Small Mercies

The funeral for Mary Patricia Fennessy is held at nine o’clock in the morning on September 17. It’s sparsely attended. Calliope Williamson stands in the back and notices a large, fat version of Mary Pat standing up front with a group of unruly kids who all look in need of a bath. There’s two old men in a nearby pew with thinning hair who have similar features to the fat woman and to Mary Pat.

Family, then.

Some of the nuns from Meadow Lane Manor attend but no coworkers. About another dozen or so mourners are scattered about a church that could easily hold a thousand.

Detective Bobby Coyne does not show up. She knows he would have if he could have — he’s like Reginald that way, a man of his word.

Directly across from Calliope, in the opposite pew at the back, stands a handsome giant with kind eyes. He wears an ill-fitting suit and a tie with a knot that’s bunched up and wrinkled. He keeps a handkerchief at hand and weeps silently but often.

She’s seen him before — he used to pick Mary Pat up after work sometimes. It’s her husband. She knows his name is Kenny, even though they’ve never been formally introduced, and that everyone calls him Ken Fen.

After the mass, she introduces herself on the church steps and expresses sorrow for his loss. Not just of his wife but of his stepdaughter as well.

He says, “You’re Dreamy.”

She shakes her head. “No one calls me that.”

“I thought—”

“The women at work — about the only thing they remember about me is that I told them a story about my father calling me Dreamy when I was a kid. Never said anyone had called me it since, but they decided not to hear that part. Gave me the name so I’d feel more like their pet, I guess.”

He sighs. “Well, I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Her eyes pulse, as if someone just slid a metal skewer sideways through her heart, but she says nothing.

“A lot of loss going around,” she says.

The other mourners are filing out. No one pauses to express their condolences to him. They walk around the two of them as if they have leprosy.

They remain on the steps long after everyone has gone, saying nothing. And it’s strangely comfortable.

“Want to get a drink, Calliope?”

“I’d fucking love one.”

They walk to the nearest bar past signs and graffiti that Calliope refuses to look at. She doesn’t need to see the words to feel their ugliness. The ugliness is everywhere over here right now; it rides the air, it hangs from streetlamp poles. Hell, she can even taste it, like a pebble of tinfoil clamped between two teeth.

The bar is one that Ken Fen tells her stays open eighteen hours of every day to serve the men who work the three shifts at the electric plant. For ten in the morning, it’s got a sizable crowd inside and two bartenders behind the bar, a waitress working the room.

They sit there for ten minutes. And not a single person acknowledges them. A giant and a black woman in a Southie bar and they may as well be invisible. The waitress passes them four times. Both bartenders catch their eyes. But no one takes their order.

On the waitress’s last pass, Ken Fen once again raises a tentative hand to her and catches her eye. She blows right past him.

He turns back to Calliope and gives her a tired smile and raised eyebrows. “Good thing I brought my own.” He reaches into his suit jacket and comes back with a flask.

Calliope matches his tired smile. “Me too.” She reaches into her bag and comes out with her own flask, a gift from Reginald for their ninth — or was it tenth? — wedding anniversary.

They raise their flasks over the table.

“What should we drink to?”

“Our dead,” Calliope says. “Of course.”

“Of course.”

They tap their flasks together and drink.

“One more,” Ken Fen says.

“Oh, I’ll be having more than one.”

He chuckles. “Toast. One more toast.”

She leans in again.

“To our living,” Ken Fen says.

“To our living,” Calliope agrees.

They drink.

Following the release of her remains by the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office, Julia “Jules” Fennessy’s body is interred at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain. Per the last will and testament of her mother, the body is placed in a mausoleum atop a small slope in the southern corner of the grounds. Funds are dispersed from the estate of Mary Pat Fennessy every month to pay for flowers to be placed around the mausoleum door. Funds are also dispersed to satisfy an odd stipulation. Once every weekday, the assistant sexton, Winslow Jacobs, is tasked with spending half an hour inside the mausoleum with a transistor radio tuned to the local classical station, WJIB.

Winslow Jacobs has had some strange jobs in his time on this earth, but this might be the strangest. He ain’t complaining, though — the head sexton, Gabriel Harrison, pays Winslow an extra fifteen dollars a week for the duty (which means Gabriel’s got to be making thirty), and the truth is, within a month, Winslow has developed a fondness for the break in his day. Plus, the music grows on him.