Cal is waiting for Trey to bring up Brendan again, or the cottage, but he doesn’t. For a while Cal is wary of this; he’s inclined to take it as a sign that the kid is making plans he’s not sharing. Then he happens to glance over, checking how the rabbit is doing. The kid is poking at the frying pan and nodding his head along to “I Ain’t Living Long Like This,” his lips pursed in a goofy half whistle, his cheeks rosy from the heat of the stove. He looks several years younger than he is, and completely at ease. It comes to Cal that, for once, the kid’s mind isn’t taken up by worrying about Brendan. He’s rewarded himself for the rabbit by allowing himself to put that away, just for a little while.
Trey looks askance at his plate when they sit down at the table, but after one bite his doubts disappear. He shovels in the food like he hasn’t eaten in weeks. His face is practically touching the plate.
“Turns out you like garlic, huh?” Cal asks, grinning.
The kid nods, over another big forkful.
“This dinner’s down to you,” Cal says. “Start to finish. No farmer, no butcher, no factory, no Noreen: just you. How’s that feel?”
Trey is smiling a particular small, private smile that Cal has come to realize means he’s specially happy. “Not bad,” he says.
“If I had my way,” Cal says, “I’d do this for every piece of meat I ever ate. It’s harder and messier than buying a hamburger, but that seems fitting. Eating a creature shouldn’t be a light thing.”
Trey nods. They eat without talking for a while. Outside the window, twilight is setting in and the cloud has started to break up, leaving patches of sky a luminous lavender-blue, edged by the lacy black silhouette of the tree line. Somewhere far away, a fox barks sharply.
“You could live up the mountains,” Trey says. He has clearly been thinking this over. “If you got good at it. Never come down again.”
“You can’t shoot jeans,” Cal points out. “Or sneakers. Unless you want to sew your clothes out of hides, you’d have to come down sometimes.”
“Once a year. Stock up.”
“You could, I guess,” Cal says. “I’d get lonesome, though. I like having someone to talk to, now and again.”
The kid, scraping his plate, throws him a glance that says they differ widely on this. “Nah,” he says.
Cal gets up to fix Trey a second helping. From the stove he says, “You wanna bring one of your friends with us, next time we go hunting?”
The last thing he wants is more random kids hanging around his house, but he feels pretty safe; he just wants to confirm a suspicion he has. Sure enough, Trey stares at him like he just suggested inviting a buffalo to dinner, and shakes his head.
“Your call,” Cal says. “You got friends, though, right?”
“Huh?”
“Friends. Buddies. Compañeros. People you hang out with.”
“I did have. I’ll get back with them sometime.”
Cal puts Trey’s plate in front of him and goes back to his own dinner. “What happened?”
“They’re not allowed hang around with me any more. They don’t care, but; they would anyway. I just . . .” He twitches one shoulder, sawing at a chunk of rabbit. “Not now.”
An edge of tension has slid back into his body. Cal says, “How come they’re not allowed to hang out with you?”
“We did some stuff together,” Trey explains through a mouthful, “like we robbed a coupla bottles of cider and got drunk. Stuff like that. There was the four of us in it—the cider wasn’t my idea, even. But their parents reckoned it was all my fault ’cause I’m the bad one.”
“You don’t seem like a bad kid to me,” Cal says, even though Trey doesn’t seem particularly upset about it. “Who says you are?”
Trey shrugs. “Everyone.”
“Like who?”
“Noreen. Teachers.”
“What’d you do that’s so bad?”
Trey twists one corner of his mouth, implying a surfeit of examples. Cal says, “Pick one.”
“Teacher was giving me hassle today. For not paying attention. I told her I don’t give a shite.”
“Well, that’s not bad,” Cal says. “It’s unmannerly, and you shouldn’ta done it. But it’s not a question of morals.”
The kid is giving him that look again. “That’s not manners. Manners is like chew with your mouth closed.”
“Nah. That’s just etiquette.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Etiquette is the stuff you gotta do just ’cause that’s how everyone does it. Like holding your fork in your left hand, or saying ‘Bless you’ if someone sneezes. Manners is treating people with respect.”
“I don’t always,” Trey says.
“Well, there you go,” Cal says. “Maybe it’s your manners that need work. You could do with keeping your mouth shut when you chew, too.”
Trey ignores that. “Then what’s a question of morals, so?”
Cal finds himself uncomfortable with this conversation. It brings back things that put a bad taste in his mouth. Over the last few years it’s been brought home to him that the boundaries between morals, manners and etiquette, which have always seemed crystal-clear to him, may not look the same to everyone else. He hears talk about the immorality of young people nowadays, but it seems to him that Alyssa and Ben and their friends spend plenty of their time concentrating on right and wrong. The thing is that many of their most passionate moral stances, as far as Cal can see, have to do with what
