Nancy finishes her rant about someone named Felix and the coffee maker in the break room and flicks her eyes at Bobby. “You need to lose a few pounds, Michael. Don’t you think he needs to lose weight, Bridge?”
Bridget looks down at her knees.
“That’s a rather unkind way to greet a man.” Bobby peels back the tab on his beer.
“I want you to live a long life.”
“You used to tell me I was too skinny.”
“But that was the heroin.”
The word “Oh!” pops out of Bridget’s mouth in horrified surprise.
“Well, it’s not a secret!” Nancy says.
“Actually,” Bobby says, “it kinda is.”
“To the outside world.” Nancy waves at the windows. “Not in here.”
Claire comes through the side door off the driveway and hangs her umbrella on a hook. “What’s not in here?”
“We’re talking about Michael’s problem.”
“The drug thing?” Claire pulls the cork from a bottle of red, pours herself a glass. Kisses Bobby’s head lightly as she comes around him to take a seat.
“Yes, the drug thing,” Nancy says. “He thinks we’re going to blab it to the world.”
“Why would we do that?”
“No one said you would,” Bobby says. “I just find it uncomfortable to talk about.”
“You’re a fucking hero,” Claire says, and Bobby is touched to see Bridget look at him with wide eyes and an emphatic nod. “You know how many people kick that shit?”
“Very few,” Bobby admits.
“But you did.” Claire raises her glass to him and drinks.
“I was just telling him he could lose a few pounds,” Nancy says, “and it turned into this thing.”
“What thing?” Bobby says.
“See, he’s getting upset.”
“I’m not getting upset.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Like I just said. Upset.”
Bobby sighs and asks Claire how her day was.
“We,” Claire says, turning her wineglass in a small circle on the table, “have a real storm of shit coming. I don’t think anyone realizes yet.”
Claire is a secretary at the Metropolitan District Commission Police barracks in Southie. MDC cops work the beaches and the parks and leave the project crime to city cops. So most city cops think MDC cops are pussies, but Bobby’s always found them to be the most knowledgeable source of information for all things Southie.
“This the busing thing?” Bobby asks.
Claire nods. “We’re getting some ugly intel. Mass-unrest kinda ugly.”
“It’ll blow over,” Bobby says, just to be optimistic.
“I don’t think so,” Claire says. “You’re working that colored kid’s death, right?”
“I am.”
“Was he a dealer?” Nancy wants to know.
Bobby shakes his head.
“Well, what was he doing there?”
“Car broke down.”
“He shoulda taken better care of it.”
“Oh, so it’s his fault,” Claire says with a roll of her eyes.
“I’m not saying it’s his fault,” Nancy says, “just that if he’d taken better care of his car, it wouldn’t have broken down and he wouldn’t have died.”
Claire says, “Sounds like you’re saying it’s his fault.”
“I said the exact opposite!”
Claire turns to Bobby. “You making arrests soon?”
“Not unless we catch some big breaks. Pretty sure we know who did it. But knowing it and proving it, you know, big difference.”
“Well, give us a heads-up if you think you’re gonna bust anyone white from Southie anytime near the first day of school. Cuz this city is about to go boom.” She refills her glass of wine.
“I dunno,” he says, suddenly weary.
“You don’t know what?” his sister Diane asks. Coming down the front hall now, just off her shift at the public library in Upham’s Corner. Goes immediately to the stove and turns on the kettle for her tea.
“We’re talking about the kid got killed at Columbia Station,” Nancy says.
“You caught that?” Diane asks Bobby.
“I did.”
“I heard Marty Butler’s guys were involved,” Claire says.
“Eh. More like wannabe — Marty Butler guys. But” — Bobby thinks of George Dunbar for a second — “if he takes a personal interest, he could cause headaches, sure.”
The Butler crew has a lot of cops on their payroll. At both a local and a state level. Even if you’re not a dirty cop, you’re reluctant to cross or expose the ones who are (or could be; you rarely know for sure). If you do go forward and make a case against Marty or one of his boys, evidence has a way of vanishing, witnesses contract acute amnesia, and the cases tend to die a quick death in open court. Whereupon the cops at the center of them have a history of being demoted or reassigned. So, if you take a run at the Butler crew, you cannot fucking miss. Not if you’re fond of the little things — a living wage, a pension at the end of it, or a roof over your head. Shit like that.
Claire knows the ins and outs of police culture the way the rest of them don’t. She pats Bobby’s hand and says, “Be careful. No one’s life is worth your own.”
Bobby has fought a war — okay, a “police action” — in a country nine thousand miles away trying to prove the opposite.
Nancy, always the first to go for the jugular, chimes in. “And you gotta think about Brendan.”
Brendan is Bobby’s son. He’s nine and lives with his mother except on weekends, when he comes here and spends forty-eight hours with his father, five crazy, doting aunts, and gentle, bleak-hearted Uncle Tim, the failed priest. Bobby loves Brendan in a way that defies every notion he ever had about love before his son entered the world. He loves him beyond all capacity for rational thought. He loves him more than he loves all other people or things or dreams — including himself, including his own — combined.
“Nobody,” he says to his sister, “not even Marty Butler, is crazy enough to come after a cop. And even if he was, he sure as shit wouldn’t come after a cop’s kid. Not if he wants to see the next day of his life. Where do you come up with this shit, Nance?”
Nancy, never one to admit a mistake, pivots. “I wasn’t talking about physical harm, Michael, I was talking about you losing your job, your pension. And then what will that treacherous cow you used to be married to do to our weekends with Brendan?”
“It’s a fair point,” Diane says, and even Bridget nods in agreement.
Bobby’s family loves his son almost as much as Bobby does. Even Tim, floating in a fog of bitterness and the most esoteric reading material Bobby’s ever come across, manages to visibly lighten on weekends. And it’s not just because Brendan is the sole nephew (or niece). Brendan is, simply put, a wonderful individual. Nine years old and he’s thoughtful, empathetic, profoundly curious, funny as fuck, and warm. It’s as if he somehow inherited the best traits of his blood relatives but none of their damage. Yet, anyway.
His sisters would say, “That’s only because Shannon doesn’t have him all to herself,” but the truth is that Shannon is a good mother. Terrible wife and didn’t come highly recommended as a daughter or sibling, but she loves her son, and she’s dedicated herself to his upbringing in a way she never dedicated herself to anything or anyone in her life.