Small Mercies

She tries to work that around in her head.

“Or,” Ken Fen says, “maybe they were involved somehow.”

She narrows her eyes at him, and in that moment, a black girl with an Afro the size of a toddler walks in the room carrying a bag of food. Mary Pat can smell the food — there’s something fried in there — and she notices two bottles of Coke dangling from the fingers of the black girl’s other hand. Sees the warmth in her smile as her eyes fall on Kenny.

So, Mary Pat thinks with a shock of disgust and embarrassment, this is her.

This is who you left me for.

This nigger.

The girl — goddamn, she’s gorgeous, Mary Pat thinks before she can stop herself — is smiling uncertainly now at Mary Pat, and for some reason the first thing Mary Pat thinks to say is, “How old are you?”

“Jesus Christ.” Ken Fen pushes his chair back from Mary Pat.

The girl is coming toward them now with a small private smile on her face. “I’m twenty-nine.” She places the food down on the table and stands behind Kenny. “You?”

Mary Pat can’t help but chuckle inside, but she doesn’t let it show.

An odd silence settles into the room. The longer it goes on, the more uncomfortable it grows. And yet none of them breaks it for the longest time.

Until Mary Pat stands and says to Kenny, “Let me know if you hear from Jules.”

Kenny grimaces. He indicates the black girl-woman, who has moved around to his hip. “Mary Pat, this is—”

“I don’t want to know her fuckin’ name.”

The black girl-woman lets out a startled hoot of a laugh, and her eyes widen.

Mary Pat can feel the rage pulsing behind her eyes. She can feel them redden. She has an image of these two crossing the Broadway bridge, her small black hand in his big white one. It’s almost unbearable to imagine — the looks they’d get! The humiliation that would crest like a wave and crash down on Mary Pat and Jules and even stain the memory of Noel, God rest his soul.

Kenny Fennessy of the D Street projects returns to Southie a race traitor, a fucking jungle-bunny lover.

Whether Ken Fen and Afro Girl lived or died on their little walk — and Mary Pat doubted they’d make it to C Street alive, definitely no farther than E — the shame that would follow Mary Pat and Jules, as long as they held on to the Fennessy name and probably for decades after, would be impossible to surmount.

But it’s Kenny and the black girl-woman staring at her with contempt. How’d that happen?

“How you live with yourself,” she hisses at Kenny, “is anyone’s guess.”

“How I live with myself?” Kenny says as the woman grabs at his arm, but he walks right through it to reach Mary Pat.

She feels suddenly at sea. She didn’t want this. For a moment she can’t think of anything to say, she just wants to slink out of here, she just wants to go back to searching for Jules. But it’s been building up for so long, ever since Kenny left her, and the words just fall out of her mouth.

“We were happy.”

He says, “We were happy?”

It hits her — they weren’t. She was. But he never seemed to be.

“We hit a few bumps.”

He says, “Those weren’t bumps, Mary Pat. They were our fucking lives shriveling. From the time I could walk, all I ever saw was hate and rage and people pounding booze so they wouldn’t feel it. Then they’d get up the next day and do the same fucking thing all over again. For fucking decades. I spent my whole life dying. Whatever time I got left, I’m living it. I’m sick of drowning.”

The beautiful black girl is looking at them with a calm Mary Pat finds both admirable and insulting.

Mary Pat looks back at Kenny and can see past his anger (and her own) to the hope in his eyes — teeny-tiny but flaring — as if it’s saying, Live this new life with me.

And some part of her almost says, Yes, let’s go. Some part of her almost grabs his face and crushes her lips against his and says through gritted teeth: “Let’s fucking go.”

But somehow the words that leave her mouth are, “Oh, so you’re too good for us?”

A desperate pop escapes his lips. A sound caught somewhere between a soft scream and a loud sigh. Whatever micro-sliver of hope lived in his eyes hops the bus out of town, and now he’s looking at her with dead pupils, dead irises, dead everything.

“Get the fuck outta here,” he says softly. “If Jules shows up, I’ll send her your way.”

7

Five o’clock comes and goes without a word from Brian Shea.

Six and seven o’clock do the same.

She walks to the Fields. There’s a sign on the door: Closed for Private Function.

What the fuck does that mean? she wants to shout. The whole bar is a private function.

Mary Pat knocks on the door. At least a dozen times. Enough to waken the aches in her right hand that have been there since she beat the shit out of her daughter’s useless excuse for a boyfriend.

No one answers the door.