Absent Friends

When her voice faltered, Tom took over, as though explaining this to Marian was his responsibility. “If it looks like the charge'll be homicide, they appoint lawyers who're experienced in that. They pay them more than Legal Aid. This guy Constantine, he has his own criminal practice. I checked him out. He knows what he's doing.”

Marian stared. “You checked him out?”

Tom nodded.

“Why?”

Looking into his coffee, Tom said, “If he wasn't any good, there's a guy I know.”

“Tom . . .” Marian wasn't sure what she wanted to ask, what she wanted to say.

“Look,” said Tom, but he stopped also, and he, too, seemed unsure. And then he said the same thing Marian had. “No one blames Markie.”

Marian could not take her eyes off Tom. She gazed at him the way she sometimes stared at spring shoots in her garden, the beginnings of plants she had not grown before, wondering exactly what this one or that would become. Jimmy had laughed when, one morning, he'd come upon her peering at the tiny sprouts and she'd told him what she wondered. They're whatever they were when you put them there, he'd said, wrapping an arm around her, nuzzling her neck. They don't change.

Sally sat and poured coffee for herself. “Your parents, Tom,” she said. “How could they not blame Markie?”

“It was Jack. It was what he was like.” Tom stirred sugar into his cup. His face was pale, and gray crescents underlined his blue eyes as they did Sally's green ones. He seemed about to say more, but Kevin swept his hands gleefully across the table, knocking a cookie into the air. Tom grabbed for it and caught it before it hit the floor. Kevin chortled. Tom gave him a smile and put the cookie on the table again. Kevin looked at Tom and giggled, then pushed it over the edge. This time Tom was too slow. The cookie flew to pieces when it hit the floor. Kevin peered over the edge of the chair, and then up at Tom, his face uncomprehending.

“Okay, enough.” Sally lifted Kevin out, hugging him tightly. He squirmed. She kissed his cheek, wiped his face, and set him down. He scuttled over to a red fire truck and made eee-eee noises as he rolled it around.

Tom, his eyes following Kevin, said to Sally and Marian, “If it's anyone's fault, it's mine.”

“How can you say that?” Marian asked hotly, defending Tom as though an accusation had been made. “You weren't even there.”

“I'm supposed to keep an eye on him. I'm supposed to know when he gets that way.”

Marian reached for a cookie, and Sally poured more coffee, and everyone pretended they hadn't noticed Tom speaking as though he would one day again have the chance to do what he'd been doing all his life, what he was supposed to do.

“It wasn't your job,” Marian heard herself say. “Looking out for everyone all the time. Especially someone like Jack.” She said this although she knew it was not true. Words could not change the past, change who they all had always been.

Kevin pushed his truck under the table and through the legs of their chairs.

“The funeral,” Marian said quietly, to Sally. “You'll come with us. Jimmy and I will pick you up.”

“No,” Tom said. “Let's make sure everyone understands. You'll come with Vicky and me. Come with us.”

In the end Sally did go to Jack's funeral, but alone. Vicky called to repeat Tom's offer, to assure her that Sally would be welcome to go to church with them; Sally thanked her and turned her down. She would not impose herself on the Molloys, she replied: she would not intrude on the family. To Marian, over another cup of coffee on the following day, she said she thought her presence would be difficult for Peggy and Big Mike, even if it was true they did not blame Markie. She shook her head and wondered how they could not, even if it was not Markie's fault; and though Marian insisted it would be unfair if they did, Jack was drunk, Jack threatened Markie, everyone believed that, everyone who knew Jack, though she said that, in Marian's heart she knew what Sally knew: Jack was dead and Markie had killed him, and if she were Jack's mother, her own grief and guilt would be burdens so enormous that she would be desperate to find someone else to whom they rightfully belonged.

Nor did Sally go to the church with Jimmy and Marian: this was a matter of having to wait for Kevin's sitter, she said, though when Marian walked with Jimmy down the drafty aisle of St. Ann's to the front pews where Jack's friends were gathering, she found Sally already seated, a black hat covering her bound red hair.

Jimmy and Marian slipped in beside Sally, and Marian took her hand. Jimmy's hand in her right, and Sally's in her left, her lover and her best friend, and yet she trembled deep within, shivering with a chill she feared neither the incense-streaked warmth of the church nor the presence of people she loved could ever cure. The cold wind from the abyss of Jack's death whispered of darkness to come, possibilities they had all known about and none had believed would come true.