Big Peg sees it, sees the tears that well up in her sister’s eyes. “It’s gonna be okay,” Peg says.
Mary Pat looks her sister directly in the eyes for the first time in who knows how long and can hear the rawness of her own voice when she whispers, “I can’t lose another one. I can’t. I can’t lose... anything else.” She wipes at a single tear before it reaches her cheekbone, drinks some beer.
Big Peg says, “You gotta get ahold of yourself, hon. Nothing bad happens to kids from Southie as long as they stay in Southie.”
Mary Pat brings her fist down on the tabletop hard enough to rattle the beer cans. “Noel OD’d in the playground across the fucking street.”
Big Peg is unfazed. “Noel went to some fucked-up country on the other side of the world and came back with his head all screwed up because he left the neighborhood.” Peg’s eyes implore her to see the basic common sense of her argument.
Mary Pat stares back across the table at her sister. Is that what people really think about her son? That it was Vietnam that turned him to drugs? Mary Pat tried thinking that way for a while, but then she faced the sobering truth that Noel didn’t discover heroin in Vietnam (Thai stick, yes, heroin, no); heroin discovered Noel in the projects of South Boston.
“Noel never touched heroin in Vietnam,” she says, and it sounds like a weak argument when it leaves her mouth. “He got hooked here. Right here.”
Big Peg sighs in a way that suggests there’s just no reaching some people, and her gaze clicks off Mary Pat’s face. She stands, draining her beer in one long swallow, and says, “Well, I gotta be up for work in the morning.”
Mary Pat nods. Stands.
Big Peg walks her down the noisy hallway, all seven of the kids fighting about something, paired off into mini-skirmishes with no ability to see the larger war.
At the door, Big Peg says, “She’ll turn up.”
Mary Pat feels too defeated to be annoyed. “I know.”
“Get some sleep.”
Mary Pat laughs at the idea of it.
“You can’t let them rule your life,” Big Peg says, and shuts the door behind her.
5
She finds Rum out on the loading dock behind the Purity Supreme. Ten at night and the heat still hits like a steamed blanket; the loading dock smells like wilted lettuce and bananas so overripe they split their skin. Rum’s smoking a cigarette and drinking tallboys with the other supermarket punks who’ve just gotten off work from produce, deli, and bagging. The strength in numbers puts a brave look in his eyes when Mary Pat gets out of Bess, and that look turns to amusement when Bess’s door creaks and the engine shudders to a stop.
Bess is Mary Pat’s piece-of-shit station wagon that she has no choice but to drive until it gives up the ghost. Not that she drives much, but every now and then she can’t avoid it. She could have walked here, but she obsessed on an image of the headlights sweeping the back of the loading dock and the punks scattering like rats, except for Rum, who she’d bump with a fender or the car door. What she forgot was that the effect of Bess on just about anyone is not threatening but comic. Bess is a two-toned 1959 Ford Country Sedan. Its rear end sags like an old dog’s ass, rust and winter road salt have eaten away the rims of the wheel wells and the lower third of the paint job, the roof rack is long since gone (no one recalls where or when), both taillights are cracked (but operational), and the tailpipe hangs on with nothing more than Hail Marys and fraying butcher’s twine. About the only thing you can say for Bess anymore is that she was a great car to transport the two kids around in, she has a 352 V8 under the hood that turns her into a rocket on the highway, and the radio works. Bess once sported two different shades of green — “April” and “Sherwood” — but at this point, both shades are so blanched you’d have to take Mary Pat’s word for it.
When she gets out of Bess, the boys in her headlights cut up, except for Rum, who just watches her come with a cocked eyebrow she considers tearing off his face as he guzzles from his tallboy.
She doesn’t go with any preamble. “Where’s Jules?”
“Fuck should I know?”
“Don’t let the beer give you too much stupid right now, Ronald. You might confuse it with courage.”
“What?”
“Where’s my daughter?”
“I don’t know.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Last night.”
“Where?”
“Carson Beach.”
“And then?”
“And then what?”
“Where did she go?”
“She walked home.”
“You let my daughter walk home in this neighborhood at one in the morning?”
“It was twelve-forty-five.”
“You let my daughter walk home in this neighborhood at twelve-forty-five?”
He raises the beer toward his lips. “Uh—”
She slaps the beer out of his hand. “Alone?”
No one’s cutting up anymore on the loading dock. She knows their mothers. They know her. Everyone’s as quiet as a church pew waiting a turn for confession.
“No, no,” Rum says quickly. “She wasn’t alone. George gave her a ride home.”
“George Dunbar?”
“Yes.”
“The drug dealer?”
“What? Yes.”
“Gave my daughter a ride home.”
“Yes. I was too fucked up.”
She takes a step back from him, makes a show of assessing him. “Where you going to be in an hour?”
“What?”
“I asked you a fucking question.”
“I’m gonna be, like, home.”
“Like home? Or home?”
“Home. I’m going home.”
She notices his four-year-old orange Plymouth Duster in the employee parking lot. She’s always hated the sight of that car, as if she’s always known its owner was a sign of bad things to come.
“If George doesn’t back up your story, I’m coming to see you again.”
“Fine,” he says in such a way that she knows he has something to hide.
“You can just tell me now.”
“Nothing to tell.”
“It’ll be better for you if you do.”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay.” She holds out her arms as if to say, This was your choice, how it goes from now on.
She catches his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as he swallows, but then he looks at his shoes and the beer can she knocked out of his hand.
She gets back into Bess, and they all stare at her, wide-eyed, as she backs up and drives out of the parking lot.
“I don’t give two shits what he told you,” George Dunbar says to her half an hour later. “It isn’t true.”
She looks at this handsome kid with his smooth demeanor and his heartless eyes who sold her son his own death in a little plastic baggie. He stares back at her with a gaze so flat and stripped of emotion it would look weird on a Ken doll.
George was a part of the fabric of the Fennessy household for about ten years, always running in and out with Noel; in all that time, she never felt she got a clear view of him. It was as if a part of him, a core part, wasn’t there when you went looking for it. She mentioned this to Ken Fen once and he said, “Most people we know are like dogs — there’s loyal ones, mean ones, friendly ones. But all of it, good and bad, comes from the heart.”
“What kind of dog is George Dunbar?”
“None,” Kenny said. “He’s a fucking cat.”
She looks now at this cat who couldn’t even be bothered to show up to Noel’s funeral. “Why would Rum lie?”
“I have no idea what goes on in another man’s mind.”