Small Mercies

“Because I came into some cans of paint, Mary Pat. Crates of them. They’re all sitting in a warehouse over on West Second. Every color of the rainbow. Would you be interested in sprucing up your walls? Adding some color?”

“If you have a few cans I can take off your hands, sure, Marty, that’d be nice.”

He waves at the absurdity of the proposition. “No, no, hon. We would never expect you to do your own painting. You take a few days somewhere and we’ll pop in and paint them walls professionally for you. You’ll come back to a place so pretty you won’t even recognize it.”

“What’s with all the renovation lately, Marty?”

“What now?”

“Well, first your place and now mine?”

He looks at her with such bafflement that she knows he has no idea what she’s talking about.

“The house behind the Fields,” she says.

He stares back at her. Still no clue.

Weeds, from the front seat, says, “She’s talking about the work we’re doing on the kitchen, boss.”

“Ah!” Marty says. “Of course, of course.” Another pat for her knee. “The thing of it is, I don’t think of that house as ‘mine,’ Mary Pat. I still live in the same spot I always did over on Linden.”

She smiles and nods and tries not to let him see into the part of her brain that knows he’s lying. Brian Shea claimed they’d been working on the living room. Weeds claimed it was the kitchen. And Marty had no fucking clue about any of it until Weeds tipped him off.

“Well, think about the paint, at any rate,” Marty says.

The car pulls to the curb in front of Kelly’s Landing. A takeout place going back to Prohibition times — best fried clams in the city — it closed a month back. Mary Pat’s parents went on their first date at Kelly’s; her mother remembered her own father taking her there as a child, as she took Mary Pat, and Mary Pat took Jules and Noel. And now it’s boarded up. A place that provided food and memories for generations. The owners, it’s said, decided it was time to try something new, time for a change.

Change, for those who don’t have a say in it, feels like a pretty word for death. Death to what you want, death to whatever plans you’d been making, death to the life you’ve always known.

They get out of the car and walk past Kelly’s onto the causeway.

“I miss the smell,” Marty says. “That fried-food smell? My entire life, I walked past here, the air had that smell. Now it just smells like low tide.”

Mary Pat says nothing.

“How did we get here?” Marty Butler wants to know.

He’s not talking about the causeway they’re walking along. He’s talking about this point in their relationship, such as it is. It’s been cloudy all day, the sun taking the day off behind a wall of woolen gray. No hint of rain but no hint of sun either. She and Marty walk toward the Sugar Bowl, a small oval park surrounded by benches. The Sugar Bowl sits a half mile out in the bay where the two causeways meet. People fish from the causeways. Mary Pat and Marty pass men and a few women casting their lines, some out of boredom, some for their dinner. Ken Fen used to fish out here, came home a couple times with flounder that was gamey. Most of the time, he admitted, he just went there to check out of his own head for a little bit. The fishermen and fisherwomen all acknowledge Marty with nods, but nobody speaks and nobody approaches.

“How did we get here?” Marty asks again. As if he didn’t know. As if he hasn’t known every move she’s made since her search for Jules began.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m just trying to find my daughter.”

“It feels so unnecessary,” Marty says. “All this...” He searches for the appropriate word in the clouds, comes back with “conflict.”

“I’m not after conflict,” she says. “I’m not looking for a fight.”

“Tell me what you need,” he says to her.

“I need Jules. I need my daughter.”

“And we need peace around our thing,” he says. “Peace and quiet and nobody looking our way.”

“I understand that.”

“You understand that, but you beat the snot out of a kid in my bar? You understand that, but you run around the neighborhood causing a fuss?”

“She’s my daughter, Marty.”

He gives that a quick flick of his head, his lips pursed, as if it’s an entirely different subject matter, as if he’s speaking English and she’s speaking Mandarin.

“What it is, Mary Pat, is a matter of order. Everything works when everything works a predictable way. Look at this bay.” He waves his arm at the water around them. Pleasure Bay. Walled in by these causeways and the tiny park where they intersect. “No waves. No surprises. Not like out there.” Now he’s gesturing at the ocean beyond. “Out there, you’ve got waves and swells and undertows.” He turns his bland face to her. “I don’t like oceans, Mary Pat, I like bays, I like harbors.”