Small Mercies

Her eyelids flutter with fatigue. She finally drags her ass to bed. She can still hear the girl’s voice — You can’t just quit. You gotta try — and she wonders where Ken Fen might be now (though she suspects she knows, even though she definitely doesn’t want to). She wonders if he’s still mad at her and why he doesn’t seem to give a shit that she’s just as mad at him, that he left her, that she never changed — he did. And who the fuck is he to change after almost seven years of marriage? Who the fuck is anyone to pull a stunt like that?

“Why’d you stop loving me, Kenny?” she asks the dark. “We made vows in front of God.”

She finds herself hoping Kenny will somehow materialize out of the dark, at least his face, but there’s nothing there but the dark.

And then she hears what could be his voice in her head, but all he says is: “Enough, Mary Pat. Enough.”

She whispers, “Enough what?”

“Stop,” he says. “Just stop.”

The tears stream hot now. They slide from her eyes down her cheeks to her pillow and from her pillow down into the collar of her pajama top. “Stop what?”

Nothing. He doesn’t say another word.

As she falls asleep, she can hear it. Or imagines she can. It’s below the asphalt, below the basements and the subflooring.

The grid.

Of circuits and conduits and connections that channel the electricity and water and heat that rise up through the wiring and pipes and tubing to power her world. Or, as was the case this morning, choose not to. She can see it spreading across her dimming consciousness in a blanket of soft light. She can feel it fluttering under her eyelids.

It’s all connected, she imagines mumbling to someone. It really is.

3

Jules never comes home that night.

Not so unusual. Not a big deal. (Though it gets a vein pulsing in Mary Pat’s throat and throws her stomach off until lunch.) Jules is seventeen. An adult in the eyes of the world. If she were a boy, she could enlist.

Nonetheless, before she leaves for work, Mary Pat calls the Morello house. Brenda’s father, Eugene, answers with a burrish “Hullo.”

“Hey, Eugene,” she says, “did Jules sleep over? She there?”

Eugene says he’ll go check, comes back on the line a minute later. “Neither of them.” She hears him gulp something she assumes is coffee, light a smoke, and take a deep drag. “They’ll turn up when they need money. Gotta go, Mary Pat.”

“Sure, sure, Gene, thanks.”

“G’bless,” he says before hanging up.

G’bless. They could add it to the list that includes It is what it is and Whatta ya gonna do. Phrases that provide comfort by removing the speaker’s power. Phrases that say it’s all up to someone else, you’re blameless.

Blameless, sure, but powerless too.

She heads to work, arrives a minute before start time, still gets a look from Sister Fran, as if a minute early is as bad as a minute late. Sister Fran looks like she’s thinking of whipping out one of her “God favors” nuggets of wisdom, like “God favors the pious for in the pious lives the wisdom of humility” or “God favors the clean because in cleanliness one better sees the reflection of God.” (She uses that one on the window washers a lot.) But Sister Fran merely snorts as she passes behind Mary Pat and leaves her to start her day.

Mary Pat works as a hospital aide at Meadow Lane Manor in Bay Village, a neighborhood that can’t decide if it’s white, black, or queer, two subway stops from Commonwealth on the edge of downtown. Meadow Lane is an old folks’ home (an “old fucks’ home,” she and her coworkers call it after a few beers) run by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent DePaul. Mary Pat works the morning shift, seven to three-thirty, Sunday through Thursday, with a half hour off for lunch. She’s been doing it for five years. It’s not a bad job once you make peace with the humiliation that comes with cleaning bedpans, giving daily baths to grown adults, and maintaining an air of servility not just to crotchety old white people but a few crotchety old black ones as well. It certainly isn’t the type of job she dreamed of when, as a child, she’d drift off to sleep. But it’s predictable, and she can do it most days with her mind on other things.

She starts her day with the morning wake-ups, and then she and Gert Armstrong and Anne O’Leary deliver the breakfasts. They’re behind the eight ball the whole morning because Dreamy banged in sick and the morning shift is a four-person job. Dreamy is the only black woman on their shift and, to Mary Pat’s recollection, she’s never been sick. Dreamy’s real name is Calliope, but everyone has been calling her Dreamy, she told them all once, since first grade. It fits her — she always has a look in her eyes like she’s someplace else, she has a light sleepy voice, and she moves like a soft summer rain. When she smiles, it breaks ever so slowly across her face.