Small Mercies

The silence.

“You got kids?” he asks Carmen.

She nods. “I got one. He’s in college now. One thing I didn’t fuck up. I got him all the way through high school before the wheels came off.”

Bobby reappraises her. “Did you have him when you were in high school?”

She smiles. “Such a silver-tongued devil, you are. No, Bobby, I didn’t have him in high school. I was nineteen. And now he’s nineteen, so do the math.”

Bobby opens his mouth in mock horror. “You’re four years older than me.”

“Yeah, but I’ve clearly taken far better care of myself.”

Bobby laughs. Can’t remember the last time he did that so freely. After a second, Carmen laughs too. She takes his hand in hers, runs her thumb down the center of his palm.

“Should we order?” she says.

“Sure.”

But they don’t for a bit. They just sit there, taking each other’s measure.

“Do you have kids?” she asks.

“One. He’s nine. Lives with his mom weekdays.”

“Well, let me ask you — what would you do if someone hurt your child and the police refused to do anything about it?”

Bobby can see Brendan and his hopeful eyes and hopeful smile, his kind demeanor and clear desire for everyone around him to be happy, a desire that frightens Bobby as much as it moves him. If the world hurt him — really hurt him — would there be anything left of Bobby to pick up and put back together?

He says to Carmen, “I’m not sure what I’d do. I mean, I’ll be honest — I know what I’d want to do — but I’m a man who obviously believes in law and order. If we were, I dunno, out in the wild, part of the wagon-trail west a hundred years ago, and someone hurt my son? Then, yeah, they’d be fucking deader than Abe Lincoln.”

She nods. “I think the same thing most days — how easy it is to say you’d kill someone who hurt your child. But there are laws. And consequences. You kill someone, you go to prison. Your kid grows up without you.”

“The rule of law is all that separates us from the animal kingdom.”

“Do the parents of this girl feel that way?”

“It’s just her mother.”

“And what’s she like?”

Bobby chuckles. “She’s a piece of work. If I’d had half a dozen of her in my platoon at the beginning of Vietnam, we probably would have staved off the whole fucking war.”

“This is a woman we’re talking about?”

“Project chick from Southie. They breed them a little different there.”

“You like her.”

“I do,” he admits. Then, seeing her eyes, “No, no, no. Not like that. Not like I like you.”

“So how?”

“She’s...” He thinks about it. How to describe Mary Pat Fennessy? “Nobody ever told this woman how to quit. Probably nobody ever told her it was okay.”

“To quit?”

“To ease up. To, I dunno, cry? Feel?” He thinks about it. “Feel something besides anger, anyway. Every time I see my son? I hug him so tight he complains. I smell his hair and his skin. I put my heart to his back sometimes, just so I can hear his blood and the beat of his heart. I mean, he’s of the age he’s gonna get sick of it soon, so I’m just getting it in while I can.”

She nods, her eyes gone soft, her thumb even softer against his palm.

“I’ll bet you money,” he says, “Mary Pat Fennessy was never held like that in her life.”

“I suspect you’re a good father,” she says.

“Call no man a good father until after he is dead.”

She rolls her eyes. “That’s not the quote.”

He smiles at her. “You know ancient Greek?”

“I know my classics,” she says. “The nuns made sure of it.”

“I don’t like nuns,” he blurts out.

“I don’t like ’em either,” she says. “Though they’ve got a raw gig. The priests get all the booze and all the credit, the nuns get, what? A convent?”

The waitress appears and they withdraw their hands so they can look at their menus and order.

After the waitress leaves, Carmen puts her hand back on the table and raises an eyebrow at him. He gives her his hand, and she places her other hand over it.

“Does this woman have other kids?”

“She had a son, but he died.”

“Husband?”

“She’s had two. Both left her, one by getting legally declared dead.”

She removes a hand to take another sip of wine. “So, if something terrible did happen to her daughter, what does she have to live for?”

In that moment, a ghost walks straight through Bobby. It’s perfectly sized to his body and touches every inch of him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet before exiting through his chest.

“I don’t have an answer for that,” he tells Carmen.

After dinner, he walks her home. She doesn’t live far — about a ten-minute walk — but they stroll, drawing it out. They walk under trees thick with leaves that smell of the day’s heat, and after they pass through Park Square, the streets spread out before them in canyons of light and dark.

Over dinner, he learned more about her work running a halfway house in Roxbury for battered wives fleeing their spouses, often with kids in tow. Now, walking through the city on a still summer night, he asks why she does what she does.