although he’s aware that this may be deliberate. The kid sticks around for an hour, or a couple, and mostly for some food. Then—in response to some mysterious inner alarm clock, or maybe just when he gets bored—he says, “Haveta go,” and leaves, tramping up the garden with his hands deep in his hoodie pockets, not looking back.
The first rainy day, Cal doesn’t expect to see him. He’s stripping wallpaper and singing the odd half line along with Otis Redding when a shadow crosses the light, and when he looks around, there Trey is at the window, watching him from inside a disreputable wax jacket a couple of sizes too small. Cal is momentarily dubious about inviting him in, but with rain dripping off the kid’s hood and the end of his nose, he doesn’t feel like he has much choice. He hangs the kid’s jacket on a chair to dry and gives him a scraper.
On sunny days they go back to the desk, but sunny days are getting scarcer as September runs itself down. More and more often, rain whips the house, and wind packs sodden leaves at the bases of walls and hedges. The squirrels are in a hoarding frenzy. Mart announces that this means a bastard of a winter ahead, and provides dramatic accounts of years when the townland was cut off for weeks and people froze to death in their own homes, although Cal fails to be properly impressed. “I’m used to Chicago,” he reminds Mart. “We don’t call it cold till our eyelashes freeze.”
“Different kind of cold,” Mart informs him. “This one’s sneaky. You wouldn’t feel it coming, not till it’s got you.”
Mart’s opinion of the Reddys turns out to match Noreen’s, only with more flourishes. Sheila Brady was a lovely girl from a decent family, with a fine pair of legs on her; she was planning to move to Galway and train as a nurse, except before she could get that far she fell for Johnny Reddy. He could talk the cross off an ass and never held a job for more than three months in his life, because nothing that would take him was good enough for him: “no kind of worker,” Mart says, with a depth of scorn that Cal and his squad reserved for granny-muggers. Sheila and Johnny had six kids, lived on benefits in some relative’s dilapidated cottage up in the hills—Mart does explain the relationship, in detail, but Cal loses track after three or four degrees—and now Johnny has fecked off, Sheila’s people have all died or moved away, and the family is as close as this place gets to trailer trash. Mart agrees with Noreen and Lena that the kids are unlikely to be above a little petty crime, but equally unlikely to have the capacity for anything high-level. “Holy God,” he says, amused, when Cal gives him the worried-city-boy spiel, “you’ve too much time on your hands. Get yourself a woman, like I told you. Then you’ll know what worry is.”
In fact Cal has more or less ruled out the possibility that the kid is planning on robbing him, given that he would be going about it in the dumbest possible way, and from what Cal can tell he appears to be far from dumb. Now that he knows a little bit about Trey’s probable family, other, more likely scenarios present themselves: the kid is getting picked on and needs protection, the kid is being abused one way or another and wants to tell someone, the kid’s mom is a drunk or on drugs or getting beat up by a boyfriend and he wants to tell someone, the kid wants Cal to track down his wayward daddy, or the kid is looking to establish some kind of alibi for something he shouldn’t be doing. Cal feels that the locals, biased by Johnny Reddy’s fecklessness, may be underrating his son’s abilities in that department. And, while he has every reason to know that kids can on occasion rise above a shitty family, he also has every reason to know that on most occasions it doesn’t turn out that way.
He pokes around the subject of Johnny Reddy a little, giving Trey an opening if that’s where he’s headed, but Trey shuts that down right quick. “Yeah, we can use this,” Cal says, examining his first attempt at chiseling out a groove. “You’re pretty handy, kid. You help out your dad with stuff like this?”