The Searcher(19)

When Cal pushes open the door with a cheerful bell-ding, Noreen is up the ladder, dusting jars and humming along to some cheesy young guy on the radio aiming for a hoedown feel. Noreen favors tops with explosive flowers and has short brown hair set in such tight curls that it looks like a helmet.

“Wipe your boots, I’m only after washing the floor,” she orders. Then, noticing Cal properly: “Ah, ’tis yourself! I was hoping you’d call in today. I’ve that cheese in that you like. I’ve been keeping a packet back for you, because Bobby Feeney does like it as well, and he’d buy the lot on me and leave you with nothing. He’d eat it like a chocolate bar, that fella. He’ll have himself a heart attack one of these days.”

Cal wipes his boots obediently. Noreen comes down the ladder, pretty nimbly for a round woman. “And come here to me,” she says, waving her dust cloth at Cal, “I’ve a surprise for you. There’s someone I want you to meet.” She calls through the door into the back room: “Lena! Come out here!”

After a moment a woman’s voice, husky and firm, calls back, “I’m making the tea.”

“Leave the tea and come here. Bring that cheese out of the fridge, the one in the black packet. Do I have to come in and get you?”

There’s a pause, in which Cal thinks he catches an exasperated sigh. Then there’s movement in the back room, and a woman comes out holding a packet of cheddar.

“Now,” Noreen says triumphantly. “This is my sister Lena. Lena, this is Cal Hooper that’s after moving in up at O’Shea’s place.”

Lena isn’t what Cal expected. From what Mart said, he was picturing a beefy, raw-red six-footer with a voice like a cow’s bellow, brandishing a frying pan menacingly. Lena is tall, all right, and she has meat on her bones, but in a way that makes Cal picture her hillwalking, rather than hitting someone upside the head. She’s a couple of years younger than him, with a thick fair ponytail and a broad-cheekboned, blue-eyed face. She’s wearing old jeans and a loose blue sweater.

“Pleasure,” Cal says, offering his hand.

“Cal the cheddar fan,” Lena says. She has a firm shake. “I’ve heard plenty about you.”

She gives him a quick wry grin and hands over the cheese. He grins back. “Same here.”

“I’d say you have, all right. How’re you getting on in O’Shea’s? Keeping you busy?”

“I’m doing OK,” Cal says. “But I can see why nobody else wanted to take it on.”

“There’s not a lot of people looking to buy houses, round here. Most of the young people take off for the city as soon as they can. They only stay if they’re working the family farm, or if they like the country.”

Noreen has her arms folded under her bosom and is watching the two of them with a maternal approval that makes Cal itchy. Lena, hands in her jeans pockets and one hip leaned up against the counter, doesn’t appear to give a damn. She has an unforced stillness to her, and a direct gaze, that are hard to look away from. Mart was right about this much: you would know she was there.

“You stuck around, huh?” Cal says. “You in farming?”

Lena shakes her head. “I was. I sold the farm when my husband died, just kept the house. I’d had enough.”

“So you just like the country.”

“I do, yeah. The city wouldn’t suit me. Hearing other people’s noise all day and all night.”

“Cal was in Chicago, before,” Noreen puts in.

“I know,” Lena says, with an amused tilt to her eyebrow. “So what are you doing here?”

Part of Cal is tugging him to pay for his cheese and take off, before Noreen calls in a priest to marry them on the spot. On the other hand, he came here today for a purpose, besides which he’s out of a bunch of stuff. Complicating this is the fact that he can’t remember the last time he was in a room with a woman he liked the idea of talking to, and he’s unsure whether this is a point in favor of sticking around or of getting the hell out of Dodge.

“Guess I just like the country too,” he says.

Lena still has the amused look. “A lot of people think they do, till they go full-time. Come back to me after a winter here.”

“Well,” Cal says, “I’m not exactly a tenderfoot. I lived out in the backwoods off and on, when I was a kid. I figured I’d settle right back in, but looks like I’ve been in the city longer than I thought.”

“What’s getting you? Not enough to do? Or not enough people to do it with?”

“Nope,” Cal says, grinning a little sheepishly. “I’ve got no problem with either one of those. But I’ve gotta admit, I get a little jumpy at night, with no one close enough to notice if any trouble came calling.”

Lena laughs. She has a good laugh, forthright and throaty. Noreen snorts. “Ah, God love you. You’ll be used to all them armed robberies and mass shootings.” The beady glance confirms for Cal that she knows about his job, not that he doubted her. “We’ve none of that round here.”

“Well, I didn’t reckon you would have,” Cal says. “What I had in mind was more like bored kids looking for entertainment. There was a crew of us that used to mess with the neighbors: prop up trash cans full of water against someone’s door and then knock and run, or else fill up a big potato-chip bag with shaving cream and slide the open end under the door, and then stomp on it. Dumb stuff like that.” Lena is laughing again. “I figured a stranger might get a little bit of that treatment. But I guess, like you said, the young people don’t stick around. Seems like I’m the only person under fifty for miles. Present company excepted.”