Small Mercies

by Dennis Lehane

arrears,

She’s twelve, she’s twenty-one, she’s thirty-three, she’s all the ages at the same time. But she isn’t aging. Not in her heart. Not in her mind’s eye.

Brian has eyes the color of Windex. They sparkle and glint at her with an air of mild presumption, like he knows the things she thinks she keeps hidden. And those things amuse him.

Every inch of her is soft and feminine and waiting on a broken heart the way miners wait on black lung—she just knows it’s coming.

“You’re either a fighter or a runner. And runners always run out of road.”

“You got some. You might not have Boston Gas bill money, but you got Robell’s money.” “No,” Mary Pat says. “I do not.” “I’m gonna go to the spearchucker school looking poorer than them?”

What a selfish child. We grew up poor and i never acted that way with my parents and their money! I had hamey downs or cast offs from friends

Finast,

When they break the clutch, she wipes under her daughter’s eyes with her thumb. She tells her it’s okay. She tells her someday it will make sense. Even though she’s waiting for that day herself. Even though she suspects everyone on God’s green earth is.

And then Jules is gone. Lost to the night.

people who treat ten-ton burdens like they weigh the same as a golf ball, people who go to work day in, day out, and give their ungrateful-prick bosses ten hours of work every single eight-hour day.

True

They’re poor because there’s a limited amount of good luck in this world, and they’ve never been given any.

If it doesn’t fall from the sky and land on you, doesn’t find you when it wakes up every morning and goes looking for someone to attach itself to, there isn’t a damn thing you can do. There are way more people in the world than there is luck, so you’re either in the right place at the right time at the very second luck shows up, for once and nevermore. Or you aren’t. In which case . . . Shit happens. It is what it is. Whatta ya gonna do.

They keep us fighting among ourselves like dogs for table scraps so we won’t catch them making off with the feast.

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.

cleaning bedpans, giving daily baths to grown adults,

Must be a resident aid cuz she has no certification

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

Wow

I do not know why the Good Lord would ask something so painful of a fine woman such as yourself, but I know He makes our hearts so big so our dead can live in them.

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.

Since birth, Ken Fen had no choice but to buy into the violence. He just never bought into the hate.

I spent my whole life dying. Whatever time I got left, I’m living it. I’m sick of drowning.”

“I might meet a guy who’s better for me, maybe, but I’ll never meet a better guy.”

They hold each other’s gaze and time falls away, and the girls they were once could maybe, just maybe, become the angels on the shoulders of the women they are now.

Coyne’s face is unreadable. “Why would you say that?”

Why would she talk to the cops?!

“Shitty things,” he says as he reaches for a fresh cigarette from his pack, “happen to shitty neighbors.”

Foreshadowing

And a question that’s been nagging at Mary Pat for a while—maybe her whole life, who knows?—finds her tongue. “It’s your truth too, though, ain’t it?”

Change, for those who don’t have a say in it, feels like a pretty word for death. Death to what you want, death to whatever plans you’d been making, death to the life you’ve always known.

They’re the friendliest people he’s ever met. Until they aren’t. At which point they’ll run over their own grandmothers to ram your fucking skull through a brick wall. He has no idea where it all comes from—the loyalty and the rage, the brotherhood and the suspicion, the benevolence and the hate. But he suspects it has something to do with the need for a life to have meaning. Bobby is a child of the ’40s and ’50s. When, as he recalls, you knew who you were. Without question.

“We’re the people who solve problems. That’s why we’re here.” His taxi girl, Cai, said, “People should be left to themselves.”

Not for the first time in his life—or even the eightieth—Bobby hates humanity. Wonders if God’s great unforgivable crime was creating us in the first place.

esoteric

If four black kids had chased a white kid into the path of a train, they’d be facing life. If they entered a plea, the best offer would be a minimum of twenty years hard time. But the kids who chased Auggie Williamson into the path of a train won’t, Bobby knows, face more than five years. If that. And sometimes that disparity wears him the fuck out.

defoliated

Two of them were dead because they’d tried to kill Corporal Michael “Bobby” Coyne of Dorchester, Massachusetts. But he knew they were really dead because they were in the way. Of profit. Of philosophy. Of a worldview that said rules apply only to the people who aren’t in charge of making them.

Call them gooks, call them niggers, call them kikes, micks, spics, wops, or frogs, call them whatever you want as long as you call them something—anything—that removes one layer of human being from their bodies when you think of them. That’s the goal. If you can do that, you can get kids to cross oceans to kill other kids, or you can get them to stay right here at home and do the same thing.

Ronald Collins,

Rum

The angry-looking guy in the business suit says with precise enunciation, “I am a heroin addict because God, if not dead, is certainly on sabbatical.”

He glances sideways once, catches her glancing sideways right back at him with a secretive smile, and he considers the possibility that maybe the opposite of hate is not love. It’s hope. Because hate takes years to build, but hope can come sliding around the corner when you’re not even looking.

Jules. Jules. Why’d you leave me? Where’d you go? Has the pain stopped, baby? Is your world warm? Will you wait for me to find you there? Please wait.

Why is everything so funny tonight? Then it hits him: Because—for the moment, anyway—I’ve got someone in my life. Makes everything a little brighter.

colitas

sinsemilla.

“Released on one’s own recognizance.”

“Arrivederci,”

“Vaya con dios,”

she leaned against the Jefferson Building, aware that she was watching suicide. Might take months, might take weeks (it took somewhere in between), but it was premeditated murder of the self nonetheless.

This is one of the moments she’ll look back on and wonder how it was she managed not to kill him.

The mother is built for battle. The daughter, on the other hand, seems, even in death, to have arrived from a fairy tale.

We’re not built for princesses down here, Bobby thinks.

“My life,” she says, “was my daughter. They took my life when they took hers. I’m not a person anymore, Bobby. I’m a testament.” “What?” “That’s what ghosts are—they’re testaments to what never should have happened and must be fixed before their spirits leave this world.”

“No matter what we claim in public, in private we all know that the only law and the only god is money. If you have enough of it, you don’t have to suffer consequences and you don’t have to suffer for your ideals, you just foist them on someone else and feel good about the nobility of your intentions.”