Sheila nods, unconvinced. Her eyes have slipped off him again.

“The other thing that hurt her,” Cal says, “was the note our girl left. Telling us how mean we were, and how it was all our fault. Me, I figured she was just working up a good head of steam to get herself out the door, but her mama didn’t see it that way. Your boy leave you a note?”

Sheila shakes her head again. “Nothing,” she says. Her eyes are dry, but her voice has a raw, scraped sound.

“Well, he’s young,” Cal says. “Same as my girl was. That age, they don’t realize what they’re doing to us.”

Sheila says, “Did your girl come back?”

“Sure did,” Cal says, grinning. “Took her a couple of months, but once her point was made and she got tired of working in a diner and sharing a studio full of roaches, she came running. Safe and sound.”

She smiles, just a twitch. “Thank God,” she says.

“Oh, we did,” Cal says. “God and the roaches.” And then, more soberly: “The waiting was hard, though. We were worrying every minute, what if she’s fallen in with some guy that doesn’t treat her right, what if she’s got nowhere to stay. And worse things.” He blows out air, looking up at the mountain. “Tough times. Maybe it’s different with a boy, though. You worry about him? Or you figure he can take care of himself?”

Sheila turns her face away from him, and he sees the long cord in her neck move as she swallows. “I worry, all right,” she says.

“Any particular reason? Or just ’cause you’re his mama, and that’s your job?”

The wind whips strands of her hair against the sharp peak of her cheekbone. This time she doesn’t push them away. She says, “There’s always reasons to worry.”

“I don’t mean to pry,” Cal says. “Pardon me if I’ve overstepped. I’m just saying, kids do the darnedest things. Most times, it all comes out in the wash. Not always, but mostly.”

Sheila takes a quick breath and turns back to him. “He’ll be grand,” she says, with a crisp snap to her voice all of a sudden; she doesn’t sound spacey any more. “Sure, I don’t blame him. He’s only doing what I should’ve done myself, when I was his age. Are you right, now, with them socks?”

“I’m a new man,” Cal says. “Thanks to you.”

“Right,” Sheila says. Her body is half-turned towards the house. “Liam! Alanna! Get off that yoke and come in for your dinner!”

“Much obliged,” Cal says, but she’s already hurrying off across the grass. She barely turns to nod over her shoulder before she’s gone behind the house, herding the kids in front of her with sharp flaps of her hands.

Cal walks back down the mountain. Apart from the patches of spruce, trees are few and far between; just the odd lonesome one, spiky and contorted, bare for winter and blown permanently sideways by the memory of hard prevailing winds. In the crook of a hill, someone’s been dumping garbage: a rusty iron bedstead, complete with stained mattress, and a heap of big plastic bags ripped open and spilling. Once he passes the stone-wall scraps of an abandoned cottage. An old crow, perched amid the grass that’s seeded in the cracks, opens its beak wide and tells him to keep moving.

He’s come across plenty of people like Sheila, both in his childhood and on the job. Whether they started out that way or got brought to it somehow, their focus isn’t much broader than a prey animal’s. They’re all used up by scrabbling to keep their footing; they don’t have room to aim for anything bigger or farther than staying one jump ahead of bad things and snatching the occasional treat along the way. He gets another inkling of what a brother like Brendan must have meant to a kid like Trey, in that house.

Sheila told the kid the truth, or at least she told him the same thing she’s telling herself: she believes Brendan got fed up and ran away, and he’ll be back. That may well be true, but Sheila hasn’t offered Cal anything to nudge him farther in that direction than he already was. Her belief is built purely out of hope, piled on top of nothing, solid as smoke.

Her worry, on the other hand, is dense and sharp-cornered as a lump of rock. Sheila’s got reasons to worry about Brendan, even if she’s not about to share them with Cal. One of Brendan’s buddies might, though.

Cal thought he was done with this stuff for good, the day he turned in his badge. Well, would you look at that, he thinks, with a feeling he can’t identify. I guess I still got it.

Donna would have rolled her eyes and said, I knew it, the only surprise is that it took you this long. She said Cal was addicted to fixing things, like a guy jabbing on and on at a slot machine, unable to leave it alone until the lights flashed and the prize came pouring out. Cal objected to that comparison, given the amount of hard work and skill he put into fixing things, but that just made Donna throw up her hands and make an explosive noise like a pissed-off cat.

Probably Donna was right, or a little bit right, anyway. The restless feeling is gone.

Mart is leaning on Cal’s gate, staring out across the fields and smoking one of his hand-rolled cigarettes. When he hears the crunch of Cal’s boots on the road, he whips round and greets him with a whoop and a fist pump. “Get up, ya boy ya!”

“Huh?” Cal says.

“I heard you were over at Lena’s place the other day. How’d you get on? Did you get the ride?”

“Jesus, Mart.”

“Did you?”

Cal shakes his head, grinning against his will.

Mart’s screwed-up eyes are alight with mischief. “Don’t be letting me down, bucko. Did you get a kiss and a cuddle, at least?”

“I got to cuddle a puppy,” Cal says. “Does that count?”

“Ah, for Christ’s sake,” Mart says, disgusted. More philosophically, he adds, “Well, it’s a step, anyhow. The women do love a man that likes puppies. You’ll be in like Flynn before you know it. Are you taking her out?”

“Nope,” Cal says. “Might take the puppy, though.”

“If it’s outa that beagle of hers, you might as well. That’s a fine dog. Is that where you’ve been the day? Cuddling puppies?”

“Nah. Went for a walk up the mountain. Stood in a patch of bog, though, so I came home.” Cal holds up his wet boot.

“Watch yourself around them bogs, now,” Mart says, inspecting the boot. Today he’s wearing a dirty orange baseball cap that says BOAT HAIR DON’T CARE. “You don’t know their ways. Step in the wrong patch and you’ll never step out again. They’re fulla tourists; eat ’em like sweeties, so they do.” He shoots Cal a wicked slantwise look.