Small Mercies

Bobby says, “She said, ‘He doesn’t have to call it his own, he just has to pay for it.’”

Rum thinks about it. “She coulda been talking about anything.”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. Like a pet. Or a car.”

This moron can fucking vote, Bobby despairs. And breed.

“All right,” he tells Rum, “after she says she’s gonna call him — and who’s ‘him,’ by the way?”

Rum pauses quite a while before he gives it all up: “Well, Frankie.”

It takes Bobby a few seconds, but then somehow he knows, out of all the Frankies in the world, who the kid’s referring to. “Frank Toomey?”

“Yeah.”

Holy fuck. Bobby turns in his chair, meets Vincent’s eyes. Vincent looks as flabbergasted as Bobby feels.

“Jules Fennessy was seeing Frank Toomey?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re telling us this now because...?”

“Because she said she’d fucking kill me if I didn’t.”

Bobby looks down the table at Vincent to make sure he didn’t write that last exchange into the record. Vincent is holding his pen aloft, so Bobby knows he didn’t.

No more questions to Rum about why he’s talking, Bobby reminds himself, just let him talk.

“Go back to your story,” Bobby tells the kid.

Jules decided she was going to call Frankie at home. Where he lived with his wife and kids. At quarter past midnight. Nobody thought this was a good idea. They all tried to talk her out of it. But she marched across Columbia Road, a dime in her hand, and stopped at the pay phone just outside the subway station and dropped the dime in the slot. The boys stayed where they were, but Brenda jogged across the road to Jules and stood by her while she talked into the phone, ended up screaming something that sounded like “Well, you spend the money!” She slammed the phone down so hard on the cradle that they heard it on the other side of the road.

Rum and George Dunbar considered moving toward the girls, but they could tell by the way Jules was waving her hands and making ugly scrunch-faces that she was crying, and who the fuck wanted any part of that? Then the same spook kid who had driven by in the dying car walked out of the block of shadow thrown by the overpass, and who knew what he had in mind because he seemed to be staring at the girls, so Rum and George jogged across the street in time to hear him say, “Are you okay?”

“We don’t have any money,” Brenda said.

“Who asked for money?” Bobby asks Rum now.

“What? No one.”

“So why did Brenda say she didn’t have any money?”

Rum shrugs. “Why else was he talking to them?”

Even Vincent, no friend to the black man, is bewildered. “To see if she was okay?”

“Fuck that,” Rum says. “He’s not supposed to ask that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s none of his business. Look, we all get how it works. Maybe you don’t, but we do. You don’t talk to each other. It’s that simple. I don’t want no trouble in my life — I really don’t — but if I was stupid enough to roll up on some colored girls in Mattapan Square and start talking to them and their boyfriends showed up? I would fucking expect them to beat the ever-living piss out of me. Nothing personal. Just the way it works. But here’s the difference between me and that dumbass spook — I am not gonna roll up on a pair of spook girls and start talking to them. About anything. Because I’m not looking for trouble.”

“But Auggie Williamson was?”

“Well, yeah.”

Bobby and Vincent exchange a look.

Bobby says, “Keep talking.”

“This nigger asking you for money?” George Dunbar asked Brenda.