Small Mercies

She tells Bobby she dreamed of being a lawyer as a little girl, she even remembers dreaming of becoming a cop at one point, but when she reached college on a full academic scholarship, she still had to make ends meet for room and board. Someone hooked her up with a job at a shelter for runaways. And there, she tells Bobby, she discovered she had a knack for convincing people — some people, not all by a long shot — that they had the ability to change the course of their lives.

“And you were hooked,” Bobby says.

She slaps his arm in agreement. “I was hooked.”

“Gotta be a lot of pain in that job,” he says. “Battered women? Shit.”

“Look who’s talking.”

“Nah nah nah,” he says. “I see a lot of crap, of course, but my job is mostly clear-cut. Someone dies, I go find who was responsible. Sometimes I get them, sometimes I don’t, but I don’t live with the hope that someone’s life could get better because of me. You, you gotta put your faith in these women who half the time go back to these assholes willingly or get chased down by them and talked into going back. How many times does one of those outcomes happen?”

“More than fifty percent of the time,” she admits. “It gets dark, I won’t lie. For a while, I searched for the light in the needle. But that eventually killed all the light.”

“Where do you find it now?”

“Faith.”

“In God?” he asks.

“People,” she says.

“Oooh.” He winces. “That’s a bad bet.”

“You don’t believe people can change?”

“I do not.”

She cocks her head at that and strolls a few steps ahead of him. “How will you ever get me into bed with a shit attitude like that, Bobby Whose Real Name Is Michael?”

“I’m just not sure where hope gets anyone,” he manages.

She walks back to him. “You don’t believe that. You had enough hope in me to bring me to rehab instead of jail. I still have my career because of that. You have enough hope in this mother from Southie that you obsessed about her all night on a date with me. And I look spec-tac-u-lar.”

“You do,” he admits.

She steps close and pulls him by his lapels toward her and kisses him for the first time — a light, slightly chaste/slightly moist kiss on the lips. “You wish you weren’t hopeful, but you are. That’s why I like you.”

She drops his lapels and is on the move again.

“You like me?” he says.

Another look over her shoulder. “Tell no one.”

They stop in front of her building on Chandler Street, a brownstone halfway down a block full of brownstones in a neighborhood that’s not one Bobby would characterize as high-crime but not one he’d call low-crime either. Like the rest of the city right now, it’s riven by tectonic shifts, caught between what it once was and what it hasn’t yet become and might never be. Carmen points out a light on the third floor, tells Bobby that’s her living room.

Their first kiss aside, it’s understood, without ever being said, that he won’t be coming up tonight, and he’s okay with that. His time in Vietnam scrambled his brain when it came to women — all he’d known were bar girls and taxi dancers and the hookers who walked the broad sidewalks outside the Imperial City in Hué and shouted their come-ons in a nearly indecipherable mix of Vietnamese, French, and the hard-boiled English they’d learned from American gangster movies. When he got back stateside, he stuck to strippers and barmaids for his first few years on the force. Then he met Shannon, a woman he was pretty sure, in hindsight, he’d never loved. Shannon was cold and imperious and noticeably unfond of humanity, and Bobby mistook the shine she took to him with his being a person of value — if someone who doesn’t like anyone likes you, doesn’t that render you peerless? It gave him pride, but no pleasure, to have a woman that beautiful and heartless on his arm. To be fair to Shannon, it wasn’t long into the marriage before she grasped that he didn’t love her. Problem was, she loved him (insofar as Shannon could love anyone), and the realization that he’d never really loved her back turned her already selfish heart into a granite nugget. Only Brendan could get in there (and Bobby wondered if that would hold once he started talking back). After Shannon, Bobby went back to wholly meaningless sex. Not with hookers, necessarily, but with women who expected sex to be just as transactional as he did.

When he got clean, he stayed away from anything that triggered his twin predilections for self-destruction and self-loathing, and for a long time that meant steering clear of the kind of women with whom he’d most often kept company.