“Sal say what time he’ll be in?”
Pete said, “The best he could do was nine-thirty. His car shit the bed so he’s going to have to T it. That’s like two train lines and a bus transfer from here and he said he wasn’t even dressed.”
“Shit.”
Around seven-fifteen, they handled a semirush of folks coming off the night shift—cops, mostly, from the D-9, some nurses from Saint Regina’s, and a few working girls who serviced the illegal after-hours clubs down on the other side of Buckingham Avenue in the Flats and up in Rome Basin. All of them were weary but convivial and wired, too, emitting an aura of intense relief, as if they’d just walked off the same battlefield together, muddy, bloody, but erect and unmaimed.
During a five-minute recess before the early-mass crowd stormed the gates, Jimmy called Drew Pigeon and asked him if he’d seen Katie.
“I think she’s here, yeah,” Drew said.
“Yeah?” Jimmy heard the spike of hope in his voice and only then realized that he’d been more anxious than he’d allowed himself to admit.
“Think so,” Drew said. “Lemme go check.”
“’Preciate it, Drew.”
He listened to Drew’s heavy feet echo away down a hardwood hallway as he cashed two scratch tickets for Old Lady Harmon, trying not to blink away tears from the sharp assault of her old lady perfume. He heard Drew coming back toward the phone and felt a mild flutter in his chest as he handed Old Lady Harmon her fifteen bucks and waved bye to her.
“Jimmy?”
“Here, Drew.”
“Sorry. It was Diane Cestra slept over. She’s in there on the floor of Eve’s bedroom, but no Katie.”
The flutter in Jimmy’s chest stopped hard, as if it had been pinched between tweezers.
“Hey, no problem.”
“Eve said Katie dropped them off round one? Didn’t say where she was going.”
“Okay, man.” Jimmy put a false brightness into his tone. “I’ll track her down.”
“She seeing anyone maybe?”
“Nineteen-year-old girls, Drew? Who could keep a tally?”
“That’s the cold truth,” Drew said with a yawn. “Eve, Jimmy? All the calls she gets from different guys, I’d swear she needs a roster by the phone to keep ’em straight.”
Jimmy forced a chuckle. “Hey, thanks again, Drew.”
“Anytime, Jimmy. Take care.”
Jimmy hung up and looked down at the register keyboard as if it could tell him something. This wasn’t the first time Katie had stayed out all night. Hell, it wasn’t even the tenth. And it wasn’t even the first time she’d blown off work, though in both cases, she usually called. Still, if she’d met a guy with movie-star looks and city-boy charm…Jimmy wasn’t so far removed from nineteen himself that he couldn’t remember what that was like. And while he’d never let Katie think he condoned it, he couldn’t be so hypocritical in his heart as to condemn it.
The bell hanging from a ribbon tacked to the top of the door clanged and Jimmy looked up to see the first group of coiffed blue-hairs from the rosary-bead crowd charge into the store, yapping away about the raw morning, the priest’s diction, the litter in the streets.
Pete stuck his head up from the deli counter and wiped his hands with the towel he’d been using to clean the prep table. He tossed a full box of surgical gloves up onto the counter and then came over behind the second cash register. He leaned in toward Jimmy and said, “Welcome to hell,” and the second group of Holy Rollers followed fast on the heels of the first.
Jimmy hadn’t worked a Sunday morning in nearly two years, and he’d forgotten what a zoo it could turn into. Pete was right. The blue-haired fanatics, who packed the seven o’clock mass at Saint Cecilia’s while normal people slept, took their biblical shopping fury into Jimmy’s store and decimated the pastry and doughnut trays, drained the coffee, stripped the dairy coolers to a shell, and reduced the newspaper stacks by half. They banged into display racks and stepped on the chip bags and plastic sleeves of peanuts that fell to their feet. They shouted out deli orders, Lotto orders, scratch ticket orders, and orders for Pall Malls and Chesterfields with a rabid indiscrimination as to their places in line. Then, as a sea of blue, white, and bald heads bobbed behind them, they dawdled at the counter to ask after Jimmy’s and Pete’s families while they fished for exact change down to the last lint-enfuzzed penny and took prolonged eons to lift their purchases off the counter and move out of the way for the raging clamor behind them.
Jimmy hadn’t seen anything resembling this kind of chaos since the last time he’d attended an Irish wedding with an open bar, and when he finally glanced up at the clock at eight-forty-five as the last of them went out through the door to the street, he could feel the sweat drenching the T-shirt under his sweatshirt, soaking into his skin. He looked at the bomb that had exploded in the middle of his store and then over at Pete, and he felt a sudden flush of kinship and fraternity with him that made him think of the seven-fifteen crew of cops, nurses, and hookers, as if he and Pete had ascended to a new level of friendship just by surviving the eight o’clock Sunday blast of ravenous geriatrics.
Pete tossed him a tired grin. “Slows for about half an hour now. Mind if I step out back and grab a smoke?”
Jimmy laughed, feeling good now and swept by a sudden, odd pride at this little business he’d built into a neighborhood institution. “Fuck, Pete, smoke a whole pack.”
He’d tidied the aisles, restocked dairy, and was replenishing the doughnut and pastry trays when the bell clanged, and he looked over to see Brendan Harris and his little brother, Silent Ray, walk past the counter and head for the small square of aisles where the breads and detergents and cookies and teas were stocked. Jimmy busied himself with the cellophane wraps over the pastries and doughnuts, and wished he hadn’t give Pete the impression he could take a mini-vacation out back and that his ass would get back in here immediately.
He glanced over and noticed Brendan peering above the aisle tops at the cash registers, like he was either planning to stick the place up or hoping for a glimpse of someone. For one irrational second, Jimmy wondered if he’d have to fire Pete for dealing out of the store. But then he checked himself, remembered that Pete had looked him straight in the eyes and sworn he’d never jeopardize Jimmy’s life’s work by dealing pot in his place of business. Jimmy had known he was telling the truth because unless you were the Grand Wizard of All Liars, it was nearly impossible to lie to Jimmy when he looked in your eyes after asking you a direct question; he knew every tic and tell and eye movement, no matter how minor, that could give you away. Something he’d learned by watching his father make him drunken promises he never kept—you saw it enough, you recognized the animal every time it chose to resurface. So Jimmy remembered Pete looking him dead in the eyes and swearing he’d never deal out of this place, and Jimmy knew it was true.
So then who was Brendan looking for? Could he be stupid enough to be considering a rip-off? Jimmy had known Brendan’s father, Just Ray Harris, so he knew a sizable chunk of dumb ran in the genes, but no one was so dumb as to try to rob a store on the East Bucky Flats/Point line with his thirteen-year-old mute brother in tow. Plus, if anyone got some brains in the family, Jimmy would begrudgingly admit it was Brendan. A shy kid, but good-looking as hell, and Jimmy had long ago learned the difference between someone who was quiet because he didn’t know the meanings of many words and someone who just stayed inside himself, watching, listening, taking it all in. Brendan had that quality; you sensed he understood people a little too well, and that the knowledge made him nervous.
He turned toward Jimmy and their eyes met, and the kid gave Jimmy a nervous, friendly smile, putting too much into it, as if he were overcompensating because there were other things on his mind.
Jimmy said, “Help you, Brendan?”
“Uh, no, Mr. Marcus, just picking up some, ah, some of that Irish tea my mom likes.”
“Barry’s?”
“That’s it, y
eah.”
“Next aisle over.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
Jimmy went back up behind the registers just as Pete came back in, carrying that stale reek of a hastily puffed cigarette all over him.
“What time’s Sal getting here again?” Jimmy said.
“Any time now, should be.” Pete leaned back against the sliding cigarette rack below the scratch ticket rolls and sighed. “He’s slow, Jimmy.”
“Sal?” Jimmy watched Brendan and Silent Ray communicate in sign language, standing in the middle of the center aisle, Brendan clutching a box of Barry’s under his arm. “He’s in his late seventies, man.”
“I know why he’s slow,” Pete said. “I’m just saying. That was me and him at eight o’clock, ’stead of me and you, Jim? Man, we’d still be in the weeds.”
“Which is why I put him on slow shifts. Anyway, it wasn’t supposed to be me and you or you and Sal on this morning. It was supposed to be you and Katie.”
Brendan and Silent Ray had reached the counter and Jimmy saw something catch in Brendan’s face when he said his daughter’s name.
Pete came off the cigarette rack and said, “That it, Brendan?”
“I…I…I…” Brendan stammered, then looked at his little brother. “Ahm, I think so. Let me check with Ray.”
The hands went flying again, the two of them going so fast it would have been hard for Jimmy to keep up even if they were making sounds. Silent Ray’s face, though, was as stone dead as his hands were electric and alive. He’d always been an eerie little kid, in Jimmy’s opinion, more like the mother than the father, a blankness living in his face like an act of defiance. He’d mentioned it to Annabeth once and she’d accused him of being insensitive to the handicapped, but Jimmy didn’t think that was it—something lived in Ray’s dead face and silent mouth that you just wanted to beat out with a hammer.
They finished flinging their hands back and forth and Brendan bent over the candy rack and came back with a Coleman Chew-Chew bar, making Jimmy think about his father again, the stench of him that year he’d worked the candy plant.
“And a Globe, too,” Brendan said.
“Sure thing, kid,” Pete said, and rang it up.
“So’s, ah, I thought Katie worked Sundays.” Brendan handed Pete a ten-spot.
Pete raised his eyebrows as he punched the cash key and the door popped open against his belly. “You sweet on my man’s daughter, Brendan?”
Brendan wouldn’t look at Jimmy. “No, no, no.” He laughed, and it died as soon as it left his mouth. “I was just wondering, you know, because usually I see her here.”
“Her little sister’s having her First Communion today,” Jimmy said.
“Oh, Nadine?” Brendan looked at Jimmy, eyes too wide, smile too big.
“Nadine,” Jimmy said, curious as to how the name had come to Brendan so fast. “Yeah.”
“Well, tell her congrats from me and Ray.”
“Sure, Brendan.”
Brendan dropped his gaze to the counter and nodded several times as Pete bagged up the tea and candy bar. “So, yeah, okay, good seeing you guys. Come on, Ray.”
Ray hadn’t been looking at his brother when he spoke, but he moved anyway, and Jimmy remembered once again the thing that people usually forgot about Ray: he wasn’t deaf, just mute, few people around the neighborhood or otherwise, Jimmy was sure, having encountered one like that before.
“Hey, Jimmy,” Pete said when the brothers had gone, “I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“Why you hate that kid so bad?”
Jimmy shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s hate, man. It’s just…Come on, you don’t find that mute little fucker just a little spooky?”
“Oh, him?” Pete said. “Yeah. He’s a weird little shit, always staring like he sees something in your face he wants to pluck out. You know? But I wasn’t talking about him. I was talking about Brendan. I mean, the kid seems nice enough. Shy but decent, you know? You notice how he uses sign language with his brother even though he don’t have to? Kinda like he just wants the kid to feel he ain’t alone. It’s nice. But, Jimmy, man, you look at him like you’re two steps from slicing off his nose, man, feeding it to him.”
“No.”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Straight up.”
Jimmy looked out over the Lotto machine, past the dusty window onto Buckingham Avenue lying gray and damp under the morning sky. He felt Brendan Harris’s shy goddamned smile in his blood, itching him.
“Jimmy? I was just playing with you. I didn’t mean nothing by—”
“Here comes Sal,” Jimmy said, and kept his eyes on the window, his head turned away from Pete as he watched the old man shuffle across the avenue toward them. “About fucking time, too.”
6
BECAUSE IT’S BROKEN
SEAN DEVINE’S SUNDAY—his first day back to work after a week’s suspension—started when he was yanked from a dream, ripped out of it by the beep of an alarm clock followed by the seizure-realization, like a baby popping from the womb, that he’d never be allowed to go back in. He couldn’t remember much of the specifics—just a few details, unconnected—and he had a sense that there hadn’t been much of a narrative flow in the first place. Still, the raw texture of it had sunk like razor points into the back of his skull, left him feeling skittish all morning.
His wife, Lauren, had been in it, and he could still smell her flesh. She’d had messy hair the color of wet sand, darker and longer than in life, and wore a damp white bathing suit. She was very tan and a light dusting of sand had speckled her bare ankles and the tops of her feet. She’d smelled of the sea and the sun, and she’d sat in Sean’s lap and kissed his nose, tickled his throat with long fingers. They were on the deck of a beach house, and Sean could hear the surf but couldn’t see any ocean. Where the ocean should have been was a blank TV screen the width of a football field. When he looked in the center, Sean could only make out his own reflection, not Lauren’s, as if he sat there holding air.
But it was flesh in his hands, warm flesh.
Next thing he remembered, he stood on the roof of the house, Lauren’s flesh replaced by a smooth metal weather vane. He gripped it, and below him, at the base of the house, a huge hole yawned up at him, an upended sailboat beached at the bottom. Then he was naked on the bed with a woman he’d never seen before, feeling her, sensing in some dream logic that Lauren was in another room of the house, watching them on video, and a seagull crashed through the window, glass spitting onto the bed like ice cubes, and Sean, fully clothed again, stood over it.
The seagull gasped. The seagull said, “My neck hurts,” and Sean woke up before he could say, “That’s because it’s broken.”
He woke up with the dream draining thickly from the back of his brainpan, the lint and fuzz of it clinging to the undersides of his eyelids and the upper layer of his tongue. He kept his eyes closed as the alarm clock kept beeping, hoping that it was merely a new dream, that he was still sleeping, that the beeping only beeped in his mind.
Eventually, he opened his eyes, the feel of the unknown woman’s hard body and the smell of the sea in Lauren’s flesh still clinging to his brain tissue, and he realized it wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t a movie, it wasn’t a sad, sad song.
It was these sheets, this bedroom, and this bed. It was the empty beer can on his windowsill, and this sun in his eyes and that alarm clock beep-beep-beeping on his bedside table. It was the faucet, dripping, he kept forgetting to fix. His life, all his.
He shut off the alarm, but didn’t get out of bed right away. He didn’t want to lift his head just yet because he didn’t want to know if he had a hangover. If he had a hangover, the first day back to work would seem twice as long, and the first day back after a suspension, with all the shit he’d have to eat and all the jokes he’d have to hear at his expense, was going to seem pretty damn long in the first place.
He lay there and heard the beeping
from the street, the beeping from the cokeheads next door who kept their TV loud from Letterman through Sesame Street, the beep of his ceiling fan, microwave, and smoke detectors, and the humming beep of the fridge. It beeped on the computers at work. It beeped on cell phones and PalmPilots and beeped from the kitchen and living room and beeped a constant beep-beep-beep on the street below and down at the station house and in the tenements of Faneuil Heights and the East Bucky Flats.
Everything beeped these days. Everything was fast and fluid and built to move. Everyone was getting along in this world, moving with it, growing up.
When the fuck did that start happening?
That’s all he wanted to know, really. When had the pace picked up, left him staring at everyone’s backs?
He closed his eyes.
When Lauren left.
That’s when.
BRENDAN HARRIS LOOKED at the phone and willed it to ring. He looked at his watch. Two hours late. Not exactly a surprise, since time and Katie were never on what you’d call a first-name basis, but man, today of all days. Brendan just wanted to go. And where was she, if she wasn’t at work? The plan had been that she’d call Brendan during her shift at Cottage Market, go to her half sister’s First Communion, and then meet him afterward. But she hadn’t gone into work. And she hadn’t called.
He couldn’t call her. That had been one of the big downsides of their being together ever since the first night they’d hooked up. Katie was usually one of three places—at Bobby O’Donnell’s place in the early days of her and Brendan’s relationship, in the apartment she’d grown up in on Buckingham Avenue with her father, stepmother, and two half sisters, or in the apartment above where a shitload of her crazy uncles lived, two of whom, Nick and Val, were legends of psychosis and really, really bad impulse control. And then there was her father, Jimmy Marcus, who hated Brendan deeply and for no logical reason that either Brendan or Katie could figure out. Still, Katie had been clear about it—over the years her father had made it his mandate: stay away from the Harrises; you ever bring one home, I disown you.
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