The Searcher(8)
“Huh,” Cal says. That could raise some bad blood, one way or another. “Did anyone want to buy it?”
“My brother did,” Mart says promptly. “The eejit. We’d enough on our plates. He watched too much Dallas, that fella. Fancied himself a cattle baron.”
“Thought you said he had no ideas,” Cal says.
“That wasn’t an idea, that was a notion. I nipped it in the bud. There’s no nipping women’s ideas. Cut them down one place, they grow up another. You wouldn’t know where you’d be.”
Kojak is leaning up against Cal’s leg, eyes half closed in bliss, butting Cal’s hand whenever he forgets to rub. Cal has been planning on getting a dog; he was going to wait till he had the house in better shape, but it looks like sooner might be a good idea. “Any relations of the O’Sheas around here?” he asks. “I found some stuff they might want.”
“If they wanted it,” Mart points out logically, “they had twenty year to take it. What class of stuff?”
“Papers,” Cal says vaguely. “Pictures. Figured I might as well check before I throw it out.”
Mart is grinning. “There’s Paudge’s niece Annie, a few mile up the road beyond Moneyscully. If you fancy taking that stuff to her, I’ll bring you, just to see the look on Annie’s face. Her mammy and Paudge couldn’t stand the sight of each other.”
“Think I’ll pass,” Cal says. “She have any kids who might want mementoes of their great-uncle?”
“They’re all gone off, sure. Dublin or England. Use them papers to light your fire. Or sell them on the internet, to some other Yank that wants a bit of heritage.”
Cal isn’t sure whether this is a jab or not. With Mart, he can’t always tell, which he knows is half the fun of it. “I might do that,” he says. “This isn’t my heritage, anyway. My family’s not Irish, so far as I know.”
“You’ve all got a bit of Irish in ye over there,” Mart says, with supreme confidence. “One way or another.”
“Guess I oughta hang on to that stuff, then,” Cal says, giving Kojak a final pat and turning back to his toolbox. Annie doesn’t sound like she’s sending kids round to scope out the ancestral home. Cal would love a lead on who the kid might be—he thought he had a fair handle on all his near neighbors, but he isn’t aware of any kids—but being a middle-aged male stranger asking questions about the local little boys seems like a good route to a hiding and a couple of bricks through your windows, and he has enough going on as it is. He rummages through the toolbox for his chisel.
“Good luck with that yoke there,” Mart says, straightening up off the fence with a grimace. A lifetime of farm labor has ground Mart’s joints to rubble; he has trouble with his knee, his shoulder, and everything in between. “I’ll take the firewood off your hands when you’re done with it.”
“Ham,” Cal reminds him.
“You’ll have to face Noreen sooner or later. You can’t be hiding away up here hoping she’ll forget. Like I told you, bucko: once a woman gets an idea, it’s going nowhere.”
“You can be my best man,” Cal says, working the chisel under the runner.
“Them ham slices is two euros fifty,” Mart tells him.
“Huh,” Cal says. “So’re those cookies.”
Mart wheezes with laughter and slaps the fence, making it bounce and rattle alarmingly. Then he whistles to Kojak and they head off.
Cal goes back to the desk, shaking his head and grinning. He sometimes suspects that Mart is putting on the gift-of-the-gab yokel act, either for shits and giggles or in order to make Cal more amenable to the cookie run and whatever else he has in mind. Betcha, Donna would’ve said, back when they used to love coming up with stuff to make each other laugh, betcha when you’re not around he wears a tux and talks like the queen of England. That or else he’s in his Yeezys, busting a move to Kanye. Cal doesn’t think about Donna constantly, the way he did at first—it took months of dogged work, blasting music or reciting football lineups out loud like a loon every time she came into his head, but he got there in the end. She still crops up from time to time, though, mostly when he runs across something that would make her smile. He always loved Donna’s smile, quick and complete, sending every line of her face flying upwards.
From having seen his buddies go through this process, he expected that getting drunk would give him the urge to call her, so he stayed away from booze for a while, but it didn’t turn out to work that way. After a few beers Donna feels a million miles away, in some other dimension, like no phone could reach her. When he goes weak is when she takes him by surprise like this, on an innocent fall morning, blooming right across his mind so fresh and vivid that he can almost smell her. He can’t remember why he shouldn’t pull out his phone, Hey, baby, listen to this. Probably he should delete her number, but they might need to talk about Alyssa sometime, and anyway he knows it by heart.
The drawer runner finally comes free, and Cal pulls out the old rusted nails with a pair of pliers. He measures the runner and scribbles the measurements on it. First time he was in the building suppliers he picked up a few bits of lumber, different sizes, because he had that toolbox and because you never know. One long piece of pine is just about the right width for the new runners, too thick but not by much. Cal clamps it to the table and starts planing it down.