My sincerest condolences,
Mary Pat sits at the kitchen table staring at the letter until the words blur. This woman wrote to her as if she were a friend. She signed her last name, which Mary Pat couldn’t even recall this afternoon. She called Mary Pat a fine woman and spoke to a friendship that Mary Pat is hard pressed to grasp. Yes, she’s friendly with Dreamy, but friendship is something else entirely. White broads from Southie aren’t friends with black women from Mattapan. The world doesn’t work that way.
For a minute or so, Mary Pat looks for a pen and paper to write a note of condolence to Dreamy, but she can find only a pen and some scrap paper. She resolves to find a proper sympathy card tomorrow and puts the pen back in the drawer.
She takes a beer, her pack of Slims, and an ashtray into the living room and turns on the TV, comes right in on the news and right in on the story about Auggie Williamson. Investigators believe he was fatally struck by the train between twelve and one a.m., and the impact threw his body under the platform. The conductor of the train never felt the impact. Trains raced by the body all last night until they stopped running, and a few went past it this morning before one conductor noticed the corpse in the crevice under the platform. Police won’t confirm rumors that drugs were found on his person, nor will they explain how he came to be on the platform last night or why/if he’d jumped or been pushed into the path of the train.
They put a picture of him up on the screen and she can see Dreamy in his eyes, which were a brown so soft it’s almost gold, and in his chin and lips. He looks so young. But the reporter announces that he graduated high school two years ago and was working in the management trainee program at Zayre.
High school graduate? Management trainee program? Do drug dealers enter management trainee programs?
But, oh, she thinks as she looks through the boob tube into his eyes, you’re just a baby. Her mother used to say that from the time a child took his first steps, every step after took him farther and farther away from his mother. Mary Pat looks at the photograph of Dreamy’s son in the last moment before it’s wiped off the screen, and she imagines her own child’s picture showing up on the same newscast, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next night.
Where the fuck is she?
She turns off the TV. She calls Rum’s place, gets his mother. No love is lost between her and Mary Pat, so the conversation is brief: “No, Ronald isn’t here, he’s at work up the Purity Supreme until ten. No, I haven’t seen Jules in, like, a week, maybe more. Anything else?”
Mary Pat hangs up.
She sits there. And sits there. She has no idea if it’s for an hour or a minute.
Before she knows she’s doing it, she swipes her smokes and her keys from the tray by the recliner and leaves the unit. She goes around the back of her building and then follows the path until she reaches her sister’s door in Franklin. Big Peg has a daughter the same age as Jules; the girls aren’t terribly close, but they do like to get high together. Almost the same thing could be said about Mary Pat and Big Peg — they’re not terribly close, but it never kept them from drinking their weight together if they happened to cross paths.
Mary Pat, not much for travel, has still managed to see parts of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine in her life. Not Big Peg. Peg married Terry “Terror Town” McAuliffe two days after senior prom. They started dating freshman year at Southie High, and neither of them has an ambition known to anyone beyond the fact that they never want to leave Southie. It’s a big day if they make it to Dorchester, and Dorchester is only six blocks away. And if the world finds their worldview narrow, well, Big Peg and Terror Town don’t give a fuck about the world, they only give a fuck about Southie. They raised seven kids who took their parents’ pride in their neighborhood like gospel from Christ (if Christ had been raised in Commonwealth and was prone, on general principle, to pounding the shit out of anyone who wasn’t). Depending on their ages, those kids — Terry Junior, Little Peg, Freddy, JJ, Ellen, Paudric, and Lefty (who was given the birth name of Lawrence but has never been called it a day in his life) — rule the corners, the project stoops, and the playground sand pits with a pride so bright and unyielding it can’t help but turn violent when even marginally challenged. As a project rat herself, Mary Pat knows all too well what happens when the suspicion that you aren’t good enough gets desperately rebuilt into the conviction that the rest of the world is wrong about you. And if they’re wrong about you, then they’re probably wrong about everything else.
Big Peg opens the screen door in a faded housedress, a beer and a lit cigarette in the same hand. “You all right?” she asks her sister with suspicious eyes.
“I’m looking for Jules.”
Big Peg pushes the door open wider. “Come in, come in.”
Mary Pat enters and they stand there just inside the door, these two sisters who were never close. Peg’s unit is a three-bedroom that currently sleeps nine people, the shotgun corridor running from the front door to the kitchen in back, the rooms off the corridor. The noise of the place is, as always, several decibels past the point where most human beings could hear themselves think.
“Oh my God, you so wore these pants.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did, I can smell your farty ass in them.”
“Fuck you.”
“I will hit you with a baseball bat.”
“No, you won’t. You can’t find one.”
“Freddy has one.”
“Mom, stop her!”
Jane Jo, aka JJ, comes bolting from one of the rooms and barges across the hall into another. Her little sister, Ellen, comes flying after her, both of them shrieking. And then the room they enter seems to explode. Things get upended in there, toppled, the walls give off dull thuds.
“The fuck you doing in my room?”
“I need your bat.”
“What bat? Get out of my room.”
“Gimme the bat.”
“I’ll hit you in the fucking head with the fucking bat.”
“Just help me find the bat.”
“Why do you want the bat?”
“To hit Ellen with it.”
There’s a pause and then:
“Cool.”
Ellen starts wailing.
Big Peg leads Mary Pat to the kitchen, closes the door. Big Peg says, “When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Last night. Right around this time.”
Big Peg snorts. “I’ve lost Terror to two-week benders. He always turns up.”
He/she/they always turn up. If Mary Pat hears that one more time tonight, she’s going to stove someone’s fucking head in with her bare fist.
“Jules isn’t Terry,” Mary Pat says. “She’s Jules. She’s seventeen.”
“Little Peg!” Big Peg screams without warning, and twenty seconds later, her eldest daughter, a girl who’s always managed to be twitchy and listless at the same time, comes through the doorway, going, “What’s up?”