This is one of the moments she’ll look back on and wonder how it was she managed not to kill him.
She drives them downtown.
“What do you know about how she died?”
George is out of sorts and grumpy. He keeps trying to raise his cuffed hand to block the sun from his eyes. He switches to his left hand, but it’s still too much sun for one hand. “Frankie was pissed because she called his house after midnight and threatened to tell people.”
“Tell people what?”
He gives her a careful look.
“Rum already told me she was pregnant,” she tells him.
“Then, yeah, that’s what she was threatening.”
She drifts into oncoming traffic and has to swerve hard to avoid an oncoming cab. It’s not anything George said. It’s a fragment of memory from the last day she spent with Jules. They’d been walking along Old Colony, and Jules had spiraled into that weird dark mood which grew so exasperating that Mary Pat had asked her if she was PMSing. To which Jules replied:
No, Ma. Definitely no.
She was trying to tell me, Mary Pat thinks. And I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see and I couldn’t hear. Because I didn’t want to. Because truth hurts, truth costs, truth upends your world.
They have to divert at the Broadway bridge because an anti-busing demonstration has shut down the bridge. As they follow the detour down along A Street, they pass throngs walking toward the bridge with anti-busing signs, anti-Garrity signs, anti-black signs.
They stop at an intersection and wait out the passing of a thick line of protesters.
“Why’d he kill her?” she says softly, surprised the words left her mouth because, in the end, no reason could be good enough.
“She wanted money to raise her kid.”
“He has plenty of money.”
“Doesn’t mean he wants to share any. Plus, I heard she was asking for a lot. Said she didn’t want to raise her kid the way she was raised.”
Mary Pat tries to keep the wince in her heart from appearing on her face. “And if she didn’t get the money?”
“She’d tell people it was his.”
“Who told you this?”
“Larry Foyle. He was pretty down about it. Said it wasn’t right. Said, ‘We’re killing little girls now?’”
“How’d you feel about it?”
“Really sad.”
She looks over at him. He’s still trying to dodge the sun, moving his head below his hand.
“No, you didn’t,” she says.
He sighs. “No, I didn’t.”
“Do you feel things, George? I’ve always wondered.”
He frowns at his own reflection in the window. “I think it’s a pretty idea, but no. Honestly? Outside of my mom, I never felt anything for anyone.”
“At least you’re honest.”
He points at the protesters, stragglers now, but still a decent number of them working their way up A Street. “Look at these fucking morons. Whether niggers walk the halls of Southie High this year or not, you’ve all already lost. The towelheads just told us to go fuck ourselves and get used to walking until they decide to let us have more oil. But you’ll pick a fight with the niggers, who are just as poor and fucked as you are, and tell yourselves you stand for something.”
The traffic moves. They make it through the intersection just as the light turns from yellow to red.
“If you don’t care about any of it, George, why’d you pick a fight with Auggie Williamson?”
He lowers his hand and looks at her, and the sun bathes the side of his face in harsh yellow that bounces and refracts as she drives.
“He was weak,” he says. “You could see it in his eyes.”
“Maybe he was just scared.”
“Fear’s a weakness.” He holds his hand back up to the sun. “I don’t like weakness.”
“Maybe it’s not weakness. Maybe it’s just a kind heart.”
He checks to see if she’s serious. Once he decides she is, he lets out a bark of a laugh. “Well, I mean, fuck that, then.”
She looks over at him for a bit and finally understands him after all these years. “I get it now. You don’t have the anger, George. You just have the hate.”
Neither says anything for two traffic lights.
As she turns onto Congress Street, Mary Pat says, “Why did they keep her body?”
“Huh?”
“If Frank Toomey did kill my daughter in that house, why did he leave her body there?”
“It’s being watched.” He shrugs. “That’s what Marty’s been told, anyway.”
“Watched by who?”
“DEA.”
“How does Marty know?”
“He’s got someone in the FBI.”
“No shit?” She can feel her eyes widen and hear an involuntary whistle leave her lips.
“Yup,” George says. “That why he’s untouchable.”
She turns that over in her head a bit.
“Where we going?”
“I’m taking you to your drugs.”
“Yeah?” He only half believes her.
“We had a deal. I’m holding up my end.”
“I didn’t promise I wouldn’t say anything.”
“You mean to Marty? About me jacking your drugs?”
“Yeah.”
“I know you didn’t. It’s all fine, George.”
He can’t seem to compute that.
“Here we go,” she says, and pulls over on the Congress Street Bridge by the harbor.
He looks at the red clapboard building that overlooks the water. At the gangway that descends to the harbor. At the yellow boat at the bottom of the gangway. “What’re we doing here?”
“Do you know what that boat is?”
“Yes,” he says irritably.
“Tell me.”
“It’s a replica of the ship.”
“What ship?”
“What’re we, in grammar school?”
“Humor me, George.”
He gives her teenage-girl eye rolls. “It’s a replica of the ship the Sons of Liberty boarded when they chucked all the British tea into the harbor back in seventeen seventysomething.”
“Very good!” She claps his knee. “And why did they do that, George?”
“To protest taxes. Can you just—”
“Not taxes,” she says. “Taxes without representation. That was the key part, George. They paid the British, but the British just took the money and didn’t do a damn thing for them. So they chucked their precious limey tea right into the harbor. The point they were making, George, is if you take from me, then I fucking take from you.”
He looks across the seat at her. “What are you on about?”
She gestures with her chin at the water. “That’s where Marty’s drugs are, George.”
He doesn’t get it. “On the boat?”
She shakes her head. “In the water.”
George’s mouth opens in a wide O. He stares through the windshield and blinks repeatedly. People walk by on the sidewalk outside the car, oblivious to the destruction going on within.
George finally speaks. He says, “Come on. No.” His voice is small and pleading and cracks on the final word.
“I stood right up there in the middle of the bridge last night...”
“Please?” George stares through the windshield at the harbor.
“And I cut open the bags, one by one.”
“Just... stop,” he whispers.
“And I rained all those pills and powder down into the water.”
He whispers something.
“What, George? I can’t hear you. Speak up.”
He makes a sound that falls somewhere between a grunt and a moan. “I’m dead.”
“Without your drugs?”
“I’m fucking dead.”
“Yeah,” she agrees, “you certainly are.”