Small Mercies

“And how many have you met?” Mary Pat wanted to know. “You see a lot of coloreds walking up West Broadway, do ya?”

“No,” he said, “but I see ’em downtown. See ’em on the T.” He used one hand to imitate someone holding a subway strap and the other to scratch under his arm like a monkey. “They’s always going to Fo’-rest Hills.” He made chimp sounds and she swatted at him.

“Don’t be ignorant,” she said. “I didn’t raise you to be ignorant.”

He smiled at her.

God, she misses her son’s smile; she first saw it, crooked and wide, when he was on her breast, drunk on mother’s milk, and it blew open a chamber of her heart that refuses to close no matter how hard she presses down on it.

He kissed her on the top of her head. “You’re too nice for these projects, Ma. Anyone ever tell you that?”

And then he was gone. Back out to the streets. All Southie kids loved the streets but none more so than project kids. Project kids hated staying in the way rich people hated work. Staying in meant smelling your neighbors’ food through the walls, hearing their fights, their fucks, their toilet flushes, what they listened to on their radios and record players, what they watched on TV. Sometimes you’d swear you could smell them, their body odor and cigarette breath and swollen-feet stink.

Jules comes back into the living room in her old tartan bathrobe, at least two sizes too small at this point, drying her hair. “We going?”

“Going?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“You told me you’d take me back-to-school shopping.”

“When?”

“Like fucking today, Ma.”

“You doing the buying?”

“Ma, come on, don’t fuck with me.”

“I’m not. You notice we don’t have a stove?”

“Who gives a shit? You never cook.”

That gets Mary Pat off the couch with blood in her eyes. “I never fucking cook?”

“Not lately.”

“Because the gas was turned off.”

“Well, whose fault was that?”

“Get a fucking job before I break your head in,” Mary Pat says, “talking to me like that.”

“I have a job.”

“Part-time don’t count, honey. Part-time don’t make the rent.”

“Or keep the stove working, apparently.”

“I will knock you into fucking next week, I swear to Christ.”

Jules raises her fists and dances back and forth in her ridiculous robe like a boxer in the ring. Smiling big.

Mary Pat bursts out laughing in spite of herself. “Put those hands down before your punch your own head, end up talking funny the rest of your life.”

Jules, laughing through her teeth, shoots her the bird with both hands, still doing the ridiculous dance in the ridiculous robe. “Robell’s, then.”

“I got no money.”

Jules stops dancing. Puts the towel back over her head. “You got some. You might not have Boston Gas bill money, but you got Robell’s money.”

“No,” Mary Pat says. “I do not.”

“I’m gonna go to the spearchucker school looking poorer than them?” Her eyes well, and she runs the towel violently over her head to make the tears get no further. “Ma, please?”

Mary Pat imagines her there on day one, this trembly white girl and her big brown eyes.

“I got a few bucks,” Mary Pat manages.

Jules drops into a crouch of gratitude. “Thank you.”

“But you gotta help me knock on a bunch of doors first.”

“Fuckin’ what now?” Jules says.

They start in the Heights. Knock on all the doors that circle the park and the monument. A lot of people aren’t home (or assume she and Jules are Christian Scientists spreading “gospel” so pretend not to be), but plenty are. And few need converting. They provide the outrage, the righteousness, the umbrage. They’ll be there on Friday.

“Bet your ass we will,” an old lady with a walker and smoker’s breath tells them. “Bet your sweet ass.”

The sun’s in descent by the time they finish. Not setting so much as dipping into the brown ribbons of smoke in a constant drift from the power plant at the end of West Broadway. Mary Pat takes Jules to Robell’s and they pick out a notebook, a four-pack of pens, a blue nylon school bag, a pair of jeans with wide flares at the bottom but which run high on the hips. Then Jules, in the groove of it all finally, goes with her mother to Finast, where Mary Pat buys a TV dinner for herself. When she asks what Jules wants for dinner, Jules reminds her she’s going out with Rum. They move through the checkout line with one TV dinner and one National Enquirer, Mary Pat thinking she may as well have Lonely, Aging, and Pudgy plastered to her forehead.

On the walk home, Jules, out of the blue, says, “You ever wonder if there’s some different place?”

Mary Pat says, “What now?”