And if this didn’t have such a personal aspect for her — if Auggie wasn’t Dreamy Williamson’s son, if Jules wasn’t a “person of interest” in his death — Mary Pat would have written it off the same way.
But reading through the papers, chain-smoking one Virginia Slim after another, she allows a picture to emerge in her mind of an Auggie Williamson who might not have done drugs, who most certainly was not from a broken home, who possibly didn’t try to steal a car or rob someone for cab fare but was, instead, a twenty-year-old kid whose car broke down in the wrong neighborhood.
And what neighborhood is that, Mary Pat?
My neighborhood.
When she walks out of work at the end of the shift, Marty Butler’s butterscotch AMC Matador is parked at the curb. Weeds stands by the back door, and as soon as Mary Pat has exited Meadow Lane Manor, he opens that door and she spies Marty sitting in the back.
She doesn’t move for a moment, just stands on the sidewalk pretending she has options. Once that little fantasy runs aground, she gets in the car with him.
He smiles and kisses her cheek and tells her she still looks as lovely as the day she married Dukie, thereby reminding her that he was at her first wedding, reminding her that Dukie worked for him, reminding her that he doesn’t just own the present, he owns history too.
Marty looks like he stepped out of a JCPenney circular. The Dad Model, wearing cardigans with a football cocked in his hand or fake-laughing with the other Dad Models. Square haircut, strong jaw, cleft in his chin. Eyes that smile without a shred of joy. Never has a hair out of place, a whisker or shadow on his cheeks. His teeth are white and straight. He’s handsome in the blandest of ways and hasn’t seemed to age for at least twenty years.
It’s a mystery what made Marty Marty. Some say it was the tour of duty in Korea. Others whisper ever so quietly that Marty Butler was always fucked in the head. A guy Dukie used to drink with, who grew up with Marty on Linden Street, told Dukie, “In high school, ’member he had a sister died from TB? He skipped her funeral to play basketball. Scored twenty-four points.”
As Weeds drives them back toward Southie, Marty asks Mary Pat, “Will you be at the rally Friday?”
“Oh, right.” In truth, Mary Pat had forgotten. The busing outrage, which seemed to consume everyone in Southie right now — and had consumed her up until three days ago — had slipped from her mind.
“‘Oh, right’?” Marty chuckles. “It’s only the future of our way of life at stake, Mary Pat.”
“I know,” she says. “I know.”
“You know who the truly happy countries are? Denmark, Norway, New Zealand, Iceland. You never hear a bad thing about those places. They don’t fight wars, they don’t suffer unrest. You never see them on the news. They have unity and prosperity because they stay whole. They stay whole because the races don’t mix because there are no races to mix.” He sighs, blowing it out through his lips. “First they’ll tell us where our kids can go to school, next they’ll tell us which god we’re allowed to pray to.”
“You pray?” She doesn’t mean to insult him, but it’s never occurred to her that someone like Marty Butler takes to prayer.
He nods. “I pray every night.”
“On your knees?” She just can’t picture it.
“On my back. In bed.” He shoots her an amused grimace. “Mostly for wisdom, sometimes for special dispensations for members of our flock.”
Our flock. His and God’s. That explains it.
“Do you recall when little Deidre Ward had the cancer? Sure, she was only seven or eight. I prayed hard those days, and wouldn’t you know the cancer went into remission. The Lord listens, Mary Pat. The trick is to have a pure heart when you ask Him for something.”
“Will that bring my Jules back to me?”
He gives her a distant smile and pats her leg. Gives the flesh above her knee a firm squeeze. His thumb and index finger dig all the way into the tissue. And then he pats lightly again and removes the hand as they cross over the bridge into Southie.
“How’s that car of yours?” he asks. “Still running?”
She nods. “As unlikely as that may seem.”
He gives his own reflection that distant smile of his. “Some things don’t know when to quit.”
“Why should it?” she says. “As long as it’s still getting me where I need to go.”
He looks at her and wiggles his eyebrows up and down like they’re in on a joke together. “And your apartment there? At Commonwealth?”
She shrugs. “The same.”
“Because I came into some cans of paint, Mary Pat. Crates of them. They’re all sitting in a warehouse over on West Second. Every color of the rainbow. Would you be interested in sprucing up your walls? Adding some color?”
“If you have a few cans I can take off your hands, sure, Marty, that’d be nice.”
He waves at the absurdity of the proposition. “No, no, hon. We would never expect you to do your own painting. You take a few days somewhere and we’ll pop in and paint them walls professionally for you. You’ll come back to a place so pretty you won’t even recognize it.”
“What’s with all the renovation lately, Marty?”
“What now?”
“Well, first your place and now mine?”
He looks at her with such bafflement that she knows he has no idea what she’s talking about.
“The house behind the Fields,” she says.
He stares back at her. Still no clue.
Weeds, from the front seat, says, “She’s talking about the work we’re doing on the kitchen, boss.”
“Ah!” Marty says. “Of course, of course.” Another pat for her knee. “The thing of it is, I don’t think of that house as ‘mine,’ Mary Pat. I still live in the same spot I always did over on Linden.”
She smiles and nods and tries not to let him see into the part of her brain that knows he’s lying. Brian Shea claimed they’d been working on the living room. Weeds claimed it was the kitchen. And Marty had no fucking clue about any of it until Weeds tipped him off.
“Well, think about the paint, at any rate,” Marty says.
The car pulls to the curb in front of Kelly’s Landing. A takeout place going back to Prohibition times — best fried clams in the city — it closed a month back. Mary Pat’s parents went on their first date at Kelly’s; her mother remembered her own father taking her there as a child, as she took Mary Pat, and Mary Pat took Jules and Noel. And now it’s boarded up. A place that provided food and memories for generations. The owners, it’s said, decided it was time to try something new, time for a change.
Change, for those who don’t have a say in it, feels like a pretty word for death. Death to what you want, death to whatever plans you’d been making, death to the life you’ve always known.
They get out of the car and walk past Kelly’s onto the causeway.
“I miss the smell,” Marty says. “That fried-food smell? My entire life, I walked past here, the air had that smell. Now it just smells like low tide.”
Mary Pat says nothing.
“How did we get here?” Marty Butler wants to know.
He’s not talking about the causeway they’re walking along. He’s talking about this point in their relationship, such as it is. It’s been cloudy all day, the sun taking the day off behind a wall of woolen gray. No hint of rain but no hint of sun either. She and Marty walk toward the Sugar Bowl, a small oval park surrounded by benches. The Sugar Bowl sits a half mile out in the bay where the two causeways meet. People fish from the causeways. Mary Pat and Marty pass men and a few women casting their lines, some out of boredom, some for their dinner. Ken Fen used to fish out here, came home a couple times with flounder that was gamey. Most of the time, he admitted, he just went there to check out of his own head for a little bit. The fishermen and fisherwomen all acknowledge Marty with nods, but nobody speaks and nobody approaches.