Getting there, Cal texts. You should come see it. Alyssa comes back with, Yes! As soon as work settles down and an eye-roll emoji. Even though this is much what Cal expected, it leaves him sore and low, with the urge to call Donna and piss her off.
Instead he goes out to his woods and spends a couple of hours collecting dead branches to stack for firewood. The cold has settled in, and a fine net curtain of rain hangs in the air. Whenever Cal leaves the house, even just to take out the trash, he doesn’t feel a drop hit him, but he gets back inside damp through. Somehow it seeps inside the house, too: no matter how long he keeps the fire burning and the oil heater on, his sleeping bag and his duvet always feel almost imperceptibly damp. He buys another heater for his bedroom, which helps some but not a whole lot.
He tries to take advantage of the fact that he can play his music as loud as he wants again, but it doesn’t go to plan. He starts out well, cooking dinner to a good rousing dose of Steve Earle complete with full air drums, just like no one ever came peeping in the windows to see him make a fool of himself. Somehow or other, though, by the end of the evening he finds himself sitting on his back step with a beer, looking up into the darkening haze of the sky and feeling the mist of rain thicken on his skin and his hair, while Jim Reeves fills the air with an old tearjerker about a guy trudging through a blizzard who almost makes it home.
One of the few things that give Cal real pleasure in these days is the discovery that he still has his eye for a rifle. The weather lends itself more to fishing, but he doesn’t have the patience just now. He would love to spend more time out with the Henry, drizzle or no drizzle, but there’s a limit to how much rabbit he can eat. He stashes a couple in his new freezer and takes two to Daniel Boone, who rewards him with a discount on bullets and a tour of his favorite guns, and a pair to Noreen, to make it clear that he sees and appreciates her support. He knows he ought to take one to Mart, but he can’t bring himself to do it.
He could take one to Lena, except he’s avoiding her with such dedication that he feels like a damn fool, skulking outside the shop trying to make sure she’s not in there before he can work up the courage to go in himself. He would love to do all his shopping in town for a few weeks, but he can’t risk offending Noreen at this delicate moment. This also means he can’t hurry in and out; he has to listen to all the news about Angela Maguire’s heart trouble, complete with an explanation of how Noreen and Angela are half cousins via a great-grandmother who may or may not have poisoned her first husband, and discuss what the new water park up beyond town might mean for Ardnakelty. Normally he would be happy to spend half his day on this, but if Lena sees him she’ll want to talk about the pup, and Cal isn’t going to take the pup.
For the first time since he arrived, Ireland feels tiny and cramped to him. What he needs is thousands of miles of open highway where he can floor it all day and all night long, watching the sun and the moon pass over nothing but ochre desert and tangled brush. If he tried that around here, he would get about fifty yards before running into an unjustifiable road twist, a flock of sheep, a pothole the size of his bathtub or a tractor going the other way. He goes walking instead, but the fields are so sodden they squelch like bog under his feet, and the road verges are churned to extravagant pits and ridges of mud that stop him from ever finding a rhythm to his stride. Mostly these inconveniences wouldn’t bother him, but right now they feel personally targeted: pebbles in his shoes, small but carefully chosen for their sharp corners.
Cal refuses to let his unsettled feeling faze him too badly. It’s natural enough, after the disturbance Trey brought. If he lets it be and does plenty of hard work, the feeling will pass. This is what he did at times when, for example, his marriage or his job pinched him around the edges, and it worked: sooner or later, things shifted themselves around enough that he felt at ease amid them again. He reckons by the time he has the house ready for winter, he should have worn the restlessness down.
In the event, he doesn’t get the chance. Less than two weeks after he sends Trey packing, he’s sitting in his nice spiffed-up front room, in front of a wood fire. It’s a high-tempered, unruly night, windy enough to make Cal wonder if his roof is as sound as he thought. He’s reading the skinny local paper, and listening for the sound of smashing roof slates, when there’s a knock at the door.
The knock has an odd quality, rough and sloppy, more like an animal’s pawing. If it hadn’t come in the lull between two gusts, Cal might have put it down to the wind hurling a branch up against the door. It’s ten at night, past farmers’ bedtime unless something is badly wrong.
Cal puts his paper down and stands for a moment in the middle of his front room, wondering whether to get his rifle. The knock doesn’t come again. He crosses to the door and cracks it open.
Trey is
