Small Mercies

How things got so far, Big Peg reminds herself, is because Mary Pat meant well, but, let’s face it, she was never much of a mother. Those kids ran the show in the house because Mary Pat spoiled them. Simple as that. Let them talk back to her, rarely beat them, gave them her last dime if they asked for it. When you spoil people, they don’t thank you. They’re not grateful. They grow entitled. They start demanding things they got no right to demand.

Like with the coloreds and the school.

Like with Noel and the drugs.

Like with Jules and another woman’s husband.

Peg can’t blame herself for Mary Pat’s failings, can’t go on a guilt trip because she walked the straight and narrow like a good citizen while Mary Pat wandered off the path and into the weeds and the swamp beyond.

And now Peg finally remembers the last thing she ever said to her sister. It was about their kids, and it feels like a prophecy when you look back on it.

You can’t let them rule your life.

The day before Mary Pat is laid to rest, Bobby’s son, Brendan, ends up in the hospital with his leg broken in three places. He got it skateboarding with his friends on a steep street near his mother’s house. Tried to avoid a pothole, smashed into a Buick, went sailing over the hood. Broke his left heel, ankle, and fibula.

All clean breaks, luckily. Surgery goes off without a hitch.

Bobby and Shannon sit with him up the Carney. The cast looks bigger than the rest of him, a big white appendage jutting off his knee and hanging suspended at the other end from a metal U inverted over the bed. He’s in good spirits, a little loopy from the drugs, and he keeps giving them this bewildered smile, like How did I get here? His aunts and Uncle Tim all visit, bring him toys, cards, books. Leave silly messages on his cast. They make so much noise in there, the nurses keep having to shush them. Finally, they shoo them out until only Shannon, Bobby, and Brendan remain.

Brendan snores softly, and Shannon looks across him at Bobby and says, “Our boy,” and something in her voice breaks because something in Brendan is broken for the first time. He’s rarely been sick, never had stitches or broken a bone. Never even got a sprain.

Bobby nods, keeps his expression even and supportive.

She looks beat. She was the one who brought Brendan in. Was here for two hours before Bobby arrived. He suggests she go home, get some rest, take a shower, at least, freshen up.

She’s reluctant, but as Brendan remains sleeping and the night drags on, she gathers her things, kisses her son’s forehead, and gives Bobby a small finger wave, her eyes wet and shaken.

When she leaves, the smile Bobby’s kept plastered to his face since he got here — his cheerleader smile, his Dad’s-on-top-of-it smile, his everything’s-going-to-be-just-fine smile — drops. He imagines the black and purple leg underneath that cast, swollen and despoiled by swaths of black sutures. His son’s flesh sliced open like a Christmas ham, so the surgeons could insert their instruments inside his body and fuse bones that had snapped like breadsticks. And while Bobby is grateful — ever so fucking grateful — that modern medicine is here to respond in this way, it nonetheless feels like a violation.

It could have been so much worse. Brendan could have soared over that Buick and landed on his head. His neck. The base of his spine.

It could always be worse. That was a mantra in Bobby’s family growing up. And he agrees with it.

But he also must confront what he has grasped intellectually since the moment he first held his son in the maternity ward of St. Margaret’s and is only now allowing to infiltrate his heart. Not because he wants it to but because that cast has given him no choice.

I can’t protect you.

I can do what I can, teach you as much as I know. But if I’m not there when the world comes to take its bite — and even if I am — there’s no guarantee I can stop it.

I can love you, I can support you, but I can’t keep you safe.

And that scares the ever-living shit out of me. Every day, every minute, every breath.

“Dad?” His son is staring at him.

Bobby looks up the cast to his son’s sleepy face. “Yeah, bud?”

“It’s just a leg.”

“I know.”

“So why do you have tears in your eyes?”

“Allergies?”

“You’re not allergic to anything.”

“Shut up.”

“Real mature.”

Bobby smiles but says nothing. After a bit, he moves his chair closer to the bed, takes his son’s hand in his. He raises it to his lips, gives the knuckles a kiss.