and think about Donna, seeing as he already fucked up and called her. Cal never had much time for nostalgia, but thinking about Donna seems like an important thing to do every now and then. He sometimes gets the feeling that Donna has methodically erased all their good times from her memory, so that she can move on into her shiny new life without ripping herself up. If he doesn’t keep them in his, they’ll be gone like they never happened.
What he thinks about is the morning they found out Alyssa was coming. He can remember clear as day how Donna felt when he hugged her, her skin hotter than normal like some engine was firing on new cylinders, the stunning gravitational pull of her and the mystery inside her. He sits on his back steps, watching green fields turn gray with evening and listening to Emmylou’s sad gentle voice drift out his door, and tries to work out how on earth he got from that day to this one.
SEVEN
Cal wakes up next morning with that bad feeling still running round his gut. His last year or two on the job, he woke up every day like this, with this same thick knotted certainty that something bad was rolling towards him, something unpreventable and implacable, like a hurricane or a mass shooting. It made him jumpy as a rookie; people noticed, and gave him shit about it. When Donna walked out, he thought that must be it, the bomb he had been waiting for. Only the feeling was still there in his gut, hulking and surly as ever. Then he figured it must be the hazards of the job catching him in some new middle-aged awareness of mortality, but when he put in his papers and walked away, still it stayed. It only started to loosen its grip when he signed the papers on this place, and it only finally left him the day he walked through his overgrown grass to his peeling front door. And now here it is again, like it just took a little while to sniff him out, all these miles away, and track him down.
He deals with it the way he did on the job, which is by trying to work it to death. After breakfast he gets back to painting the living room, as hard and fast as he can and whether he wants to or not. This works as well as it ever did, which is to say not particularly, but at least he gets shit done along the way. By dinnertime he has the primer put on, walls and ceiling, and most of the first coat of paint. He’s still skittish as a wild horse. The day is windy, which means all kinds of noises inside and outside and up the chimney, and Cal jumps at every one of them even though he knows they’re nothing but leaves and window frames. Or, possibly, the kid. Cal wishes the kid’s mama had decided to send him to military school when he first started playing hooky.
The days are shortening. By the time Cal knocks off work it’s dark, an edgy, blustery dark that makes his plan to walk off the rest of the feeling seem a lot less attractive. He’s eating a hamburger and trying to firm up his resolve when something smashes against his front door. Not the wind, this time; something solid.
Cal puts down his hamburger, goes quietly out the back and edges around the side of the house. There’s only a sliver of moon; the shadows are thick enough to hide even a guy his size. From out over Mart’s land floats the imperturbable call of an owl.
The front lawn is empty, wind yanking the grass this way and that. Cal waits. After a minute, something small comes whizzing out of the hedge and smacks into the wall of the house. This time, with the juicy crack and splatter it makes against the stone, Cal gets it. The damn kid is egging his house.
Cal goes back indoors and stands in his living room, evaluating the situation and listening hard. The same applies to the eggs as to the tires: a couple of rocks would have been easier to come by, and would have done a lot more damage. The kid isn’t attacking Cal; he’s demanding him.
Another egg splats against the front door. Before he knows he’s going to do it, Cal gives up. He can hold out against this kid and