Small Mercies

by Dennis Lehane

“Good morning.” Jules shoots her a smile that manages to be bright as the sun and cold as the moon. “I’m going to need to shower, Ma.”

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

While her lips say, “That’s quick thinking,” her head says, I pray you don’t breed. “But, yeah, I don’t like colors in my milk.” He arches his eyebrows as if he just said something wise. “Not. For. Me.” She shoots him a tight smile. And if you do breed, please don’t breed with my daughter.

For a kid from Southie, he speaks like some rich people she’s run into over the years—like his words and God’s come from the same well, while your words come from a place off the map that no one can hear or see.

“People in Dover,” she says. “In Wellesley and Newton and Lincoln—their kids get to hide in college and grad school and have doctors who say they got fucking tinnitus or fallen arches or bone spurs or whatever other bullshit they can come up with.

Sister Loretta used to say that even if hell was not the firepit with the horned demons and the pitchforks that the medievalists supposed, it was, make no mistake, a void. It was an eternal separation from love. What love? God’s love. Anyone’s love. All love.

She stands in the doorway a long time, her lower lip quivering. “Well, I raised her, didn’t I?” she says. “So I guess that’s my sin.” She lets herself out.

Mary Pat, moving along the fringe of the crowd on the far side of the street, catches herself thinking that a woman whose husband kills people for a living might want to lay off the God talk.