Almost at the tree, Rip does a 180 and tears off around the house towards the road. Cal knows what that means. He heads back into the house, to unplug the iron.

Trey comes in the door alone: Rip and Banjo are playing tag around the yard, or hassling the rooks, or rooting out whatever they can find in the hedges. The dogs know the boundaries of Cal’s land, which is ten acres, more than enough to keep them occupied. They’re not going to go chasing sheep and getting themselves shot.

“Went and got this,” Trey says, swinging the chair off her back. “Your woman over the mountain.”

“Good job,” Cal says. “You need lunch?”

“Nah. Had it.”

Having grown up dirt-poor himself, Cal understands Trey’s prickly relationship with offers. “Cookies in the jar, if you need to top up,” he says. Trey heads for the cupboard.

Cal puts his last shirt on a hanger and leaves the iron on the kitchen counter to cool off. “Thinking of getting rid of this,” he says, giving his beard a tug. “What do you figure?”

Trey stops with a cookie in her hand and gives him a stare like he suggested walking naked down what passes for the main street in Ardnakelty. “Nah,” she says, with finality.

The look on her face makes Cal grin. “Nah? Why not?”

“You’d look stupid.”

“Thanks, kid.”

Trey shrugs. Cal is well versed in the full range of Trey’s shrugs. This one means that, having said her piece, she no longer considers this her problem. She shoves the rest of her cookie in her mouth and takes the chair into the smaller bedroom, which has turned into their workshop.

The kid’s conversational skills being what they are, Cal relies on the timing and quality of her silences to communicate anything he ought to know. Normally she wouldn’t have dropped the subject that fast, not without giving him more shit about what he would look like clean-shaven. Something is on her mind.

He puts his shirts in his bedroom and joins Trey in the workshop. It’s small and sunny, painted with the leftovers from the rest of the house, and it smells of sawdust, varnish, and beeswax. Clutter is everywhere, but it’s ordered. When Cal realized they were getting serious about carpentry, he and Trey built a sturdy shelving unit for boxes of nails, dowels, screws, rags, pencils, clamps, waxes, wood stains, wood oils, drawer knobs, and everything else. Pegboards on the walls hold rows of tools, each one with its shape traced in its proper place. Cal started off with his granddaddy’s toolbox and has since accumulated just about every carpentry tool in existence, and a few that don’t officially exist but that he and Trey have improvised to suit their needs. There’s a worktable, a lathe bench, and a stack of mixed scrap wood in a corner for repairs. In another corner is a dilapidated cartwheel that Trey found somewhere, which they’re keeping on the grounds that you never know.

Trey is kicking a drop cloth into place on the floor, to stand the chair on. The chair has good bones. It was handmade, long enough ago to have a dip worn into the seat by many rear ends, and another worn into the front stretcher by many feet. The back and the legs are delicate turned spindles, ringed and beaded here and there for decoration. It’s spent much of its life near cooking or burning, though: smoke, grease, and layers of polish have left it covered in a dark, tacky film.

“Nice chair,” Cal says. “Gonna have to clean it up before we do anything else.”

“I told her that. She said good. Her granddad made it.”

Cal tilts the chair to inspect the damage. “On the phone she said the cat knocked it over.”

Trey makes a skeptical pfft noise. “Yeah,” Cal says.

“Her Jayden’s in my school,” Trey tells him. “He’s a prick. Hits little kids.”

“Who knows,” Cal says. “All these are gonna need replacing. What wood do you figure?”

Trey examines the seat, which all those rear ends have kept clean enough to show the grain, and the insides of the breaks. “Oak. White.”

“Yeah, me too. See if we’ve got a piece thick enough to turn. Don’t worry about matching the color; we’re gonna have to stain it anyway. Just get the grain as close as you can.”

Trey squats by the assortment of scrap wood and starts poking around. Cal goes out to the kitchen and mixes white vinegar and warm water in an old jug. Then he dusts off the chair with a soft cloth, leaving space for the kid to talk into if she feels like it, and watches her.

She’s grown. Two years ago, when she first showed up in his backyard, she was a scrawny, silent kid with a self-inflicted buzz cut and a half-grown bobcat’s urge towards both flight and fight. Now she’s up past his shoulder, the buzz cut has relaxed into a rough crop, her features are getting a new clarity, and she rummages and sprawls around his house like she lives there. She even has entire conversations, or at least most days she does. She’s got none of the polish and artifice that some teenagers start developing, but she’s a teenager all the same, both her mind and her life getting more intricate every day. The things she says, just about school and her friends and whatever, have new layers underneath them. Cal is having more trouble with it than she seems to be. These days, every time he picks up a whiff of something on her mind, the bloom of terror inside him spreads wider and darker. Too many things can happen, at fifteen, and do too much damage. Trey seems solid as hardwood, in her own way, but she’s taken too many knocks in her life not to have cracks in there somewhere.

Cal finds a clean rag and starts rubbing down the chair with the vinegar mix. The sticky coating comes away well, leaving long brown streaks on the rag. Outside the window, blackbirds’ rambling songs carry from far across the fields, and bees revel in the clover that’s commandeered Cal’s backyard. The dogs have found a stick to play tug-of-war with.

Trey, holding two pieces of wood side by side to compare them, says, “My dad came home.”

Everything in Cal comes to a dead stop. Of all the fears that were milling inside him, this wasn’t one.

He says, after what seems to be a long time, “When?” The question is a dumb one, but it’s all that comes into his head.

“This morning. While I was getting the chair.”

“Right,” Cal says. “Well. He here for good? Or just for a while?”

Trey shrugs extravagantly: no idea.

Cal wishes he could see her face. He says, “How’re you feeling about it?”

Trey says flatly, “He can fuck off.”

“OK,” Cal says. “That’s fair.” Maybe he ought to be giving the kid some bullshit speech that includes the words “but he’s your daddy,” but Cal makes it his practice never to bullshit Trey, and his feelings on Johnny Reddy happen to coincide with hers.

Trey says, “Can I stay here tonight?”

Cal’s mind stops again. He goes back to rubbing down the chair, keeping his rhythm even. After a moment he says, “You worried about something your dad might do?”

Trey snorts. “Nah.”

She sounds like she’s telling the truth. Cal relaxes a little bit. “Then what?”

Trey says, “He can’t just walk back in.”

She has her back to Cal, rummaging among the wood, but her whole spine has a taut, angry hunch. “Right,” Cal says. “I’d probably feel the same way.”

“Can I stay, so?”

“No,” Cal says. “Not a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Well,” Cal says. “Your dad might not be happy about you taking off the minute he’s back in town. And I figure I’d best not start out by pissing him off. If he’s gonna stick around, I’d rather he didn’t have a problem with you hanging out over here.” He leaves it at that. She’s old enough to understand some, at least, of the other reasons why not. “I’ll call Miss Lena, see if you can spend the night there.”

The kid starts to argue, but she changes her mind and rolls her eyes instead. Cal finds, to his surprise, that he feels shaken, like he just fell off something high and he needs to sit down. He props his ass on the worktable and pulls out his phone.

On reflection, he texts Lena rather than calling her. Could Trey stay at your place tonight? Don’t know if you heard but her dad just came home. She doesn’t feel like hanging out with him.

He sits still, watching the sunlight shift across Trey’s thin shoulders as she pulls out lengths of wood and discards them, until Lena texts back. Fuck’s sake. I don’t blame her. Yeah she can stay no problem.

Thanks, Cal texts. I’ll send her over after dinner. “She says you’re welcome to stay,” he tells Trey, pocketing his phone. “You gotta tell your mama where you are, though. Or ask Miss Lena to.”

Trey rolls her eyes harder. “Here,” she says, thrusting an old oak sleeper at him. “This?”

“Yeah,” Cal says. He goes back to the chair. “That’s good.”

Trey marks the end of the sleeper with a swipe of black Sharpie and puts it back in the corner. “That stuff coming off?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Cal says. “It’s fine. Easy as pie.”

Trey finds a clean rag, dips it in the vinegar mix and wrings it out hard. She says, “What if he’s not OK with me coming here?”

“You reckon he’ll have a problem?”

Trey considers this. “He never gave a shite where we went before.”

“Well then,” Cal says. “Most likely he won’t give a shit about this, either. If he does, we’ll deal with it then.”

Trey throws a quick glance up at him. Cal says, “We’ll deal with it.”

Trey nods, one decisive jerk, and starts in on the chair. The fact that his word can reassure her makes Cal want to sit down all over again.

Reassured or not, she’s still not feeling talkative, even by her own standards. After a while, Rip and Banjo get thirsty and come in the open front door, take a long noisy drink from their bowls, and bounce into the workshop for some attention. Trey squats to make a fuss over them, even laughing when Rip nudges her under the chin hard enough that she falls on her backside. Then the dogs flop down for a rest in their corner, and Trey picks up her rag again and gets back to work.

Cal doesn’t feel much like talking either. He never for a minute expected Trey’s father to come home. Even made up entirely of anecdotes, Johnny Reddy has always struck Cal as a type he’s encountered before: the guy who operates by sauntering into a new place, announcing himself as whatever seems likely to come in handy, and seeing how much he can get out of that costume before it wears too thin to cover him up any longer. Cal can’t think of a good reason why he might want to come back here, the one place where he can’t announce himself as anything other than what he is.

—

Lena is hanging her washing on the line. She takes an unreasonable amount of private pleasure in this job. It makes her keenly aware of the air around her, warm and sweet with cut hay, of the generous sunlight covering her, and of the fact that she stands where generations of women have stood, doing the same task against the greens of the fields and the faraway outline of the mountains. When her husband died, five years back, she learned the skill of taking every scrap of happiness where she could find it. A fresh bed or a perfectly buttered piece of toast could lighten the weight enough to let her catch a breath or two. A small breeze swells the sheets on the line, and Lena sings to herself, low fragments of songs she picked up off the radio.

“Well, would you ever look at that,” a voice says behind her. “Lena Dunne. Large as life and twice as gorgeous.”

When Lena turns around, it’s Johnny Reddy, leaning on her back gate and looking her up and down. Johnny always did have a way of inspecting you like he was remembering, with approval, what you were like in bed. Since he was never in Lena’s bed and isn’t going to be, she has no time for this.

“Johnny,” she says, looking him up and down right back. “I heard you were home, all right.”

Johnny laughs. “God almighty, word still travels fast around here. The place hasn’t changed a bit.” He gives her an affectionate smile. “Neither have you.”

“I have,” Lena says. “Thank God. You haven’t.” It’s true. Apart from the first smattering of gray, Johnny looks the same as he did when he used to throw pebbles against her window and bring her and half a dozen others to the disco in town, all of them piled on top of each other in his dad’s rickety Ford Cortina, speeding through the dark and shrieking at every pothole. He even stands the same, easy and light as a young lad. He confirms Lena’s observation that the men who age best are the feckless ones.

He grins, running a hand over his head. “I’ve still got the hair, anyway. That’s the main thing. How’ve you been getting on?”

“Grand,” Lena says. “How’s yourself?”

“Never better. It’s great to be home.”

“Lovely,” Lena says. “That’s nice for you.”

“I was in London,” Johnny tells her.

“I know, yeah. Off making your fortune. Did you?”

She’s expecting a flourish-laden story about how he was within touching distance of millions when some villain swooped in and robbed the chance from under his nose, which would at least make his visit interesting enough to be halfway worthwhile. Instead, Johnny gives the side of his nose a mischievous tap. “Ah, now, that’d be telling. It’s under construction. Authorized personnel only.”

“Ah, shite,” Lena says. “I forgot my hard hat.” She goes back to her washing, feeling that Johnny could at least have waited until she was done enjoying it.

“Will I give you a hand with that?” he asks.

“No need,” Lena says. “It’s done.”

“Brilliant.” Johnny opens her gate wide and sweeps a hand towards it. “You can come for a walk with me, so.”

“This isn’t the only thing I’ve to do today.”

“The rest’ll keep. You deserve a bit of a break. When was the last time you skived off for the day? You used to be great at that.”

Lena looks at him. He still has that smile, the wide impish crinkle that woke your reckless side and lured you into thinking the stakes were low. Lena kept them that way, except for that speeding Cortina. She had a laugh with Johnny, but even though he was the finest thing and the biggest charmer within miles of Ardnakelty, he never stirred enough in her to get him beyond the outside of her bra. He had no substance; there was nothing in him to hold her. But Sheila Brady, who was Lena’s friend back then, kept believing the stakes were low and the substance was in there somewhere, till she came up pregnant. From there the momentum just kept on rolling her downhill.

Sheila was big enough and smart enough to make her own decisions, but Johnny’s momentum took their kids along too. Lena has got fonder of Trey Reddy than she is of just about any other human being.

“You know who’d only love to skive off for the day?” she says. “Sheila. She used to be great at it, too.”

“She’s at home with the kiddies, sure. Theresa went off somewhere—she’s a chip off the old block, that one, got itchy feet. The rest are too small to mind each other.”