Sheila says, “Why would you have us?”

“I’ve got awful fond of your Trey.”

Sheila nods, accepting that. “At first I thought you meant for old times’ sake,” she says. “I wouldn’ta fell for that. You were never like that.”

“I wasn’t,” Lena agrees. “I mighta gone that way in my old age, but. I haven’t checked.”

Sheila shakes her head. “I’m grand where I am,” she says. “I wanta have my eye on him.”

“Fair enough,” Lena says. “I’ll take the kids if you want.”

“The little ones are all right here. I told Trey to go down to you till he leaves.”

“I’ll have her. No problem.”

“I know that. She wouldn’t go.”

“Tell her again. And I’ll ask her.”

Sheila nods. “ ’Tis great there’s people that see it in her,” she says, “that she’s worth helping. She oughta make the most of that. No one ever thought that about me.”

Lena considers this. “People thought you had what you wanted, maybe,” she says. “I thought that. There’s no point in trying to help someone outa what they want.”

Sheila shakes her head briefly. “They thought I had what I deserved. That’s different.”

“They’re awful fond of thinking that, around here,” Lena agrees. “I’d say there was plenty that thought the same about me when Sean died.”

“I liked Sean,” Sheila says. “You picked right.” Out in the yard, one of the kids yells, but she doesn’t look around. “There’s people that help me now, anyhow,” she says. “The last coupla years. Bringing me a loada turf for the winter. Mending my fence that was falling down.”

Lena says nothing. She knows why the townland started giving Sheila help.

“I oughta spit in their faces,” Sheila says. “Only I can’t afford to.”

Lena says, “Are you wanting to spit in my face?”

Sheila shakes her head again. All her movements have a spare, contained quality, like she’s eking herself out to last the day. “You’re not doing it ’cause you think it’ll clear your debt,” she says. “You owe me nothing. And you’re not doing it for me, anyhow. You’re doing it for Trey.”

“Well then,” Lena says. “If you want to bring the kids down to mine, bring them.”

This time Sheila looks at her differently, with something almost like interest. “Everyone’d be asking you questions,” she says. “You always hated that. People poking their noses in.”

It’s the first time she’s spoken like Lena is someone who used to be her friend. “I’m older now,” Lena says. “They can ask all they like. It’ll do them good. Get the aul’ circulation going.”

“What would you tell them?”

“Whatever we fancy, sure. The English fella’s here hunting for Bobby’s aliens, maybe, and him and Johnny are after bringing one into the house, and you’re sick of cleaning alien shite off your floors.”

Sheila laughs. The laugh, clear and free and youthful, takes both of them by surprise. Sheila snaps her mouth closed and looks down into her mug like she’s done something ill-judged.

“Doireann Cunniffe’d fall for it,” Lena says. “As long as you kept a straight face.”

That pulls a faint smile out of Sheila. “I was awful for that,” she says. “You had the best poker face of any of us. I was always the one that’d start in giggling and give us away.”

“That was half the fun, sure. Talking our way outa trouble afterwards.”

One of the kids shrieks again. This time Sheila gives the window a brief glance. “If I told them what we usedta get up to,” she says, “they wouldn’t believe it, to look at me now. The children. They wouldn’t believe a word.”

The thought seems to chafe at her. “Sure, that’s the way it goes,” Lena says. “I’d say our parents got up to plenty that we wouldn’ta believed, either.”

Sheila shakes her head. “I’d like them to know,” she says. “To warn them, like. One minute you’re a bunch of mad wee messers, and then next thing you know…You tell Trey. She’ll believe you.”

“She’s fifteen,” Lena points out. “We’ll be lucky if she believes a word outa any adult, the next few years.”

“You tell her,” Sheila repeats. She picks at something stuck to her mug, which seems to irritate her. The shrieking outside has stopped. “I left him one time,” she says. “Middle of the night. He was asleep, drunk. I packed the kids into the car—the four of them, just, ’twas before Liam and Alanna—and I went. Mostly I remember how quiet it was: the rain on the windscreen, and not another soul on the roads. The kids went asleep. I drove for hours. In the end I turned around and came back. There was nowhere I could drive to that was far enough to be worth my while.”

Her fingers have stilled on the mug. “I felt like a prize feckin’ eejit,” she says. “He never knew, anyway. I was glad of that. He woulda made fun of me.”

“If you think of something I could do,” Lena says. “Say it to me.”

“Maybe,” Sheila says. “Thanks for the jam.” She gets up and starts clearing away the tea things.

—

Cal is doing the dishes after lunch when Trey and Banjo show up. The sound of the door banging open hits him with a surge of relief so disproportionate it almost knocks him off his feet. “Hey,” he says. “Long time no see.”

Trey gives his injured face one long, unreadable look, but then her eyes skid away. “I came yesterday morning,” she informs him. “You were out.”

The fact that she came at all has to be a good thing, but Cal can’t tell by her whether she was just there for carpentry purposes, or whether she wanted to talk. “Well,” he says, “I’m here now.”

“Yeah,” Trey says. She crouches to meet Rip’s welcome and rub his jowls.

She hasn’t brought anything. Mostly Cal doesn’t like it when Trey shows up with food—he doesn’t require an entrance fee—but today he would have welcomed a packet of cookies or a hunk of cheese or whatever. It would mean she was planning to stick around awhile.

“What’s with his paw?” he asks, indicating Banjo.

“Fell over him,” Trey says, that little bit too promptly. “That was days ago, but. He’s grand. He’s only looking for ham slices.”

“Well, we got those,” Cal says. He goes to the fridge and tosses Trey the packet. He doesn’t try asking about her lip, which looks pretty much healed. Apparently today everybody is politely not asking anybody anything. “You want something to eat?”

“Nah. Had lunch.” Trey drops onto the floor and starts feeding Banjo scraps of ham.

“No thank you,” Cal says automatically, before he can stop himself.

Trey rolls her eyes, which comforts him a little bit. “No thank you.”

“Hallelujah,” Cal says, getting out the iced tea. His voice sounds fake to him. “We got there in the end. Have some of this. This weather, if you don’t keep drinking you’ll shrivel up.”

Trey rolls her eyes again, but she downs the iced tea and holds out her glass for more. “Please,” she adds, as an afterthought.

Cal gives her a refill and pours a glass for himself. He knows he needs to talk to her, but he allows himself a minute first, to just lean against the counter and look at her. The kid is outgrowing her jeans again; her ankles stick out. Last time it took Sheila months to notice and buy her new gear, while Trey refused to take Cal’s charity and Cal tried to come up with a way of raising the issue to Sheila without being some pervert who looked at teenagers’ legs. Back then he swore that next time he was just going to go into town and buy her some damn jeans, and if she didn’t like it she could feed them to Francie’s pigs.

“I saw my dad last night,” Trey says. “When he got in.”

“Oh yeah?” Cal says. He keeps his voice neutral, even though that little shitbird clearly saw no downside to telling the kid who had done the damage, putting her right in the middle.

“You bet him up pretty good.”

Two years ago she would have said “You bet the shite outa him,” or something. That “pretty good” is all Cal. “We went at it,” he says.

“How come?”

“We had a difference of opinion.”

Trey has her jaw set at the angle that means there’s business to be dealt with. “I’m not a fuckin’ baby.”

“I know that.”

“So how come you fought him?”

“OK,” Cal says. “I don’t like your dad’s game.”

“It’s not a game.”

“Kid. You know what I mean.”

“What d’you not like?”

Cal finds himself where Trey regularly seems to put him: helplessly and desperately out of his depth, right when it’s crucial not to fuck up. He has no idea what to say that won’t make things worse.

“I’m not gonna bitch about your daddy to you, kid,” he says. “That’s not my place. But the stuff he’s doing…” That’s not what I want for you, is what he means, except that he has no right to want anything for Trey at all. “People round here are gonna end up pretty pissed off.”

Trey shrugs. Rip is shouldering Banjo out of the way, looking for both shares of ham and attention. She disentangles them and uses one hand for each.

“When they do,” Cal says, “it’d be a real good idea if you weren’t smack in the middle of all this.”

That gets a swift flash of a glance from Trey. “They can go and shite. All of ’em. I’m not scared of them.”

“I know that,” Cal says. “That’s not what I mean.” What he means is simple enough—Things were good, that matters, don’t go and fuck it all up—but he can’t find a way to say it. It seems laden with too many things that a kid Trey’s age is incapable of knowing, even if he could explain them to her: the full weight and reach of choices, how unthinkingly and how permanently things can be forfeited. She’s much too young to have something the size of her future in her hands. He wants to ditch this whole damn topic of conversation and argue with her over whether she needs a haircut. He wants to tell her she’s grounded till she gets some sense.

“Then what?” Trey demands.

“He’s your daddy,” Cal says, picking his words with difficulty. “It’s natural for you to want to help him out. But things are gonna get messy.”

“Not if you say nothing.”

“You figure that’ll make a difference? Seriously?”

Trey gives him a look like if he was any dumber she’d have to water him. “You’re the only one that knows. How are the lads gonna find out, if you don’t talk?”

Cal feels his temper rising. “How the hell are they not gonna find out? There’s no fucking gold. I don’t care how dumb your dad thinks they are, sooner or later they’re gonna notice that. And then what?”

“My dad’ll come up with a story,” Trey says flatly. “That’s what he’s good at.”

Cal bites back several comments that need to stay unsaid. “Yeah, the guys won’t give a shit how good his story is. What they’ll want is their money. If you’re hoping they’ll cut your dad some slack if you’re involved, just ’cause you’ve got some respect around here—”

“Never thought that.”

“Good. ’Cause they won’t. All you’ll do is drop yourself in the shit right alongside him. You want that?”

“I told you. They can all go and shite.”

“Listen,” Cal says. He takes a breath and brings his voice down to normal, or as close as he can get it. He looks at the mutinous set of Trey’s shoulders and has a doomed sense that whatever he says is inevitably going to be the wrong thing. “All I’m saying is, sooner or later, this is gonna be over. When it is, your dad and Rushborough are gonna have to leave town.”

“I know that.”

Cal can’t tell, from what he can see of her face, whether that’s true or not. “And I’m saying you need to think about what happens after that. If you stay out of your dad’s doings from now on, I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t get any flak from anyone. But if—”

That gets a flash of anger from Trey. “I don’t want you sticking your nose in. I can look after myself.”

“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.”