‘Don’t bother with all the silence.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘You think I can fall asleep with you out God-knows-where?’

She flicked her light on and sat up and looked at her husband with all the derision and anger he knew she felt.

‘Come on, I told you where I was.’

‘You said you were going to find the Cahill boy and talk some sense into him, which means God-knows.’

‘Stop saying that.’

‘And you took the gun,’ she said. Then he saw it, in the dark: real hurt in her face. She was maybe crying, maybe had earlier in the night. Normally their arguments did not extend past annoyance. And she didn’t cry.

‘How do you know that?’ he asked, regretting the question the minute it left him.

‘You left the back shed door open.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Well, it was open when I looked out there, and I walked in and the gun was gone. Are you gonna tell me what you were thinking?’ She was near tears and it made him hurt. ‘What were you thinking, Vernie? What were you doing?’

He tried to shush her, cooing at her like she was pigeon, but her arms were crossed and his cooing only seemed to strengthen her resolve. He sat on the bed beside her and looked at his hands. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry is nothing. Sorry’s a rotten word.’

‘I know,’ he said, and then, ‘I was just going to scare him a bit.’

She snorted. ‘Scare him a bit. He’s a Cahill, Vernie. They don’t scare at guns.’

‘He’d been hitting my boy.’

‘He’s my boy too.’

‘Well, he’d been hitting him. I’m not going to go in there with my shoulders all slumped and ask him pretty please will you stop. People like that only understand power.’

She said nothing for a moment. Then, ‘Did it work?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you talk to them?’

‘I talked to Ernie and he seemed to agree to get it stopped. Seemed like he didn’t know it was happening. It was his oldest, Brendan.’

‘Did you take the shotgun in?’

He nodded. ‘But I had it down. Just so they knew I was serious.’

‘And they weren’t mad?’

‘Well. Ernie was a bit.’

‘But he said he’d have it stopped?’

‘That’s what he said.’

She finally unfolded her arms but drew no closer to her husband. She said, ‘I thought I might go and visit him tomorrow.’

‘Ernie?’

‘Get off it,’ she said. ‘Caleb.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Just take him some things.’

Vernon looked at the ceiling. ‘I regret it. Not going to visit him before this. You should have seen him.’

‘You said.’

‘Don’t you regret it?’

In the dark her face was unknowable. ‘I always regretted it.’

She shuffled onto her back and rolled from him, bunching the sheets around her, flicking off her light. He said nothing else and in their now shadowed ceiling he conjured up the image of the cemetery, the concrete headstones, what it would be like to regard so many dead from above, or below. He thought of how his wife had spoken of their son since he beat Mel. Her words now. Had she really regretted it? Had she forgiven their son? He sat there on their bed staring at her back.