And now Peg finally remembers the last thing she ever said to her sister. It was about their kids, and it feels like a prophecy when you look back on it.
You can’t let them rule your life.
The day before Mary Pat is laid to rest, Bobby’s son, Brendan, ends up in the hospital with his leg broken in three places. He got it skateboarding with his friends on a steep street near his mother’s house. Tried to avoid a pothole, smashed into a Buick, went sailing over the hood. Broke his left heel, ankle, and fibula.
All clean breaks, luckily. Surgery goes off without a hitch.
Bobby and Shannon sit with him up the Carney. The cast looks bigger than the rest of him, a big white appendage jutting off his knee and hanging suspended at the other end from a metal U inverted over the bed. He’s in good spirits, a little loopy from the drugs, and he keeps giving them this bewildered smile, like How did I get here? His aunts and Uncle Tim all visit, bring him toys, cards, books. Leave silly messages on his cast. They make so much noise in there, the nurses keep having to shush them. Finally, they shoo them out until only Shannon, Bobby, and Brendan remain.
Brendan snores softly, and Shannon looks across him at Bobby and says, “Our boy,” and something in her voice breaks because something in Brendan is broken for the first time. He’s rarely been sick, never had stitches or broken a bone. Never even got a sprain.
Bobby nods, keeps his expression even and supportive.
She looks beat. She was the one who brought Brendan in. Was here for two hours before Bobby arrived. He suggests she go home, get some rest, take a shower, at least, freshen up.
She’s reluctant, but as Brendan remains sleeping and the night drags on, she gathers her things, kisses her son’s forehead, and gives Bobby a small finger wave, her eyes wet and shaken.
When she leaves, the smile Bobby’s kept plastered to his face since he got here — his cheerleader smile, his Dad’s-on-top-of-it smile, his everything’s-going-to-be-just-fine smile — drops. He imagines the black and purple leg underneath that cast, swollen and despoiled by swaths of black sutures. His son’s flesh sliced open like a Christmas ham, so the surgeons could insert their instruments inside his body and fuse bones that had snapped like breadsticks. And while Bobby is grateful — ever so fucking grateful — that modern medicine is here to respond in this way, it nonetheless feels like a violation.
It could have been so much worse. Brendan could have soared over that Buick and landed on his head. His neck. The base of his spine.
It could always be worse. That was a mantra in Bobby’s family growing up. And he agrees with it.
But he also must confront what he has grasped intellectually since the moment he first held his son in the maternity ward of St. Margaret’s and is only now allowing to infiltrate his heart. Not because he wants it to but because that cast has given him no choice.
I can’t protect you.
I can do what I can, teach you as much as I know. But if I’m not there when the world comes to take its bite — and even if I am — there’s no guarantee I can stop it.
I can love you, I can support you, but I can’t keep you safe.
And that scares the ever-living shit out of me. Every day, every minute, every breath.
“Dad?” His son is staring at him.
Bobby looks up the cast to his son’s sleepy face. “Yeah, bud?”
“It’s just a leg.”
“I know.”
“So why do you have tears in your eyes?”
“Allergies?”
“You’re not allergic to anything.”
“Shut up.”
“Real mature.”
Bobby smiles but says nothing. After a bit, he moves his chair closer to the bed, takes his son’s hand in his. He raises it to his lips, gives the knuckles a kiss.
The funeral for Mary Patricia Fennessy is held at nine o’clock in the morning on September 17. It’s sparsely attended. Calliope Williamson stands in the back and notices a large, fat version of Mary Pat standing up front with a group of unruly kids who all look in need of a bath. There’s two old men in a nearby pew with thinning hair who have similar features to the fat woman and to Mary Pat.
Family, then.
Some of the nuns from Meadow Lane Manor attend but no coworkers. About another dozen or so mourners are scattered about a church that could easily hold a thousand.
Detective Bobby Coyne does not show up. She knows he would have if he could have — he’s like Reginald that way, a man of his word.
Directly across from Calliope, in the opposite pew at the back, stands a handsome giant with kind eyes. He wears an ill-fitting suit and a tie with a knot that’s bunched up and wrinkled. He keeps a handkerchief at hand and weeps silently but often.
She’s seen him before — he used to pick Mary Pat up after work sometimes. It’s her husband. She knows his name is Kenny, even though they’ve never been formally introduced, and that everyone calls him Ken Fen.
After the mass, she introduces herself on the church steps and expresses sorrow for his loss. Not just of his wife but of his stepdaughter as well.
He says, “You’re Dreamy.”
She shakes her head. “No one calls me that.”
“I thought—”
“The women at work — about the only thing they remember about me is that I told them a story about my father calling me Dreamy when I was a kid. Never said anyone had called me it since, but they decided not to hear that part. Gave me the name so I’d feel more like their pet, I guess.”
He sighs. “Well, I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Her eyes pulse, as if someone just slid a metal skewer sideways through her heart, but she says nothing.
“A lot of loss going around,” she says.
The other mourners are filing out. No one pauses to express their condolences to him. They walk around the two of them as if they have leprosy.
They remain on the steps long after everyone has gone, saying nothing. And it’s strangely comfortable.
“Want to get a drink, Calliope?”
“I’d fucking love one.”
They walk to the nearest bar past signs and graffiti that Calliope refuses to look at. She doesn’t need to see the words to feel their ugliness. The ugliness is everywhere over here right now; it rides the air, it hangs from streetlamp poles. Hell, she can even taste it, like a pebble of tinfoil clamped between two teeth.
The bar is one that Ken Fen tells her stays open eighteen hours of every day to serve the men who work the three shifts at the electric plant. For ten in the morning, it’s got a sizable crowd inside and two bartenders behind the bar, a waitress working the room.
They sit there for ten minutes. And not a single person acknowledges them. A giant and a black woman in a Southie bar and they may as well be invisible. The waitress passes them four times. Both bartenders catch their eyes. But no one takes their order.
On the waitress’s last pass, Ken Fen once again raises a tentative hand to her and catches her eye. She blows right past him.
He turns back to Calliope and gives her a tired smile and raised eyebrows. “Good thing I brought my own.” He reaches into his suit jacket and comes back with a flask.
Calliope matches his tired smile. “Me too.” She reaches into her bag and comes out with her own flask, a gift from Reginald for their ninth — or was it tenth? — wedding anniversary.
They raise their flasks over the table.
“What should we drink to?”