Mary Pat can’t help but chuckle inside, but she doesn’t let it show.
An odd silence settles into the room. The longer it goes on, the more uncomfortable it grows. And yet none of them breaks it for the longest time.
Until Mary Pat stands and says to Kenny, “Let me know if you hear from Jules.”
Kenny grimaces. He indicates the black girl-woman, who has moved around to his hip. “Mary Pat, this is—”
“I don’t want to know her fuckin’ name.”
The black girl-woman lets out a startled hoot of a laugh, and her eyes widen.
Mary Pat can feel the rage pulsing behind her eyes. She can feel them redden. She has an image of these two crossing the Broadway bridge, her small black hand in his big white one. It’s almost unbearable to imagine — the looks they’d get! The humiliation that would crest like a wave and crash down on Mary Pat and Jules and even stain the memory of Noel, God rest his soul.
Kenny Fennessy of the D Street projects returns to Southie a race traitor, a fucking jungle-bunny lover.
Whether Ken Fen and Afro Girl lived or died on their little walk — and Mary Pat doubted they’d make it to C Street alive, definitely no farther than E — the shame that would follow Mary Pat and Jules, as long as they held on to the Fennessy name and probably for decades after, would be impossible to surmount.
But it’s Kenny and the black girl-woman staring at her with contempt. How’d that happen?
“How you live with yourself,” she hisses at Kenny, “is anyone’s guess.”
“How I live with myself?” Kenny says as the woman grabs at his arm, but he walks right through it to reach Mary Pat.
She feels suddenly at sea. She didn’t want this. For a moment she can’t think of anything to say, she just wants to slink out of here, she just wants to go back to searching for Jules. But it’s been building up for so long, ever since Kenny left her, and the words just fall out of her mouth.
“We were happy.”
He says, “We were happy?”
It hits her — they weren’t. She was. But he never seemed to be.
“We hit a few bumps.”
He says, “Those weren’t bumps, Mary Pat. They were our fucking lives shriveling. From the time I could walk, all I ever saw was hate and rage and people pounding booze so they wouldn’t feel it. Then they’d get up the next day and do the same fucking thing all over again. For fucking decades. I spent my whole life dying. Whatever time I got left, I’m living it. I’m sick of drowning.”
The beautiful black girl is looking at them with a calm Mary Pat finds both admirable and insulting.
Mary Pat looks back at Kenny and can see past his anger (and her own) to the hope in his eyes — teeny-tiny but flaring — as if it’s saying, Live this new life with me.
And some part of her almost says, Yes, let’s go. Some part of her almost grabs his face and crushes her lips against his and says through gritted teeth: “Let’s fucking go.”
But somehow the words that leave her mouth are, “Oh, so you’re too good for us?”
A desperate pop escapes his lips. A sound caught somewhere between a soft scream and a loud sigh. Whatever micro-sliver of hope lived in his eyes hops the bus out of town, and now he’s looking at her with dead pupils, dead irises, dead everything.
“Get the fuck outta here,” he says softly. “If Jules shows up, I’ll send her your way.”
7
Five o’clock comes and goes without a word from Brian Shea.
Six and seven o’clock do the same.
She walks to the Fields. There’s a sign on the door: Closed for Private Function.
What the fuck does that mean? she wants to shout. The whole bar is a private function.
Mary Pat knocks on the door. At least a dozen times. Enough to waken the aches in her right hand that have been there since she beat the shit out of her daughter’s useless excuse for a boyfriend.
No one answers the door.
She tries Brian Shea’s house next. Over on Telegraph Hill, it’s one of the original redbrick townhomes that front the park. His wife, Donna, answers the door. Donna and Mary Pat (and Brian too) were in the same grammar school class, same class at Southie High too. At one point, Mary Pat and Donna were thick as thieves, but that was before their lives curved in different directions and Mary Pat ended up raising two kids in the projects while Donna Shea (née Dougherty) married a marine, traveled the world, and then came back when said marine got fragged by his own guys in a place called Binh Thúy. Donna came back childless, moved in with her senile mother, and looked to be staring at a long slow decline to her own senility when she hooked up with Brian Shea instead and changed the whole course of her life. Her mother died, Brian got bumped up to second in command of the Butler crew, they moved into a townhouse on Telegraph Hill, and Brian bought her a two-toned Mercury Capri right off the lot. No kids, no pets, no struggle. Donna Shea hit the trifecta. All she has to worry about now are canceled nail appointments and any unexplained lumps on her chest.
Donna looks at Mary Pat from the other side of the threshold and says, “What can I do for you?”
As if Mary Pat knocked on her door selling term life.
“Hey,” Mary Pat says. “How you doing?”
“I’m okay.” Donna looks bored. Glances over Mary Pat’s shoulder at the street. “What’s up?”
“I’m looking for Brian.”
“He ain’t here.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Why do you want to know where my husband is?”
“He was looking into something for me.”
“What?”
“Where my daughter might be. She’s been missing since the night before last.”
“What’s that gotta do with him?”
“He offered to look into it.”
“So wait for his answer.”
“He said he’d get back to me by five tonight.”
“Well, he ain’t here.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“So.”
“So.”
“I just...”
“What?”
“I’m just trying to find my daughter, Donna.”
“So, find her.”
“I’m trying,” though what she wants to say/scream is Why are you being such an asshole? She can’t think of anything more to say, so she turns and walks down the steps.
“Mary Pat,” Donna says softly.
Mary Pat looks up the stairs at her. “What?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with me.”
She invites Mary Pat into her home.
“I have no idea why I’m not happy,” Donna says after she gets them each a beer. “But I’m not. I mean, I got everything. Right? Look at this place. Brian’s a good guy, a good dresser too. He takes care of me. He’s never hit me. Can’t remember a time he even yelled at me. So what’s not to be happy about?” She waves her arm at the dining room. The china cabinet as big as a butcher’s freezer, the chandelier above them so enormous its shadows drizzle down the walls like vines, the table they’re sitting at parquet-top with seating for twelve. She says it again: “Why am I not happy?”
“How the fuck would I know?” Mary Pat says with an uncomfortable laugh.
Donna sucks on a cigarette. “You’re right. You’re right, you’re right, you’re right.”
“I don’t know if I’m that right,” Mary Pat says. “I just don’t know why you’re not happy.”
“I’m getting laid good,” Donna says. “I’m taken care of. He buys me anything I want.”