Small Mercies

When she met him, he was recently divorced, paying a king’s ransom in alimony to an ex-wife who’d told him once with bitter pride that she wasn’t capable of love, and if she were, she wouldn’t waste it on him. He and Mary Pat dated for a year before getting married. Ken Fen never had a nickel for himself until he got a job working the mail room at Harvard, which made it look like maybe, in a couple years, once he’d caught up on all his debt, he could move them out of public housing.

As an added benefit of his job, he could attend Harvard lectures for free. Couldn’t get credit, but he could sit in. That’s where the trouble started. Suddenly, he’s coming home with books (Siddhartha is one she remembers, The Tin Drum another), suddenly, he’s quoting people she’s never heard of. Not that she’s heard of a lot of people, but suddenly, he’s quoting, and Kenny was never a quoter.

She finds him sitting alone at a table in the middle of the mail room. She’s timed it so she’ll arrive at his lunch hour, but he doesn’t have any food in front of him, is just sitting there reading (of course). He looks up with a beam of a smile when she enters. The smile dies fast, as if snatched from his face by the quickest of hands, and she realizes in that moment that he was expecting to see someone else.

“Hi,” she says.

He rises from the table. “What’re you doing here?”

“Have you seen Jules?”

He shakes his head. “Why would I have seen Jules?”

“I thought she mighta come to you. I can’t find her.”

“Since when?”

“Night before last.”

“Jesus, Mary Pat.” He comes to her. Takes her by the elbow. “Come sit down.”

Even though he hadn’t wanted to see her, even though he’s still mad at her (or are his feelings for her worse than anger somehow?), even though he had been so irritated and impatient the last time they spoke — in her moment of need, he comes right to her. He’s a rock, Kenny. Always has been. First one to give support, last one to ask for it.

She sags a bit as he leads her to the table and pulls out a chair. Her eyes fill. The fear she’s kept tightly wrapped bursts through its wrapping, and a small moan escapes her lips as he helps her into the chair and pulls up another across from her.

It takes her a few seconds to catch her breath, and when she starts speaking, it’s like she can’t stop. It all just spills.

“I haven’t seen her since the other night, and I have this feeling? I have this feeling, Kenny, and it’s the worst feeling, it’s worse than any I had that whole year Noel was in Vietnam, and worse than the one I had the day Dukie, God rest him, left the house and I never saw him again. It’s like a part of her never left my womb, you know? It stayed in there and became something else, became, like... molded... to my body. The inside of it, with the blood and the organs and all the other shit you can’t survive without? That’s where part of her has always lived. But, but, but I can’t feel her there for the first time since she was born.” She thumps her own chest harder than she intended. “She’s not in here anymore.”

He hands her tissues he found somewhere, and she uses them, is surprised that they come back sopping in her hand. He takes the wet clump from her and hands her a couple of fresh ones and then a couple more after that until her face is dry and her nose is clear.

“So you haven’t seen her or heard from her?” she asks.

His eyes are sorrowful. “No.”

“She’d reach out to you if she was in some kinda trouble she didn’t want me to know about.”

“Probably, yeah.”

“She loves you.”

“I know.”

“She has your number?”

“Yup.”

That stings a bit. She doesn’t have his number, but her daughter does.

“So, okay,” he says, “let’s back up. Tell me what you know.”

It takes her five minutes.

“So,” he says in that analytical voice he uses sometimes when he’s explaining a play in a football game she didn’t understand or, later in their marriage, when he was explaining what one of his quotes actually meant. “She’s with the kids at the park until midnight. Then she’s at Carson another forty-five minutes. She walks toward home. That’s their story.”

She nods. “And they’re sticking to it.”

“Sounds like horseshit.”

“Why?”

“They’re fucked up, right? Drinking and getting high and shit?”

“Yeah.”

“But they all know the time.”

“To the minute,” she says. “That bothered me too.”

He thinks for a bit, his eyes, as always, brimming with an intelligence he could never fully hide no matter how hard he tried, the thing she loved about him only a little less than she loved his kindness.

“Wait a minute,” he says. “All this mystery — whatever we’re calling it — went down between midnight and one Saturday night, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what’s right across from Columbia Park, Mary Pat?”

She shrugs. “A lot of things.”

“Columbia Station,” he says. “Where that black kid got killed.”

She’s not quite following. “Yeah...”

“Between midnight and one,” he says. “That’s what the papers say.”

“But what does one have to do with the other?”

“I don’t know, maybe these kids saw something.”