Eddie Joyce - Small Mercies

An accident on the West Shore Expressway. Another bias attack down in Port Richmond. A kid from Prince’s Bay wounded in Afghanistan. When this happens, which isn’t often, she stops her bustling and listens.

On this morning, there’s nothing happening. The borough is silent.

She’s in the kitchen now, inspecting the fridge. It always seems emptier than it should be, but whenever she fills it, she ends up throwing away half the food. They don’t have three ravenous teenage boys eating around the clock anymore. The fridge is like the house: emptier than it used to be. Nothing can change that.

She looks into the cupboard to make sure she has Alyssa and little Bobby’s favorite cereals. She’s holding a box of Honey Nut Cheerios when a report catches her attention: a home invasion the night before, in someplace called Moriches out on Long Island. Two men broke into the home of an elderly couple. The man was a World War II veteran, eighty-three years old. They beat him senseless. He’s in a coma, but they interview his wife, whose fear is palpable, can be felt through the airwaves. One man has been apprehended, but the other is on the loose.

Gail hopes a cop — an angry, hungover cop — finds him in a cold, low place, shoots him in the stomach, and leaves him to rot under a pile of wet leaves. She can see the cop plain as day, walking silently, his gun drawn, chilled breath spilling out before him. A spike in the back of his head from too much whiskey the night before. Anger for this and for something else. A score that was never settled. Chance to make things right. The assailant unaware, some low-life junkie starting to come down. The cop’s almost there.

Good Christ, where do these thoughts come from?

Moriches. She’s never been there, never even heard of it. But now it has a feel, now she will remember it. Moriches, where elderly World War II veterans are beaten to snot and renegade cops administer street justice.

She likes the woman, the wife of the veteran. Her voice, her manner: they belong to a different time. Gail tries to focus on her. A pity what happened. How scared she must be. Moriches. When Tina gets here, she’ll ask her to look it up on the computer, point out where it is. She wants to know where it is, to see it placed on a map.

Gail hasn’t been to most places she hears of on the radio, but each summons a feeling. She likes some names: Lynbrook, Mamaroneck, Dobbs Ferry. She doesn’t like others: Sayville, Passaic, Scarsdale. She was shocked when Michael told her that Scarsdale was a well-heeled town. The name sounded tough, like a run-down mining town. A scar in the earth, scars on the faces. She never would have guessed.

* * *

When there’s nothing left to do, when nothing else can be tidied or straightened, she sits at the table and waits for Tina and the kids. She spreads the Advance across the table and sifts through it. This is more intimate than the radio, deserves more focus. A community of millions siphoned down to a few hundred thousand.

Between articles, she looks out the large bay window at the front of the kitchen. The morning is gray, the sun up but stuck behind a fleet of low-lying clouds. The other houses on the block are dark. The street is still. The whole neighborhood sleeping off the week.

The block hasn’t changed much in the forty years they’ve called it home. Fewer trees. Less open space. A handful of new houses that don’t quite fit in. Otherwise, Wirra Lane has largely escaped the overdevelopment that has plagued the rest of the Island.

A blank moment in the mind. Her thoughts drift to Franky. She hopes he’s holding down his latest job, hopes he’s still on the wagon. She hasn’t seen him in a few weeks. Hasn’t heard from him in a few weeks, come to think of it. Maybe he’s met someone. God, she hopes he’s met someone. The right girl would make him tow the line. The right girl would make him straighten out his act.

Of course, the right girl would be too smart to get involved with him at all.

It wasn’t always that way. There was a time, not so long ago, when Franky was half a lady’s man. Handsome in a roguish way. A glint of trouble in his eyes, sure, but charming. She was sitting at this table one morning, dawn coming on, when a car pulled up. Franky and Bobby were both living at home, taking summer classes at CSI and wearing out their elbows at every bar on Forest Avenue. They’d been out the night before. Gail had heard them come in, after four, stumbling down the hallway into their bedrooms.

At least, she thought she’d heard them — the two of them — but it wasn’t like she’d done a bed check. She couldn’t fall back to sleep, so after an hour of trying, she wandered downstairs to get a start on the day. And here was a car, pulling to a stop quietly, and there was Franky in the passenger seat, leaning over to make out with the girl who was driving. He got out of the car and closed the door softly, was walking up the path to the front steps when the girl — black hair in a ponytail, toned, long legs in jean shorts — got out of the car and chased him down, holding a slip of paper. He turned back, gave her another long kiss, and tucked the paper into his pocket. He waved as she drove off, then walked into the house, happy and oblivious, looking like a man who’d just gotten laid, which was probably the case. He didn’t notice Gail sitting in the dark.

“Was that Kerry Cole?” she asked, hoping to startle him. Gail recognized her from the Advance . She’d been a soccer star on the Island a few years back, had gotten a full ride to Notre Dame, must have been home for the summer. He sat down across from Gail, a smirk on his face.

“T’was, Mother, t’was,” he said, in a fake Irish accent. “A fine girl.”

He retrieved the slip of paper from his pocket, spread it on the table. Gail saw the name Kerry, a telephone number below it. Bobby would have been embarrassed and Peter annoyed, but Franky was nonplussed. Proud, if anything. And Gail felt a strange pride too. She could see a girl like Kerry Cole falling for Peter. But Franky? Who was taking his sweet time getting through community college? Whose great ambition was tomorrow night? Whose ideal reading was two pages of box scores in the Post ?

Yet there she was, chasing Franky down to hand over her number. Making out with him in the front yard like it was her last day on earth. As a mother to three boys — three men now — Gail had gotten used to a certain amount of locker room banter over the years. Still, it was an odd thing to be happy that your son had maybe screwed above his station. But she was happy. And proud.

“Slumming for the summer?” she asked, regretting it immediately. She meant it in a teasing way, but with Franky, she had a way of being cruel without always intending to. He didn’t flinch though.

“What can I say, Mother? There’s no accounting for taste.”

He smiled. He wasn’t drunk, wasn’t even tipsy. He was glowing with the unlikelihood of his conquest. He was past the age where Gail could give him a talk about precautions, about being careful. And God help her, she could think of worse things than Franky knocking up a sweet, smart girl like Kerry Cole.

“You should call her, Francis,” she said, trying not to sound too insistent.

“I’m starving,” he responded.

She fried up some bacon and scrambled some eggs, sat there with him while he ate it. The smirk on his face creased into a smile.

“Fine girl. My ass.”

He had to spit the eggs out into a napkin because he was laughing so hard. She said it to him for the next few weeks, their own private joke. He could be so easy sometimes. He had his moments.

He never called, despite Gail’s nudges. Gail didn’t see Kerry Cole again until her wedding was announced in the Advance some years later. By that point, Gail had endured a host of mornings with Franky: mornings where he needed to be helped out of a cab, mornings where she found him passed out on the front lawn, mornings when he didn’t come home at all, and, of course, the morning when he called and told them in a slurred ramble that he’d been arrested.