“Sure, you do that,” Cal says, his voice rising. “And give my love to Whatshisname,” but she’s already hung up, which is probably a good thing.

Cal stands there in his back field for a while, with the phone in his hand. He wants to punch something, but he knows that would do nothing but bust his knuckles. Having that much sense makes him feel old.

Evening is filtering into the air; there are streaks of cold yellow above the mountains, and in the oak tree the rooks are having their evening conference. Cal goes back to the house and puts some Emmylou Harris on the iPod. He needs someone to be sweet to him, just for a little while.

He takes that bottle of Jim Beam out onto the back steps after all. He can’t see any reason not to. Even if someone is in some kind of danger, it seems the last thing they want is any help from him.

He also can’t see any reason not to let himself sit there 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 he can hold out against his own intractable unsettled places, but not both at the same time.

He goes to the sink, fills up the plastic tub where he does his dishes, and finds an old dish towel. Then he takes them both to the door and flings it wide open.

“Kid!” he calls, good and loud, to the hedge. “Get out here.”

Silence. Then a flying egg misses Cal by inches and splatters against the wall.

“Kid! I changed my mind. Knock that shit off before I change it back again.”

There’s another silence, this one longer. Then Trey, egg box in hand and egg in the other, steps out of the hedge and stands waiting, ready to run or throw. The V of light from the doorway stretches his shadow behind him, turning him elongated and narrow, a dark figure materialized in headlight beams on a deserted road.

“I’ll look into your brother,” Cal says. “I’m not promising you anything, but I’ll see what I can do.”

Trey is staring at him with pure, feral suspicion. “Why?” he demands.

“Like I said. I changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“None of your beeswax,” Cal says. “Not because of you pulling this dumb crap, tell you that much. You still want me to do this, or not?”

Trey nods.

“OK,” Cal says. “Then first off, you clean up all this shit. When you’re done, come inside and we’ll talk.” He dumps the towel and the bucket on the doorstep, goes back inside and slams the door behind him.

He’s finishing up the last of his burger when he hears the door open and the wind comes charging in, looking for things to grab. Trey stands in the doorway.

“You done?” Cal asks.

Trey nods.

Cal doesn’t need to check whether he did it right. “OK,” he says. “Sit down.”

Trey doesn’t move. It takes Cal a minute to realize: he’s scared he’s being lured inside for a beating.

“Jesus, kid,” he says. “I’m not gonna hit you. If you cleaned up, we’re square.”

Trey’s eyes go to the desk, in a corner.

“Yeah,” Cal says. “You messed it up pretty good. I got most of the paint off, but there’s some in the cracks. You can work on it with a toothbrush sometime.”