Small Mercies

Dear Mrs. Mary Patricia Fennessy,

It’s a terrible thing for a mother to lose her child. I cannot imagine the hurt you are feeling. Many times at work you have brought a smile to my face or made the day go quicker by telling me stories of your beloved Noel. What a scamp he was! What a rascal! He loved his mama, that was clear, and his mama loved him. I do not know why the Good Lord would ask something so painful of a fine woman such as yourself, but I know He makes our hearts so big so our dead can live in them. That’s where your Noel is now. Living in his mother’s heart like he once lived in your womb. If I can ever be of assistance, please reach out to me. You have always shown me every kindness and your friendship is something I value.

My sincerest condolences,

Calliope Williamson

Mary Pat sits at the kitchen table staring at the letter until the words blur. This woman wrote to her as if she were a friend. She signed her last name, which Mary Pat couldn’t even recall this afternoon. She called Mary Pat a fine woman and spoke to a friendship that Mary Pat is hard pressed to grasp. Yes, she’s friendly with Dreamy, but friendship is something else entirely. White broads from Southie aren’t friends with black women from Mattapan. The world doesn’t work that way.

For a minute or so, Mary Pat looks for a pen and paper to write a note of condolence to Dreamy, but she can find only a pen and some scrap paper. She resolves to find a proper sympathy card tomorrow and puts the pen back in the drawer.

She takes a beer, her pack of Slims, and an ashtray into the living room and turns on the TV, comes right in on the news and right in on the story about Auggie Williamson. Investigators believe he was fatally struck by the train between twelve and one a.m., and the impact threw his body under the platform. The conductor of the train never felt the impact. Trains raced by the body all last night until they stopped running, and a few went past it this morning before one conductor noticed the corpse in the crevice under the platform. Police won’t confirm rumors that drugs were found on his person, nor will they explain how he came to be on the platform last night or why/if he’d jumped or been pushed into the path of the train.

They put a picture of him up on the screen and she can see Dreamy in his eyes, which were a brown so soft it’s almost gold, and in his chin and lips. He looks so young. But the reporter announces that he graduated high school two years ago and was working in the management trainee program at Zayre.

High school graduate? Management trainee program? Do drug dealers enter management trainee programs?

But, oh, she thinks as she looks through the boob tube into his eyes, you’re just a baby. Her mother used to say that from the time a child took his first steps, every step after took him farther and farther away from his mother. Mary Pat looks at the photograph of Dreamy’s son in the last moment before it’s wiped off the screen, and she imagines her own child’s picture showing up on the same newscast, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next night.

Where the fuck is she?

She turns off the TV. She calls Rum’s place, gets his mother. No love is lost between her and Mary Pat, so the conversation is brief: “No, Ronald isn’t here, he’s at work up the Purity Supreme until ten. No, I haven’t seen Jules in, like, a week, maybe more. Anything else?”

Mary Pat hangs up.

She sits there. And sits there. She has no idea if it’s for an hour or a minute.

Before she knows she’s doing it, she swipes her smokes and her keys from the tray by the recliner and leaves the unit. She goes around the back of her building and then follows the path until she reaches her sister’s door in Franklin. Big Peg has a daughter the same age as Jules; the girls aren’t terribly close, but they do like to get high together. Almost the same thing could be said about Mary Pat and Big Peg — they’re not terribly close, but it never kept them from drinking their weight together if they happened to cross paths.