Small Mercies

When she gets out of Bess, the boys in her headlights cut up, except for Rum, who just watches her come with a cocked eyebrow she considers tearing off his face as he guzzles from his tallboy.

She doesn’t go with any preamble. “Where’s Jules?”

“Fuck should I know?”

“Don’t let the beer give you too much stupid right now, Ronald. You might confuse it with courage.”

“What?”

“Where’s my daughter?”

“I don’t know.”

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

“Last night.”

“Where?”

“Carson Beach.”

“And then?”

“And then what?”

“Where did she go?”

“She walked home.”

“You let my daughter walk home in this neighborhood at one in the morning?”

“It was twelve-forty-five.”

“You let my daughter walk home in this neighborhood at twelve-forty-five?”

He raises the beer toward his lips. “Uh—”

She slaps the beer out of his hand. “Alone?”

No one’s cutting up anymore on the loading dock. She knows their mothers. They know her. Everyone’s as quiet as a church pew waiting a turn for confession.

“No, no,” Rum says quickly. “She wasn’t alone. George gave her a ride home.”

“George Dunbar?”

“Yes.”

“The drug dealer?”

“What? Yes.”

“Gave my daughter a ride home.”

“Yes. I was too fucked up.”

She takes a step back from him, makes a show of assessing him. “Where you going to be in an hour?”

“What?”

“I asked you a fucking question.”

“I’m gonna be, like, home.”

“Like home? Or home?”

“Home. I’m going home.”

She notices his four-year-old orange Plymouth Duster in the employee parking lot. She’s always hated the sight of that car, as if she’s always known its owner was a sign of bad things to come.

“If George doesn’t back up your story, I’m coming to see you again.”

“Fine,” he says in such a way that she knows he has something to hide.

“You can just tell me now.”

“Nothing to tell.”

“It’ll be better for you if you do.”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay.” She holds out her arms as if to say, This was your choice, how it goes from now on.

She catches his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as he swallows, but then he looks at his shoes and the beer can she knocked out of his hand.

She gets back into Bess, and they all stare at her, wide-eyed, as she backs up and drives out of the parking lot.

“I don’t give two shits what he told you,” George Dunbar says to her half an hour later. “It isn’t true.”

She looks at this handsome kid with his smooth demeanor and his heartless eyes who sold her son his own death in a little plastic baggie. He stares back at her with a gaze so flat and stripped of emotion it would look weird on a Ken doll.

George was a part of the fabric of the Fennessy household for about ten years, always running in and out with Noel; in all that time, she never felt she got a clear view of him. It was as if a part of him, a core part, wasn’t there when you went looking for it. She mentioned this to Ken Fen once and he said, “Most people we know are like dogs — there’s loyal ones, mean ones, friendly ones. But all of it, good and bad, comes from the heart.”

“What kind of dog is George Dunbar?”

“None,” Kenny said. “He’s a fucking cat.”

She looks now at this cat who couldn’t even be bothered to show up to Noel’s funeral. “Why would Rum lie?”

“I have no idea what goes on in another man’s mind.”

George Dunbar did two years of college. Majored in economics. He didn’t drop out because he couldn’t hack it; he dropped out because he was making too much money selling drugs. His uncles run a cement mixing company, and George, she’s always heard, has been promised a third of the business that once belonged to his late father. But he’d rather deal drugs. For a kid from Southie, he speaks like some rich people she’s run into over the years — like his words and God’s come from the same well, while your words come from a place off the map that no one can hear or see.

“So you didn’t drive her anywhere?”

“No, I did not. She walked off to go home at around quarter to one.”

“And you let a girl her age walk home alone through this neighborhood?”

George gives her a look of pure bafflement. “I’m not her keeper.”

They sit in the gazebo in Marine Park. Across Day Boulevard, Pleasure Bay is lit in a gummy moonlight. George Dunbar was easy to find. Most nights he can be found sitting in the gazebo in Marine Park. Everyone in Southie, from cops to kids, knows it. Just more proof he’s protected. If you want drugs, you go to the gazebo and see George Dunbar or one of the kids who works for him.

She finds herself wishing that his mother will get caught fucking around on Marty Butler, get her ass thrown to the curb. And that two days later, someone will mess up George Dunbar’s perfect hair by pumping a bullet into his fucking head.

“What’d you guys get up to last night?” she asks him.

He shrugs, but she catches him looking off to the trees for a moment, a sign that he’s thinking about his answer as opposed to just answering.

“We all had a few beers in the ring at Columbia. Then we walked on down to Carson.”

“When?”

“Eleven-forty-five.”