The Hunter

Lena’s house is lit, three small clean rectangles of yellow against the great black fields. Her dogs, Nellie and Daisy, let her know Trey and Banjo are coming; before they’re in the gate, she opens the door and stands waiting in the light. The sight of her loosens Trey’s muscles a little. Lena is tall and built strong, with deep curves, wide cheekbones and a wide mouth, heavy fair hair and very blue eyes. Everything about her has a heft to it; nothing is half there. Cal is the same: he’s the tallest man Trey knows and one of the broadest, with thick brown hair and a thick brown beard, and hands the size of shovels. Trey herself is constructed for agility and inconspicuousness, and has no issue with this, but she takes a deep pleasure in Cal’s and Lena’s solidity.

“Thanks for having me,” she says on the doorstep, handing Lena a Ziploc bag full of meat. “Rabbit.”

“Thanks very much,” Lena says. Her dogs swivel between Trey, Banjo, and the bag. Lena palms their noses away from it. “Did you get it yourself?”

“Yeah,” Trey says, following Lena inside. Cal has a hunting rifle, and a warren on his land. The rabbit was his idea: according to him, it’s mannerly to bring your hostess a gift. Trey approves of this. She dislikes the thought of being indebted, even to Lena. “Fresh tonight. Hasta go in the fridge for a day, or else it’ll be tough. Then you can put it in the freezer.”

“I might eat it tomorrow. It’s been a while since I had rabbit. What’s that way you and Cal fry it up?”

“Garlic and stuff. And then tomatoes and peppers in with it.”

“Ah,” Lena says. “I’ve no tomatoes. I’d have to get them off Noreen, and then she’d want to know what I was cooking, and where I got the rabbit, and what you were doing over here. Even if I told her nothing, she’d smell it off me.” Lena’s sister Noreen runs the village shop, and the rest of the village while she’s at it.

“Probably she knows already,” Trey says. “About my dad.”

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” Lena says. “No need to give her a leg up, though. Let her work for it.” She puts the rabbit away in the fridge.

They make up a bed for Trey in the spare room, which is big and airy, painted white. The bed is a broad solid thing with knobbed bedposts, seventy or eighty years old by Trey’s guess, made of battered oak. Lena pulls off the patchwork quilt and folds it up. “You won’t be wanting that in this heat,” she says.

“Who else stays here?” Trey asks.

“No one, these days. Sean and I used to have friends down from Dublin for weekends. After he died, there was a while when I’d no wish to see anyone. I never got back into the habit.” Lena dumps the quilt into a chest at the foot of the bed. “Your dad called round this afternoon,” she says.

“Didja tell him I’d be coming here?” Trey demands.

“I did not. I texted your mam, though.”

“What’d she say?”

“ ‘Grand.’ ” Lena takes a sheet from a pile on a chair and shakes it out. “I had these out on the line for a while; they should be aired enough. What do you reckon about your dad coming home?”

Trey shrugs. She catches two corners of the sheet when Lena flips them to her, and starts stretching it over the mattress.

“My mam coulda told him to fuck off,” she says.

“She’d have had every right to,” Lena agrees. “I wouldn’t say he gave her a chance, but. I’d say he showed up on the doorstep with a big smile and a big kiss, and waltzed inside before she could get her bearings. By the time she’d her head together, it was too late.”

Trey considers this. It seems likely. “She could do it tomorrow,” she says.

“She might,” Lena says, “or she might not. Marriage is an odd thing.”

“I’m never gonna get married,” Trey says. Trey has a bone-deep mistrust of marriage or anything resembling it. She knows that Lena sometimes stays the night at Cal’s place, but Lena also has a place of her own, which she can go back to whenever she wants, and where no one else has any say or any right of entry. To Trey, this seems like the only possible arrangement with any sense to it.

Lena shrugs, tucking a corner in more tightly. “Some people would tell you you’ll change your mind. Who knows. Marriage suits some people, for some of their lives, anyway. It’s not for everyone.”

Trey asks abruptly, “Are you gonna marry Cal?”

“No,” Lena says. “I loved being married, mostly, but I’m done with it. I’m happy as I am.”

Trey nods. This comes as a relief. The question has been on her mind for a while. She approves of Cal and Lena being together—if one of them went out with someone else, it would complicate matters—but she likes things the way they are, with them in two separate places.

“I’ve had offers, mind you,” Lena adds, snapping the top sheet out across the bed. “Bobby Feeney came down here a coupla years back, all spruced up in his Sunday best and carrying a bunch of carnations, to explain why he’d make a fine second husband.”