, but . . . yeah.”
“But you’re not gonna get that through to a guy who’s feeling sensitive,” Cal says.
“Yeah. That’s why we broke up, basically.”
Cal considers this. “So you
