Small Mercies

Turns out that’s not good enough for Big Peg. Oh, no.

“I ain’t sending them,” Peg says.

“What?”

She swallows some beer and nods at the same time. “Ain’t sending them. We’re joining the boycott. Weeze would roll over in her grave if she saw a pack of darkies walking down the same corridor as her granddaughter at South Boston High School, Mary Pat. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“Weeze” (or “Weezie”) was what they’d called their late mother, Louise. No one else had ever called her that, just her kids, and only, while she was alive, in a conspiracy of silence.

“You’re not wrong,” Mary Pat admits, “but what about their education?”

“They’ll get their education. I give this a month, two at the most. When the city realizes we won’t bend and all we want is what’s ours?” Big Peg winks in a knowing way. “They’ll back down.”

The words — and Big Peg’s confidence — ring hollow. And when they do, the fear that’s been eating away at Mary Pat’s stomach lining all day returns.

Big Peg sees it, sees the tears that well up in her sister’s eyes. “It’s gonna be okay,” Peg says.

Mary Pat looks her sister directly in the eyes for the first time in who knows how long and can hear the rawness of her own voice when she whispers, “I can’t lose another one. I can’t. I can’t lose... anything else.” She wipes at a single tear before it reaches her cheekbone, drinks some beer.

Big Peg says, “You gotta get ahold of yourself, hon. Nothing bad happens to kids from Southie as long as they stay in Southie.”

Mary Pat brings her fist down on the tabletop hard enough to rattle the beer cans. “Noel OD’d in the playground across the fucking street.”

Big Peg is unfazed. “Noel went to some fucked-up country on the other side of the world and came back with his head all screwed up because he left the neighborhood.” Peg’s eyes implore her to see the basic common sense of her argument.

Mary Pat stares back across the table at her sister. Is that what people really think about her son? That it was Vietnam that turned him to drugs? Mary Pat tried thinking that way for a while, but then she faced the sobering truth that Noel didn’t discover heroin in Vietnam (Thai stick, yes, heroin, no); heroin discovered Noel in the projects of South Boston.

“Noel never touched heroin in Vietnam,” she says, and it sounds like a weak argument when it leaves her mouth. “He got hooked here. Right here.”

Big Peg sighs in a way that suggests there’s just no reaching some people, and her gaze clicks off Mary Pat’s face. She stands, draining her beer in one long swallow, and says, “Well, I gotta be up for work in the morning.”

Mary Pat nods. Stands.

Big Peg walks her down the noisy hallway, all seven of the kids fighting about something, paired off into mini-skirmishes with no ability to see the larger war.

At the door, Big Peg says, “She’ll turn up.”

Mary Pat feels too defeated to be annoyed. “I know.”

“Get some sleep.”

Mary Pat laughs at the idea of it.

“You can’t let them rule your life,” Big Peg says, and shuts the door behind her.

5

She finds Rum out on the loading dock behind the Purity Supreme. Ten at night and the heat still hits like a steamed blanket; the loading dock smells like wilted lettuce and bananas so overripe they split their skin. Rum’s smoking a cigarette and drinking tallboys with the other supermarket punks who’ve just gotten off work from produce, deli, and bagging. The strength in numbers puts a brave look in his eyes when Mary Pat gets out of Bess, and that look turns to amusement when Bess’s door creaks and the engine shudders to a stop.

Bess is Mary Pat’s piece-of-shit station wagon that she has no choice but to drive until it gives up the ghost. Not that she drives much, but every now and then she can’t avoid it. She could have walked here, but she obsessed on an image of the headlights sweeping the back of the loading dock and the punks scattering like rats, except for Rum, who she’d bump with a fender or the car door. What she forgot was that the effect of Bess on just about anyone is not threatening but comic. Bess is a two-toned 1959 Ford Country Sedan. Its rear end sags like an old dog’s ass, rust and winter road salt have eaten away the rims of the wheel wells and the lower third of the paint job, the roof rack is long since gone (no one recalls where or when), both taillights are cracked (but operational), and the tailpipe hangs on with nothing more than Hail Marys and fraying butcher’s twine. About the only thing you can say for Bess anymore is that she was a great car to transport the two kids around in, she has a 352 V8 under the hood that turns her into a rocket on the highway, and the radio works. Bess once sported two different shades of green — “April” and “Sherwood” — but at this point, both shades are so blanched you’d have to take Mary Pat’s word for it.