Absent Friends

They eat franks, cole slaw, potato salad, pop open beers, watch Kevin stomp around the tiny yard in that funny kid walk. You'd think he'd tire himself out, but he can't sit still. When he falls, his eyes get wide like he can't believe it, then he just laughs. Sally and Markie take turns jumping up and grabbing him back from crawling through the bushes, running up the driveway, chewing on sticks; he's just like Markie, Jimmy thinks, the kid'll try anything, never thinks ahead. Then laughs at himself: for Pete's sake, he's a baby, how's he gonna think ahead? Jimmy and Marian jump up after Kevin, too, because Kevin, it's like he's everyone's first kid.

Marian doesn't say she got a promotion at work, so Jimmy does. Oh, Jimmy, it's no big deal, Marian protests, but Jimmy says, Come on, you've only been there two months, I mean, come on. Markie and Jimmy talk about cars: Sally tells them that Steve Fagan at the repair shop says Markie's got the best hands of any mechanic ever worked there. Jimmy tells funny stories about the firehouse. Sally says, The Chinese restaurant fire, Jimmy, I heard you were a big hero in that one.

Yeah, well, says Jimmy. I mean, the pressure was on. You save a Chinese restaurant from burning down, you know they send free egg rolls to the firehouse for the rest of your life?

Everyone laughs, and no one asks anything else about the Chinese restaurant fire, what it was like in the greasy black smoke, how it felt to grab that guy with flames all over him, roll him over and over in that tablecloth, save his life. No one asks about the fire under Jimmy's skin. No one knows anything about it, to ask.

Marian says to Sally, I'm glad your dad's better; Sally's dad's been sick on and off all summer. Everyone toasts Marian with beer cans because her middle sister, Eileen, just left to go to college. Not in New York like Marian; Eileen's going away, she got a scholarship to a fancy school in Boston. Oh, come on, you guys, I didn't do anything, says Marian, Eileen's just smarter than anyone.

Yeah, you only brought them up, your sisters and Davey, says Markie.

Well, Davey can take care of himself. But the girls, someone had to keep guys like you away from them. Marian says this and everyone laughs, but they all can see how proud Marian is.

They finish the franks and start to play a little ball, the girls against the boys like back in grade school, but Kevin tries to play. Jimmy bends down and hands the ball off to him. The kid takes it in both arms and lifts it toward the hoop, hops up, and lets it go with a big grunt like he really expects it to fly up there. Sally starts cracking up, and then Markie does, too, and then they're all laughing too hard and they have to stop. Jimmy, sitting in a rickety lawn chair, sips a cold beer, swears he can feel the heat from the sun leaning on him like it weighed something, thinks he could just sit here like this forever.

But he can't. The sun keeps moving, gets to where half the yard's shaded by the branches of the big oak tree old man O'Neill's father planted when he bought the place. Marian needs to drop in on her dad and her two sisters who still live at home, just to check up. And Kevin's getting cranky: he needs his nap, says Sally. She scoops him up, tells him to wave bye-bye to Uncle Jimmy. Marian goes in with her, carrying the bowls and plates they used. Jimmy hears the water running in the kitchen, thinks, Well, now's the time.

Markie, man, he says, just him and Markie in the yard now, the shadow of the oak tree's trunk dark on the grass between them, Markie, you seen Jack around lately?

Jack? Yeah, around, sure. How come? Markie looks away from Jimmy when he says this, quick and then back at the grass, like there's something he wants to see. But there's nothing there, and in that looking-away and looking-back Jimmy knows he's right.

Tom and Big Mike, they know enough to keep away from Markie. Whatever Markie thinks he wants, it wouldn't work out, and Tom and Mike know it even if he doesn't. But Jack thinks differently. Like always, Jack will try something just to see what happens. If trouble comes, well, that'll be what happened. Markie's always had that in him, too, though more than once Jimmy's seen on Jack's face that the trouble, for Jack, sometimes that can be the good part. For Markie, it's not that. It's more he never sees the trouble coming.

LAURA'S STORY

Chapter 8

Leaving the Cat

October 31, 2001

In the late afternoon Laura stood at the bow of the Staten Island ferry, heading back to Manhattan. She shut her eyes and breathed moisture and salt. It was a scent that from the first had smelled like home to her, though it was not. She had grown up in a state where all water was sweet. She had never known this scent until she came to New York at seventeen, a late-summer visit to serve as the border between childhood and the adult life she could not wait to live: she was on her way to college the following week.