Small Mercies

“I been working my ass off all day, helping the boss renovate his house, and I’m fucking bushed. Exhausted. Meanwhile, you go to my house and disturb my wife and dump a beer all over my dining room table like a slob with no manners. Then you fucking come here — twice — while we’re busting our asses to make the boss’s living room look nice. And why, Mary Pat? Why? Because your fucking daughter is probably off getting high or getting laid and forgot to call? Or because she said, ‘You know what? Enough of this shit, enough of this town, enough with them about to bus a bunch of fucking chimpanzees into my school, I’m going to Florida.’ Because I will bet you a thousand bucks of my own money that that’s where she’s headed. So I suggest you think of your daughter in Florida, sipping drinks, getting a tan. I suggest you remember that kids leave, that’s what kids do, but neighbors are forever. They shovel your walk when you’re sick, tell you when someone’s looking at your house funny, that kinda thing.” He lights his own cigarette, his pale blue eyes holding hers through the flame. “But you, right now, you are not being much of a neighbor. And we’re all getting pretty tired of it.”

“You’re getting tired of it?”

“Everyone is.”

“Well, tell everyone I’m just warming up.” She stands.

He flicks his cigarette into her chest. He does it casually, then stares at her blankly as she swipes at the sparks and pieces of coal before they can burn the fabric of her shirt.

“Shitty things,” he says as he reaches for a fresh cigarette from his pack, “happen to shitty neighbors.”

She can’t think of a comeback — she can’t really think of anything at this point; her brain swims — so she leaves.

10

The next morning, she goes into work feeling so jagged it’s like she’s got sharpened quills sticking out of her. By this point, all the other girls know she hasn’t seen her daughter in three days, and they give her a wide berth. A few look like they’re considering offering sympathies or... something, but are too wary to approach.

In the break room, over coffee, all the talk centers on Auggie Williamson.

By now, the reporters have pieced together some of the facts from that night. Auggie Williamson’s car — a ’63 Rambler — broke down on Columbia Road. That left Auggie a couple options, neither ideal. The first was to walk along Columbia Road for about a mile until he reached Upham’s Corner and turned onto Dudley Street, at which point he would be among his kind. But that would be a long mile through a white neighborhood into a slightly mixed neighborhood before he reached a mostly brown one.

The second option, and the one he took, was to walk a few hundred yards to Columbia Station. There he could board the subway southbound, hope he didn’t run into any white gangs in the four stops it took him to reach Ashmont Station, where he could transfer to a bus that would take him into Mattapan, where he could, again, find safety among his own kind.

That was the option Auggie Williamson chose, but within those few hundred yards, he either talked some shit to the wrong people or tried to pull some nigger bullshit like stealing another car to get himself home or sticking someone up for carfare.

And he got what was coming.

At least that’s the sum total of the theories of the girls in the break room.

She reads the newspapers as the girls gossip.

Auggie Williamson had been returning from his job at the Zayre department store off Morrissey Boulevard. He’d worked until midnight because they were taking inventory that weekend and he was in the management trainee program. According to the papers, Auggie Williamson was twenty. He had lettered in baseball at Boston English, where he carried a consistent B-minus average through all four years. After graduation, he worked for a year at a pizza joint in Mattapan Square before being accepted to the management trainee program at Zayre.

Some of this information, Mary Pat suspects, she’s half heard from Dreamy over the years. Half heard because she was only half listening.

Dreamy has two daughters, Ella and Soria, who Mary Pat knew about, though she could never quite recall their names. Raised in the same household as Auggie, created by the same man, Dreamy’s husband, Reginald, a sweet, respectful, polite man. Dreamy works with Mary Pat, Reginald works as a clerk at the DPW, Ella’s in high school, Soria’s in seventh grade. The whole family sounds like a straight-up working-class family on the rise. Auggie had no criminal history.

She comes across a picture of Auggie in his baseball uniform in yesterday’s Herald American.

“Look how they try to make him look like a saint.” Dottie’s suddenly standing over her, a butt sticking out of her mouth, unlit. She lights it now. “Keep talking about how he was a hard worker, his father’s a hard worker, blah blah blah. We’ll see.” She nods at the rest of the girls. “We’ll see.”

“But,” Mary Pat says quietly.

“What?” Dottie leans down to hear her.