Small Mercies

Mary Pat, not much for travel, has still managed to see parts of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine in her life. Not Big Peg. Peg married Terry “Terror Town” McAuliffe two days after senior prom. They started dating freshman year at Southie High, and neither of them has an ambition known to anyone beyond the fact that they never want to leave Southie. It’s a big day if they make it to Dorchester, and Dorchester is only six blocks away. And if the world finds their worldview narrow, well, Big Peg and Terror Town don’t give a fuck about the world, they only give a fuck about Southie. They raised seven kids who took their parents’ pride in their neighborhood like gospel from Christ (if Christ had been raised in Commonwealth and was prone, on general principle, to pounding the shit out of anyone who wasn’t). Depending on their ages, those kids — Terry Junior, Little Peg, Freddy, JJ, Ellen, Paudric, and Lefty (who was given the birth name of Lawrence but has never been called it a day in his life) — rule the corners, the project stoops, and the playground sand pits with a pride so bright and unyielding it can’t help but turn violent when even marginally challenged. As a project rat herself, Mary Pat knows all too well what happens when the suspicion that you aren’t good enough gets desperately rebuilt into the conviction that the rest of the world is wrong about you. And if they’re wrong about you, then they’re probably wrong about everything else.

Big Peg opens the screen door in a faded housedress, a beer and a lit cigarette in the same hand. “You all right?” she asks her sister with suspicious eyes.

“I’m looking for Jules.”

Big Peg pushes the door open wider. “Come in, come in.”

Mary Pat enters and they stand there just inside the door, these two sisters who were never close. Peg’s unit is a three-bedroom that currently sleeps nine people, the shotgun corridor running from the front door to the kitchen in back, the rooms off the corridor. The noise of the place is, as always, several decibels past the point where most human beings could hear themselves think.

“Oh my God, you so wore these pants.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did, I can smell your farty ass in them.”

“Fuck you.”

“I will hit you with a baseball bat.”

“No, you won’t. You can’t find one.”

“Freddy has one.”

“Mom, stop her!”

Jane Jo, aka JJ, comes bolting from one of the rooms and barges across the hall into another. Her little sister, Ellen, comes flying after her, both of them shrieking. And then the room they enter seems to explode. Things get upended in there, toppled, the walls give off dull thuds.

“The fuck you doing in my room?”

“I need your bat.”

“What bat? Get out of my room.”

“Gimme the bat.”

“I’ll hit you in the fucking head with the fucking bat.”

“Just help me find the bat.”

“Why do you want the bat?”

“To hit Ellen with it.”

There’s a pause and then:

“Cool.”

Ellen starts wailing.

Big Peg leads Mary Pat to the kitchen, closes the door. Big Peg says, “When’s the last time you saw her?”

“Last night. Right around this time.”

Big Peg snorts. “I’ve lost Terror to two-week benders. He always turns up.”

He/she/they always turn up. If Mary Pat hears that one more time tonight, she’s going to stove someone’s fucking head in with her bare fist.

“Jules isn’t Terry,” Mary Pat says. “She’s Jules. She’s seventeen.”

“Little Peg!” Big Peg screams without warning, and twenty seconds later, her eldest daughter, a girl who’s always managed to be twitchy and listless at the same time, comes through the doorway, going, “What’s up?”

“Show some manners. Say hi to your aunt.”

“Hey, Mary Pat.”

“Hi, sweetie.”

Big Peg asks, “You seen Jules? Look at your aunt when you talk to her.”

“Not lately.” Little Peg’s listless/twitchy eyes twitch listlessly at Mary Pat. “How come?”

“Ain’t seen her since last night,” Mary Pat says. She can feel the helpless-hopeful smile she wears around her cigarette. “Just getting a little worried.”

Little Peg stares back at her with nothing in her eyes, her mouth slack and half open. She could be a mannequin in a Kresge’s window.

Mary Pat remembers when Little Peg was five and Mary Pat used to babysit her occasionally. That Little Peg was hilarious and sparked like a snapped electric wire in a storm. She was so aware of herself and the life around her, so joyful.

What takes that from them? Mary Pat wonders.

Is it us?

“So, you ain’t seen her in a bit?”

“No.”

“Like, how long?”

“I saw her up the park last night.”

“Which?”

“Park? Columbia.”

“When?”