Small Mercies

She stares at him. Is he slick enough to lie under the influence of his first hit of heroin? Does he — does anyone — have that kind of willpower?

He smiles at her. A dreamy, distant smile. Knowing but not arrogant.

“You know how to pour concrete?” he asks her.

“You mix it, you pour it.”

He sighs. “You’ve never done it, have you?”

“No, George, I haven’t.”

“Most people think it’s easy. You grab a bag of it, mix it with some water, lay it down with a trowel, wait for it to dry.”

She can sense this is not a random topic between them. She’s aware that his family business — started by his uncles and his late father shortly after World War II — is cement.

“But it’s not easy?” she offers.

A long slow shake of his head. “Not if you’ve never done it before, not if you don’t know what you’re doing. Not if your basement is eighty-five fucking degrees on a summer day and you mixed it wrong anyway, so it’s already cracking five minutes after it fucking dries, and it fucking dries five minutes after you lay it down. What you got then is a mess. You can’t get to what you’re trying to seal over, but you haven’t totally sealed it over either. I mean, it’s there, what you tried to cover, like a fucking bug trapped in ice. And the fumes will knock you out.”

He slides down the side of the car and sits against the tire and looks off at nothing. “I had this tricycle once. Metal. Heavy. It had a red seat.”

She waits for more — a point, perhaps — but that’s all she’s getting.

“George,” she says.

“Hmmm?”

“What were you trying to seal over?”

“Hmmm?”

“You said you were trying to seal something over in a hot basement.”

He drifts, and then it’s as if her words finally reach him at the other end of a long tunnel. “I wasn’t the one who fucked up.”

“No?”

Another slow headshake. “I don’t fucking make mistakes with cement. They did.”

“Who?”

He licks his lips several times. “You know.”

“No, I—”

“Marty and Frank.” He stares at her through half-mast eyes.

“What about them?”

“They tried to bury her in the basement, but they mixed the cement wrong, so they had to do it all over again.”

Two thick veins, one on either side of Mary Pat’s larynx, start to throb. “Say her name.”

“Jules.” A lazy smile for her as the heroin bathes his inner body from head to toe. “They had to bury her twice.”

23

It’s a few moments before she can speak.

She remembers the day she forced her way into the Fields. Larry Foyle and Weeds sported dirty T-shirts, their bodies sweaty and ripe with B.O. And then Brian Shea, his skin speckled with chalky residue, claimed he’d been helping “renovate” Marty’s house. A sledgehammer rested against a toolbox in the rear grotto. Brian had been indignant because she’d gone to his house and questioned his wife in the disappearance of her daughter. He’d been threatening. Flicked a cigarette at her.

Insinuated that she was a bad neighbor.

Acted self-righteous.

And all the while, her daughter’s body lay just twenty feet away in a cellar.

Brian Shea, with whom she’d had clammy, forgettable high school sex in his mother’s bedroom.

Brian Shea, for whom Dukie had put in a word when he was just another kid on the make, trying to get in with Marty Butler.

Brian Shea, to whom Dukie once loaned money, only to have to chase him down to get it back.

Brian Shea, who was at the party they threw after Jules’s christening.

Had been in their home, had eaten at their table, had drunk their liquor and beer.

Brian Fucking Shea.

“Why you crying?” George Dunbar, his back against the Nova, is watching her with a loose, sleepy gaze.

“Am I?” She dabs under her eyes with the heel of her hand.

He doesn’t even hear her. He’s already floating again.

She squats down by him and snaps her fingers in front of his face. “Did you see her?”

“Who?”

“Jules.”

“When?”

“When you reset the basement floor?”

“Whose?”

“Marty’s.”

“Nah, nah, nah. We, um, we brought in the Quikrete. It’s the stuff they should have used from the start. Concrete but sand too. It’s good shit, dries fast...” He lowers his head, seems to fall asleep.

She slaps his face. His eyes snap open, meet hers. “You never saw Jules?”

“No, no. She... I mean, there was a hole in the floor, and it had been patched over, and then they poured the bad cement mix over that. So they busted up all the bad cement, and we came in and laid the Quikrete down, and that’s where she is.”

“Under the Quikrete.”

He doesn’t answer. He’s into another nod.

She slaps him again.

“George! Is she under the Quikrete?”

“Yeah. She’s there.” His words are a muddy slur at this point. “She’s there.”

“George,” she says before she loses him, “does anyone come to this garage besides you?”

He smiles and rolls his head on his neck. “No one knows it’s here.”

“No one?”

“Not a soul,” he slurs.

If he notices when she handcuffs him to the handle of the car door, he doesn’t seem to mind.

She gets some sleep in the backseat of the Nova.