“Ma.”
“Now I got to put you out.” She pushed herself up from the chair, and in her housecoat nearly flew to the sink. She clung to it as though hands from the floor had her by the ankles, pulling her down. “My baby boy. I should of dragged you to church with me. Should of dragged you. You’re leaving me all alone in the world!”
“Ma.” He just couldn’t do this now. “Ma, sit down.”
“Where you been all this time, Eddie? Where?”
“Working, Ma.” He hit his chest where the letters MBTA, for Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, were stitched over the pocket. Milky had been fired five months before, but still left the house most mornings dressed for work. For her sake.
“Two days straight, and no call?”
“Work is work, Ma.”
“How could you bring this evil down upon me? You’re all I got, Eddie! Daddy’s in heaven and Jimmy’s in the ground and you... you...”
She felt her way back into the chair, a handkerchief clutched in her hand over her heart. She looked gray. She wasn’t breathing right.
“Ma. Ma, listen to me. Where is it? Tell me what you did.”
“How you could bring it in this house after your only brother...”
“Ma, where’d you put it?”
“I didn’t touch it!” Her arm fell dead on the table. “I don’t touch that stuff. I know better.”
“Ma.” Milky grabbed a seat, pulled it near. Her voice was like raccoon claws scraping at the insides of his eyes. He ran his hand through his hair and it came back wet with scalp sweat. He wasn’t moving out. He wasn’t going nowhere except down the hallway to his room to cook a foil and do up. “Listen to me, Ma.”
“Both my boys, these drugs...”
“Ma, shut up!”
He wasn’t yelling at her. He was yelling at himself.
“Look,” he said. “This is something I’m not supposed to tell. Not to anyone. Not even my own mother. No one, you understand?”
He got right up again and paced in the kitchen. His angst was real. This was a leap off a cliff. A Hail Mary pass. The kind of lie that had no end, but he knew he had to follow through anyway, and hope for some miracle. He was too dopesick to argue with her. He was sweating like an egg left out on the counter.
“Ma, it’s this way, okay? I’m a cop. Not really a cop — not a full cop. Not yet. But I’m on that track. I’m working for them now, you see? Undercover. And this — this breaks every rule in the book, me telling you here. If only you hadn’t gone into my room...”
He spun around, gripped a handful of his own hair. He wished he could rip it out. Focus the pain on his flesh, instead of underneath where it wriggled through him like bloodsucking worms.
“But Eddie, how could—”
“I worked it out with them. They know Dad, of course — they remember him, they all still talk about him. And they approached me about maybe doing this... and I tell them, I says, ‘I got some priors, some trouble in my youth, maybe a little even beyond juvie.’ And they says, ‘That little stuff we can work out. If you can show and demonstrate who you are now. Make up for those mistakes, balance the books. If so, then clean slate.’ ”
She said, “They talked about Dad?”
“I told them up-front, I says, ‘I don’t want to coast. Don’t bring me in on the old man’s reputation alone.’ Because who could live up to that anyway? But they says, ‘Milky’ — or, actually, it’s ‘Eddie’ they call me. ‘Eddie, you got to be your own man. We know that. There’s room for you with us if you work hard now. But it’s dangerous, this thing. This is lion training without no whip. You’ll be in that ring all alone.’ ”
He could see emotion tugging at her face. Like waves washing seaweed forward and backward. She wanted to believe him. To commit to this. To crash onto the sandy beach of good news.
He felt the crinkle of the Summons to Appear still in his back pocket, from just having been cut loose of the Suffolk County Jail. “Here,” he said, taking out the pink form, folding it so that she could see only the official seal and the lettering above his typed name. “See that? City of Boston, right there. Boston Police Department.” He put it away again before she could reach for it. “I’m breaking rules left and right here, Ma. I’m jeopardizing my place with them as it is, just telling you this. Risking everything. So you gotta trust me now. Please. And for Christ’s sake, stay outta my stuff from here on in.”
“Eddie... I just don’t know. I remember Jimmy, all his lies.”
“That’s just it, Ma. It’s because of Jimmy that I went to them. That’s what this thing is. Bringing those others to justice.”
“Who?”
“I can’t say. I can’t tell you nothing more, Ma, we won’t discuss these things. In fact, we should never talk about any of this again. Ever. Let it be an understanding.”
“The department, Eddie? For real?”
“I’m trying not to count my chickens too hard. Things haven’t panned out for me before. But they been good to me so far, and I’m trying to be good to them. Only now I got the added stress of worrying about you knowing.”
“No, Eddie.”
“This is a long-term project I’m on, understand. Nothing’s going to break overnight. They tell me these things take months, maybe years. But I’ll do what they say, however long it takes. This is my shot here, and I know it.”
These last words he felt in his chest. Felt them like they were the truth.
Ma was sitting back now, breathing easier. The strange look in her unfocused eyes, faraway yet so close: It was pride. It was love.
“Come here,” she said.
He did. He went and leaned down, and she placed her warm and trembling palms on his clammy cheeks. Her pale lips quivered as she stared at him, drinking him in like medicine. This clinch was as close as they ever got. The Milk family version of a hug and a kiss.
“My boy,” she said.
Milky hated himself then, and loved himself at the same time. A terrible sort of dreadful euphoria, as though he had shot his own mother up with smack. Tied her off and injected her himself and watched her eyes go liquid, and let her thank him for it, for delivering her from suffering. Delivering her from pain. Turned out both of them had needed to get high.
“You’re not going to tell no one,” he said.
“No, no.”
“Not until I let you know the time is right.”
“Then I shout it from the back porch. I dance up Broadway in heeled shoes.”
He had her soaring. Pipe dreams worked for everybody. He stood straight again, his mother sitting back.
“I thought I’d lost you, Eddie. Thought my best boy was gone from me forever.”
Milky squeezed her hand and stole a glance down the narrow hallway toward his room, needing to do up so badly right now.
The walk was an informal thing that, over time, had become consecrated. All the old war widows (staying married in Southie, that was a war) met at the rink down on the Point and walked Day Boulevard to Castle Island, around and around the old fort there at the edge of the harbor. Two shifts, a late-morning walk and a late-afternoon walk. A gang of gray ladies in white Reeboks and duck-brimmed visors, walking laps around the belly-ringed teenagers promenading their baby buggies.
That morning, there were only two of them. There was Rita and, wasn’t it just her luck, Patty Milk. Patty had stopped walking for a long time after her youngest boy Jimmy died up on their roof. Now she tagged along every once in a while, rarely with anything to say. Always a step or two behind the pack, just walking and looking out to sea.