The Searcher(41)

The kids glance at their mama for permission. When she nods, they edge closer, shouldering each other, till they can grab the bars.

“Say thank you,” Sheila says automatically. They don’t, although the little girl gives Cal a big happy grin. The two of them retreat to the play structure fast, before someone can take the chocolate back.

“You just have these two?” Cal asks, propping himself more comfortably on the gate.

“Six. Those are my little ones.”

“Whoa,” Cal says. “That’s a lot of hard work. Your big kids in school?”

Sheila looks around like one of them might materialize from somewhere, which Cal agrees is entirely possible. “Two,” she says. “The others are grown.”

“Wait a minute,” Cal says, delighted to have made the connection. “Is Brendan Reddy your boy? The one who did the electrical work for that guy, what’s his name, skinny old guy with a cap?”

Sheila spaces right back out, instantly and completely. Her eyes skid off Cal’s face and she gazes up the road like she’s watching some action unfold. “Don’t know,” she says. “He might’ve done.”

“Well, there’s a piece of luck,” Cal says. “ ’Cause, see, my house, O’Shea’s place? I’ve been fixing it up myself. I’m doing OK with most stuff, the plumbing and the painting. But I don’t wanna go messing around with any wires, not till someone’s taken a look who knows what he’s doing. Brendan knows his way around electrics, right?”

“Yeah,” Sheila says. Her arms have come up to wrap tightly under her bosom. “He does, yeah. But he’s not around.”

“When’ll he be back?”

Her shoulders twitch. “Don’t know. He went off. Last spring.”

“Oh,” Cal says, with dawning understanding. “He moved out?”

She nods, still not looking at him.

“He go somewhere close by, where I could maybe give him a call?”

She shakes her head, a quick jerk. “He didn’t say.”

“Well, that’s rough,” Cal says peacefully. “My girl, she did that one time. When she was eighteen. Got a bee in her bonnet about how me and her mama didn’t give her enough freedom, and off she went.” Alyssa never did any such thing. She was always a good kid, stuck to the rules, hated making people unhappy. But Sheila’s eyes have come back to him. “Her mama wanted to look for her, but I said no, let her win this one. If we go find her, she’ll be even madder, and she’ll just go farther next time. Let her go, and she’ll come back when she’s ready. You been looking for your boy?”

Sheila says, “Wouldn’t know where.”

“Well,” Cal says, “he got a passport? Can’t get too far without one of those.”

“I never had him one. He could’ve got it himself, but. He’s nineteen. Or you can get to England without.”

“Any places he wanted to see? People he talked about visiting? Our girl always did say she liked the sound of New York, and sure enough, that’s where she ran to.”

She lifts one shoulder. “Plenty of places. Amsterdam. Sydney. Nowhere I can go look for him.”

“When my girl went,” Cal says reflectively, rearranging his forearms on the gate and watching the kids take apart their chocolate, “her mama kept thinking we should’ve seen it coming. All that talk about New York, she figured that was a hint we should’ve caught. She tore herself up pretty bad about it. Boys, though, they’re different.” Cal never did like to use a daughter in his work stories; he mostly preferred to stick with his imaginary son, Buddy. Sometimes, though, a girl makes for a better angle. “They keep quiet, don’t they?”

“Brendan doesn’t,” Sheila says. “He’s a great talker.”

“Yeah? He dropped hints he was thinking about leaving?”

“Nothing about leaving. He said he was sick of it, only. Sick of having nothing to do. No money. There was a load of things he wanted, always, and he could never . . .” She throws Cal a glance that’s a mix of shame and defiance and resentment. “It wears you out.”

“That it does,” Cal agrees. “Specially if you can’t see your way out. That’s hard on a young man.”

“I knew he was fed up. Maybe I should have . . .” The wind is slapping straggles of hair across her face; she wipes them away, hard, with the back of a work-reddened hand.

“You can’t blame yourself,” Cal says gently. “That’s what I told my wife. You’re not a mind reader. All you can do is work with what you’ve got.”

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?”