Small Mercies

No one seems to notice the overflowing sink and overflowing ashtrays, the empty beer cans everywhere, the glasses sticky with liquor sediment, the takeout pizza boxes, the takeout fish-and-chips box, the McDonald’s bags crumpled on the kitchen counter.

“We need to get you ready,” Joyce says.

“Ready for what?” Mary Pat asks, and they all laugh.

“Ready for what!” Patty Byrnes says. “Oh, you’re a caution.”

“Come, come.” Maureen Kilkenny leads her down the hallway toward her bedroom.

A second later, or so it seems, Carol has joined them in there, and the two women are going through Mary Pat’s meager closet. They toss one dress on the bed, followed by another. Then a blouse-and-skirt combo. Next come the shoes — Mary Pat has only two pairs of dress-up shoes, one heels, one flats, so that immediately narrows it down to a 50/50 choice.

They hold each dress and then the blouse-and-skirt combo up to Mary Pat’s body, and she watches herself let them, can hear them chirping about which one looks best and which could go with the shoes — Has to be the flats, Carol says, no one can wear heels as long as they’ll be standing, plus it sends a conflicting message. Mary Pat sees herself standing in her bedroom but it’s not her, it’s Novocain Mary Pat, the lost, the numb, the beaten. Carol and Maureen decide on the blouse and skirt. The blouse is the red of wine and the skirt is a plaid number, vaguely tartan. The flats are black. Once the clothes are on, they work on her hair and makeup in the bathroom, and Mary Pat catches sight of herself in the mirror and feels a strange pride in acknowledging that she looks like a ghoul, like something that has been siphoned of all blood but nonetheless walks among the living.

They whisk her back out to the main room, where the other four wait. The fast-food boxes and beer cans are gone, the ashtrays are emptied, the glasses are drip-drying in the dish rack.

“Where are we going?” Mary Pat asks.

Again, they all laugh at the absurdity of the question.

But then Hannah Spotchnicki bursts out with “The rally!”

“At City Hall,” Carol says.

“Oh,” Mary Pat manages. “Right.”

“Can’t go there without you, silly!” Noreen Ryan says way too chirpily when you consider the fear in her eyes.

“We need everyone,” Carol says. “Everybody we can lay our hands on.”

The absurdity of the sentence in her present circumstances is not lost on Mary Pat. She smiles at Carol. “Every body you can lay your hands on?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What if you can’t?”

“What?”

“Lay your hands on the body?”

Mary Pat has no idea how long everyone just stares at her — could be a second, could be five minutes — but most of them seem like they’d prefer to run right out the fucking door.

Maybe, Mary Pat thinks, I’ll become one of those women who pushes her belongings around town in a shopping cart and sleeps in playgrounds.

“You need fresh air,” Carol says. “You need to be a part of something meaningful. You need purpose, Mary Pat. Now more than ever.”

Now more than ever.

So they do know.

“Okay,” Mary Pat hears herself say.

They move her out that door like she’s on a hand truck.

Along the roadway just outside the projects, a school bus waits. If anyone grasps the irony, they don’t mention it. The bus is a faded denim blue with the ghostly words Franklin Middle School still visible under a layer of old paint. The tires look bald. About twenty women have been waiting on the bus the whole time. They’ve got the windows down and their cigarette arms out the windows. Several fan themselves. It’s not boiling yet — no sun, a cloudy morning — but it’s humid as hell.

Mary Pat knows most of the women. Almost all of them have beehive hairdos, which is hardly unusual for Southie. What is unusual is that most of them have placed small American flags or what appear to be tea bags in the center of the hives. They barely meet her eyes as she takes her seat near the front with the SWAB Sisters, but she looks at them long enough to confirm that, yes, those are tea bags. As the bus lurches out onto the roadway, Mary Pat looks down the length of it, sees Mary Kate Dooley, Mary Jo O’Rourke, Donna Ferris, Erin Dunne, Tricia Hughes, Barbara Clarke, Kerry Murphy, and Nora Quinn. Old friends all. And not one looks back at her. Stacked at the rear, taking up the final four seats and the space behind them, are the signs — some, Mary Pat is sure, she assembled herself a few nights ago on the floor of her apartment.

They drive out through South Boston in the humid gray. They smoke and make small talk, and the center of the city looms closer with every intersection they pass through.

“I don’t want to talk about her,” Joyce O’Halloran is saying to Carol, her hands up by her ears.

“So why are you talking about her?” Carol asks.