Small Mercies

3

Jules never comes home that night.

Not so unusual. Not a big deal. (Though it gets a vein pulsing in Mary Pat’s throat and throws her stomach off until lunch.) Jules is seventeen. An adult in the eyes of the world. If she were a boy, she could enlist.

Nonetheless, before she leaves for work, Mary Pat calls the Morello house. Brenda’s father, Eugene, answers with a burrish “Hullo.”

“Hey, Eugene,” she says, “did Jules sleep over? She there?”

Eugene says he’ll go check, comes back on the line a minute later. “Neither of them.” She hears him gulp something she assumes is coffee, light a smoke, and take a deep drag. “They’ll turn up when they need money. Gotta go, Mary Pat.”

“Sure, sure, Gene, thanks.”

“G’bless,” he says before hanging up.

G’bless. They could add it to the list that includes It is what it is and Whatta ya gonna do. Phrases that provide comfort by removing the speaker’s power. Phrases that say it’s all up to someone else, you’re blameless.

Blameless, sure, but powerless too.

She heads to work, arrives a minute before start time, still gets a look from Sister Fran, as if a minute early is as bad as a minute late. Sister Fran looks like she’s thinking of whipping out one of her “God favors” nuggets of wisdom, like “God favors the pious for in the pious lives the wisdom of humility” or “God favors the clean because in cleanliness one better sees the reflection of God.” (She uses that one on the window washers a lot.) But Sister Fran merely snorts as she passes behind Mary Pat and leaves her to start her day.

Mary Pat works as a hospital aide at Meadow Lane Manor in Bay Village, a neighborhood that can’t decide if it’s white, black, or queer, two subway stops from Commonwealth on the edge of downtown. Meadow Lane is an old folks’ home (an “old fucks’ home,” she and her coworkers call it after a few beers) run by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent DePaul. Mary Pat works the morning shift, seven to three-thirty, Sunday through Thursday, with a half hour off for lunch. She’s been doing it for five years. It’s not a bad job once you make peace with the humiliation that comes with cleaning bedpans, giving daily baths to grown adults, and maintaining an air of servility not just to crotchety old white people but a few crotchety old black ones as well. It certainly isn’t the type of job she dreamed of when, as a child, she’d drift off to sleep. But it’s predictable, and she can do it most days with her mind on other things.

She starts her day with the morning wake-ups, and then she and Gert Armstrong and Anne O’Leary deliver the breakfasts. They’re behind the eight ball the whole morning because Dreamy banged in sick and the morning shift is a four-person job. Dreamy is the only black woman on their shift and, to Mary Pat’s recollection, she’s never been sick. Dreamy’s real name is Calliope, but everyone has been calling her Dreamy, she told them all once, since first grade. It fits her — she always has a look in her eyes like she’s someplace else, she has a light sleepy voice, and she moves like a soft summer rain. When she smiles, it breaks ever so slowly across her face.

Everyone likes Dreamy. Even Dottie Lloyd, who hates the blacks with a passion, allows that Dreamy is a “good nigger.” Dottie said to Mary Pat once, “If they all worked as hard as her, were as polite as her? Shit. No one would ever have a problem with them.”

Mary Pat considers herself kind of friends with Dreamy; they’ve spent many a lunch talking about their lives as mothers. But it’s a white-and-black friendship, not the kind where you exchange phone numbers. Mary Pat asks Sister Vi, one of the decent ones, if she knows what’s going on with Dreamy, Dreamy’s never sick, and Sister Vi gets a weird look in her eyes, the kind of look you’d expect to get from Sister Fran. It feels judgy and distant. She says, “You know I can’t discuss another employee, Mary Pat.”

After breakfast, still behind the eight ball, they’re on to bedpans or helping the ones who aren’t quite at the bedpan stage get to the bathroom, which often involves wiping an ass, an indignity Mary Pat finds even less appealing than cleaning the bedpans. If the old folks need no help getting to the bathroom, then they need no help, and she and the other girls (all the aides are women) move on to the morning baths.

On her lunch break, she calls home, but Jules doesn’t answer. She calls the Morellos again, gets Brenda’s mother, Suze, this time. Suze says nope, she ain’t seen either of them but figures they’ll turn up.

“How many times, Mary Pat,” Suze says, “how many times we been through this with these two? And they always turn up.”

“They do,” Mary Pat says, and hangs up.

Back at work, as they’re prepping the trays for the lunch run, Dottie Lloyd mentions a “nigger drug dealer got hisself killed” at Columbia Station, ended up fucking up the morning commute. Why couldn’t they just lift him off the tracks and let the trains through? He ruins people’s lives selling his shit and now he’s fucking up the morning commute? It’s hard to say which sin is more unforgivable.

“Found him on the inbound track,” Dottie says. “Least he could have had the decency to land on the outbound track. Then he would have only pissed off Dorchester and, you know, fuck Dorchester.”

Mary Pat pulls the large aluminum tray of mini — milk cartons from the fridge and places it on the prep table, starts putting the cartons on the hard plastic trays they bring to the rooms. “Who are we talking about now?”

Dottie hands Mary Pat the afternoon edition of the Herald American, and she reads it over the prep table. man hit by subway car. The article goes on to report that Augustus Williamson, twenty, was found dead under the inbound platform of Columbia Station early this morning and that police have confirmed he suffered multiple head traumas.

It doesn’t say anything about the dead black guy being a drug dealer, but it’s a pretty safe assumption, or otherwise why would he be there? Why come into their part of town? She doesn’t go into theirs. She doesn’t know anyone who says they’ll be spending the afternoon on Blue Hill Ave. to shop for clothes or go pick up a record at Skippy White’s. She stays on her side of town, her side of the fucking line, and is it too much to ask that they do the same? Why do they have to antagonize? You go downtown, okay, fine, that’s where they all intermingle, black and white and Puerto Rican. They work together, they bitch about their bosses, lives, the city together. But then they go back to their own neighborhoods and sleep in their own beds until they have to get up in the morning and do it all over again.

Because the truth is they don’t understand one another. It’s not a plan of Mary Pat’s making, nor is it her desire, that they have different tastes in music, in clothing, in the food they put on their tables. But that’s the way it is just the same. They like different cars, different sports, different movies. They don’t even talk the same. The Puerto Ricans barely speak the language, but most of the blacks she knows have grown up here and still it’s like they didn’t. They speak that jive of theirs, which, truth be told, Mary Pat likes, loves the rhythm of it, loves the way they emphasize different words in a sentence than any white people she knows, have a way of punching out through the ends of their stories with big booming laughs. But it doesn’t sound anything like the speech that leaves the mouths of Mary Pat or her friends. So if you don’t speak like us, Mary Pat wants to ask, and you don’t like our music, our clothes, our food, our ways, why come into our neighborhood?

To sell drugs to our kids or steal our cars. That’s the only answer left.

Something about the newspaper article, though, bugs her the rest of the shift. She can’t put a finger on it, but there’s something in there that sets off an alarm. What? What is it? And then it hits her: “What’s Dreamy’s last name?” she asks Gert.

“Calliope,” Gert says.

Mary Pat frowns. “Did you really just say that?”

“What?”

“Calliope’s her real first name,” Anne O’Leary says with a withering sigh.

“So what’s her last name?” Gert says.

“You’re her friend,” Anne says to Mary Pat. “How do you not know?”

“I mean” — Mary Pat can feel her face pinken — “I just know her as Dreamy.”

There’s a quiet that feels not-quite-awkward-but-awkward’s-on-the-way, and it’s broken only when Dottie, of all people, says, “Williamson.”

“What?”

“Dreamy’s last name. It’s Williamson.”

“How the fuck would you know?”

“I’m a beast for the details.”

Mary Pat moves down the prep table until she finds the Herald. She opens it to the article for the other girls, points at the dead drug dealer’s name — Augustus Williamson.

“So?” Gert says.

Gert is dumber than a busload of retards on a bus driven by a retard.

“So,” Mary Pat says, “Dreamy always talked about her son, Auggie.”

It takes the other girls a minute.

“Oh, shit,” Anne O’Leary says.

Dottie says, “That’s why she didn’t come to work.”