Eddie Joyce - Small Mercies

Michael looks confused.

“Maria. My mother?”

“Yes.”

“Gail, you’re not making any sense.”

“I know. It doesn’t matter. I can’t explain it.”

She starts going through the kitchen drawers. She finds the paring knife, still chipped, the blade long gone dull. Michael sighs, a long, pointed gesture of exasperation.

“Look, are we going to church or not?”

“No.”

He tries to suppress a smile. He’s still a child in this way. Let him play hooky from church. Give him ice cream, beer, pizza, two seconds of naked tits in a movie.

“I’m going to change then.”

“Fine.”

She puts the knife in her bag, slips on a jacket and sneakers, and dashes out to the car. The air is cold, still dewy; another gray day, makes her long for the blazing crispness of early autumn. She could call, but she wants to do this in person. Sit at Tina’s table and explain. What exactly? She’s not sure, but Tina will get it, Tina will understand.

Their lives didn’t overlap. Maria never saw Bobby’s face, never held his hand. She’s always known this, of course, as a mathematical matter — one life ended before the other began — but she’s never really understood what it meant. He grew up eating the dishes that Maria taught Gail to make. The mother he always knew was different because of Maria, had already absorbed the gentle lessons of motherhood she bestowed. He sat in an attic strewn with sausages with his grandfather when he was three weeks old. These are all things Tina should know.

She drives faster than normal. She’s holding something slippery and precious and she needs to get to Tina’s house before it slides away.

A year after Bobby was killed, Tina was in a low, angry place. Her parents were retiring, moving to Florida. They’d put it off for a year to help Tina after Bobby’s death, but now they were moving forward. Selling the house and moving away. Tina was furious. She railed at them, night after night, at Gail’s table, the tears streaming down her face.

“A fucking year, Gail? A fucking year? They gave me a year. Almost to the goddamn day. ‘We’ve done our bit, T. Now we have to get on with our lives. Welcome anytime.’ Oh jeez, thanks. Sure, we’ll drop in every weekend. Thanks a lot, fuckwads.”

Gail laughed at the familiar malapropism.

“That’s a Bobby word.”

Tina poured herself a large glug of Chianti.

“It sure is.”

“You can’t be mad at them, Tina.”

“Fucking A, I can’t. They’re moving to a golf course, Gail. They don’t even fucking golf.”

She cursed like a sailor in those years.

“What am I supposed to do? With a one-year-old and a kid about to enter kindergarten?”

Gail reached a hand over.

“Tina, anything you need. Anything at all. Michael and I aren’t going anywhere. Anything. You want to move in here? Done. You want to drop the kids off every day? Done.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“You’re welcome.”

Tina raised a hand to her face, pushed some tears into her skin. She exhaled.

“Well, I need two things right now. I need a cigarette.”

She fished a pack out of her purse. She cracked the window behind her.

“I didn’t even know you smoked,” Gail said, genuinely surprised but without judgment. She found an ashtray hiding in the back of the cupboard, behind a Cornell baseball coffee mug.

“I sneak, when the kids are asleep. I know I have to quit.”

“All in good time. I’m surviving on cheap red wine and ziti. What’s the other thing you need?”

“I need a Bobby story, one that I haven’t heard. Tell me a Bobby story, Gail.”

Gail wasn’t sure what she was asking.

“A story about Bobby, in other words?”

“Yeah, my therapist, she says I need to explore my grief, need to let it expand, not try to diminish it before its proper time. So I figure I have cried and wailed over everything I know about Bobby. I have relived everything we did together. Everything I can remember anyway. I have grieved for all of that. Now, I want to grieve over the things I didn’t know. Tell me a story about Bobby that I don’t know.”

“A Bobby story?”

“A Bobby story.”

It became their little tradition together. Whenever one of them got low, she would ask the other for a Bobby story. A story would be told, they would laugh or cry together, and then they would hug. Gail would sit up some nights, trying to remember little snippets from Bobby’s childhood so she’d have them ready for when Tina asked. She even wrote a few down in a black and white notebook so she’d be sure to remember them. The time Bobby snuck a communion wafer home from church. The time he was telling the whole family about his biology project and accidentally kept saying orgasm instead of organism . The time the boys fought the Garsini brothers at P.S. 8 because one of the Garsinis had pushed Bobby for no good reason. Franky jumped in to defend Bobby and then Peter jumped in to defend Franky. All three of them sitting in the kitchen that night, giggling and holding ice packs to their heads. One with a black eye, one with a bloody nose, one with a fat lip. Bobby happy as a clam because his big brothers had come to his defense.

She even told Tina about the time Franky and Peter left Bobby behind down at the beach at Gateway and she found him there crying, astonished that his brothers could be so mean. He was ten, maybe eleven, and it was the first time she saw him really angry, except for a few tantrums he had as a toddler. She told Tina the whole story too. She didn’t leave out her own failure that night. She let it serve as a lesson to Tina: how you punish your children is as important as whether you do. Never be cruel, even when they are.

And the things she learned from Tina. Little insights into what Bobby was like as a husband and a father. How he adored his daughter. How he loved his brothers, admired Peter and had eternal patience with Franky. She reaffirmed what Gail already knew: that her son was basically happy, an easygoing, kindhearted soul.

With flaws. Tina didn’t hide those. She told a few stories about his temper, about nights when he had a few too many. She told Gail that they fought the night before he was killed because he’d been at a bachelor party that weekend in Atlantic City and still went out to watch the Giants game with Franky. That when he came home, he was tipsy and tried to apologize, but she wouldn’t have it, and that when he left for work the next morning, she was still mad at him. That when he died, she was still mad at him.

Just when you think the sadness can grow no larger, your son’s widow tells you that — no, confesses that to you — and the grief pushes through a door you didn’t know was there to occupy a space you didn’t know existed. When you lose a child, you know the grief will be overwhelming and harrowing, but you half expect it to be monotonous. A single, horrible note that you can’t get out of your head.

But it’s not. It has dimensions, it has depth. It changes and transforms. It hits you differently each day. You owe it respect in some ways. You have to mourn everything: the flaws as well as the virtues, the bad moments as well as the good. You have to turn over every rock and embrace the individual sadnesses you find underneath. The Bobby stories did that.

Together, Tina and Gail gave grief its due.

* * *

She parks the car on the street in front of Tina’s house, a modest, high-ranch home, surrounded on both sides by ridiculous Roman-columned monstrosities. Bobby bought a house half a mile from his parents. All he ever wanted was the life they had.

She will tell Tina a Bobby story, the first Bobby story, the prelude to all the others. She will tell him about Maria, who kissed her stomach, and Enzo, who grieved in an attic, and Sean, who spun his quarters, and Constance, who told her not to have children and wouldn’t cross a bridge to see them when she did. She will tell her about Diana Landini’s blouses and birthday parties at red picnic tables and how she miscarried and she caught Maria crying by herself, even how sex crazed she was during her pregnancy with Peter. She will tell her how Tiny Terrio, who she knows, whose daughter is a friend of hers, asked a question and ushered Bobby’s name into the world. She will tell Tina all of this and Tina will understand. Tina will hug Gail and everything will be normal again between them.