“It was almost three years back. I’m getting used to it, bit by bit.” She rubs behind the mama dog’s ear; the dog narrows her eyes in bliss. “But I held it against the farm. Couldn’t wait to get the place off my hands.”

“Huh,” Cal says. It occurs to him that Lena is talking pretty freely to someone she’s hardly met, and that most people he’s known to do that were either crazy or looking to lower his guard for their own purposes, but from her it doesn’t make him wary. He’s aware that, however revealing this conversation might appear to be, the vast majority of her is held so far apart as to be imperceptible. “Your husband wouldn’t leave it, huh?”

“Not a chance. Sean needed the freedom. He couldn’t stick the thought of working for some other man. For me”—she tilts her head at her surroundings—“this is freedom. Not the other. When I walk out of work, I’m done. No being dragged out of bed at three in the morning because a calving’s going wrong. I like the horses, but I like them even better now that I can leave them at the end of the day.”

“Makes plenty of sense to me,” Cal says. “And it worked out that simple?”

She shrugs. “More or less. Sean’s sisters were bulling: the family farm, sold away before he was even cold in the ground, that kind of thing. They wanted me to let their sons work it, then leave it to them when I die. I decided I could live without them better than I could live with this place still on my back. I never liked them much anyway.”

Cal laughs, and after a moment Lena does too. “They think I’m a cold bitch,” she says. “Maybe they’re right. But there’s ways I’m happier now than I’ve ever been.” She nods at the runt, who’s flipped himself right side up and is squeaking furiously enough that his mama’s ears prick up. “Will you look at that fella. I don’t know where he’s going to put it, but he’s looking for more.”

“I’ll let you all go back to business,” Cal says, sliding the pup gently back into the box, where he squirms in among his brothers and sisters, heading for food. “And I’ll get back to you about this little guy.”

Lena doesn’t invite him in for a cup of tea, or walk him to the main road. She nods good-bye outside her front door and goes inside, Nellie bouncing after her, without even waving him off. All the same, Cal leaves her place feeling more cheerful than he has all day.

This mood lasts until he gets home, when he discovers that someone has let the air out of all four of his tires.

“Kid!” he yells, at the top of his lungs. “Get out here!”

The garden is silent, except for the rooks jeering back at him.

“Kid! Now!”

Nothing moves.

Cal cusses and digs his jump-starter, which has a built-in tire inflator, out of the back of his car. By the time he has the damn thing set up and working, and the first tire back in shape, he’s calmed down enough that something occurs to him. It would have been quicker and easier to slash the tires than to let the air out. If Trey bothered to do this instead, it’s because he wasn’t aiming to do real damage. He was aiming to make a point. Cal isn’t clear on what that point is—I’m going to hassle you till you do what I need, possibly, or maybe just You’re a dick—but then communication never has been Trey’s strong suit.

He’s moving on to the second tire when Mart and Kojak show up. “What’re you at with the prize pony?” Mart inquires, nodding at the Pajero. Mart, having come upon Cal waxing it one day, feels that Cal’s attitude to it is altogether too precious and citified for a back-country beater. “Putting ribbons in her mane?”

“More or less,” Cal says, giving Kojak’s head a rub as Kojak checks out the evidence of Lena’s dogs on his pants. “Topping up the air.”

Luckily Mart has more important things on his mind than the fact that Cal’s tires are flat as a witch’s tit. “A young lad’s after hanging himself,” he informs Cal. “Darragh Flaherty, from over the river. His father went out this morning to do the milking and found him hanging from a tree.”

“That’s a damn shame,” Cal says. “Give my respects to his family.”

“I will. Only twenty years of age.”

“That’s when they do it,” Cal says. For a second he sees Trey’s tense face: He didn’t go off. He goes back to screwing the inflator onto the valve stem.

“I knew that lad wasn’t right, the last while,” Mart says. “I seen him at mass in town three times this summer. I said it to his father, to be keeping an eye on him, but sure you can’t watch them day and night.”

“Why shouldn’t he go to church?” Cal asks.

“Church,” Mart tells him, pulling his tobacco pouch out of a jacket pocket and finding an undersized rollie, “is for women. The spinsters, mostly; they do like to get themselves in a tizzy over whose turn it is to do the second reading, or the altar flowers. And the mammies bringing in the childer so they won’t grow up heathens, and the aul’ ones showing off that they’re not dead yet. If a young lad starts going to mass, it’s a bad sign. Something’s not sitting right, in his life or in his head.”

“You go to mass,” Cal points out. “That’s where you saw him.”

“I do,” Mart acknowledges, “now and again. There’s great chats at Folan’s, after, and the carvery dinner. I get a fancy sometimes to have my dinner cooked by someone else. And if I’m looking to buy or sell stock, I’d go to mass all right. There’s many a deal done in Folan’s after noon mass.”

“Here I had you down as just a prayerful kinda guy,” Cal says, grinning.

Mart laughs till he chokes on smoke. “Sure, I’ve no need for that carry-on at my age. What sins would I commit, an aul’ lad like me? I haven’t even got the broadband.”

“There’s gotta be a few sins available in these parts,” Cal says. “How ’bout Malachy Whatshisname’s poteen?”

“That’s no kind of sin,” Mart says. “There’s what’s against the law, and then there’s what’s against the church. Sometimes they do be the same, and sometimes they don’t. Did they never teach you that, in your church?”

“Might’ve done,” Cal says. His mind isn’t entirely on Mart. He would be happier if he had a clearer sense both of Trey’s capabilities and of his boundaries. He has a feeling that both are flexible, determined almost entirely by context and need. “Been a while since I was a churchgoing man.”

“We wouldn’t meet your requirements, I suppose. Ye’ve all them churches where they play with the snakes and speak in tongues. We wouldn’t be able to offer you any of that round here.”