Eddie Joyce - Small Mercies

Tina has more to say, but Gail doesn’t want her to say anything. She doesn’t want her to make promises she might not keep. Already she can feel distance growing between them. Already they are protecting themselves, protecting each other, from what is to come. Tina starts gathering herself to speak. The shrill, insistent sounds of Saturday morning cartoons blare in from the living room.

“Tina, I know how much you loved my son.”

Tina hugs her and Gail notices that she is thinner. She gained weight after Bobby was killed. Her small frame didn’t carry it well. All the chub went straight to her face and her rear, made her look heavier than she was. But she’s slimmed back down; she nearly has the figure she had when Gail first met her, when Tina was a teenager. Even Michael noticed. She should have known. She feels a protective flutter in her throat.

Bobby Jr. walks into the kitchen.

“Mom, can I have a doughnut?”

Tina is sniffling and Gail dries her eyes with her shirtsleeve. Bobby’s eyes shine with embarrassment. Gail summons a smile. The poor kid has spent half his life walking into kitchens full of crying women.

“Everything’s okay, Bob-a-loo. We’re just crying about a silly thing.”

“Were you talking about my dad?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“Come here, sweetie.”

Tina slides around the table, opens her arms for a hug. Bobby looks down at his shoes.

He needs a male influence. This is probably a good thing. Tina’s mothering him too much, trying to shelter him from the world that took his father. It’s a fine line. You want to protect your kids, but you can’t go too far. If you shield them from everything, they never learn to fend for themselves. Michael used to worry that she mothered Bobby too much. Her baby.

“He’ll be like a turtle without a shell, the world will bring a hard boot down on him and he won’t know what to do.”

It was a hard boot all right.

Alyssa shuffles into the kitchen, eyes still glued to her phone. She looks up, assesses the situation, and frowns.

“Why is everyone crying?”

It is a complaint, disguised as a question.

* * *

After Tina and the kids leave, Gail sits at the table for a long time, processing this turn of events. She has questions. Of course she has questions. Loads of them. She can feel them piling up even as she tries not to think of them. Her mind starts spinning with possibilities, each of them unpleasant to contemplate. She sees Tina in a wedding gown, the kids on vacation at Disney World with a new dad, the whole family moving to San Francisco.

Yes, she has questions. She has more questions than she can bear.

But the answers, the important ones, are already there. He’s a nice guy and he’s good with the kids. And it’s serious, has to be. Tina has dated a few other guys over the years. Gail knows this even if nothing was ever explicitly discussed. Tina never said anything because it wasn’t ever serious enough to warrant a conversation. The fact of the conversation means it’s serious. The fact that it’s serious means he’s a nice guy and good with the kids. She could noodle this stuff out if she tried.

So, he’s nice and good with the kids and it’s serious. She’ll learn the details soon enough. No sense worrying about things you can’t control.

She knows this is right — that she shouldn’t worry — but she knows that she will. The questions will not vanish. The answers will not satisfy her. She can feel the happiness of this ebbing, the sadness rising, morphing into loneliness. She needs to do something, anything, to distract herself. She needs some relief from her own thoughts.

She stands, looks out the window. It’s still gray out, one of those ominous half days, a bridge between darknesses. She puts on a jacket, feels an anticipatory shiver run from the back of her shoulders down to her thighs.

Maybe later she’ll look up that Italian word that Maria would have used. Maybe she’ll just make up her own word.

Before she leaves, she looks back down at her to-do list. The final, solitary dash sits abandoned on the paper. She picks up the pen and gives the dash a companion.

It reads:

— Tell Bobby.

Tina sets her lips in a gentle circle and applies a bright red lipstick. She inspects her reflection in the bathroom mirror, unsure whether the color suits her. Or the occasion. Even the simplest decisions — what lipstick to wear, hair up or down — are vexing her tonight. She hasn’t felt like this since high school: the fluttering stomach, the anticipation that borders on dread, the head turned to sieve, unable to hold a single thought.

You haven’t dated since high school, her reflection reminds her. Not really.

Only this isn’t high school, when emotions were the only thing that mattered. More than school, more than family, more than friends. When you could feel something so deeply, so purely, without any comprehension of its true capacities. To change you, your life, the things that matter. To bring new souls into existence.

No, this isn’t high school. The real world infringes, insists; a dozen anxieties jostle for priority in her head. The kids, Bobby, Wade, tonight, tomorrow morning, waking in a different bed, another man beside her, Gail judging her. She knows this last image is crazy, but she can’t shake it. It keeps showing up at the end of a sprint through half thoughts. She is lying in Wade’s bed and he is in the bathroom. She can see one of his pale naked buttocks atop a long, spindly leg, but the bathroom door bisects him, hiding half of his body. The tap is running; she can hear it. The sheets on his bed are lime green. Tina lies on top of them, luxuriantly naked, and Gail watches her from a doorway, shaking her head and frowning.

The whole thing is ridiculous. She’s never been to his apartment, never seen his bare ass. And she prays to God that he doesn’t have lime green sheets.

This isn’t high school. Why then can she hear Stephanie shouting at her from the bedroom? Twenty years pass and you wind up in the same place, more or less. In your bathroom talking about guys. She hears Stephanie call Vinny an asshole a few times, but she’s not processing it. It’s noise floating around her.

She’s thought about calling Gail half a dozen times, even flipped open her cell phone once to do it. She told her about Wade this morning, but it felt like she held something back. What is she supposed to say, though?

Gail, in case I wasn’t clear this morning, I’m planning on sleeping with this other man who I told you about. Tonight. Okay with you? Fine, we’re clear then. Okay, I’ll let you know how it goes.

“Are you even listening to me?”

Stephanie has crept into the bathroom while she was preoccupied.

“Jesus Christ. You scared the shit out of me.”

“So you weren’t listening to me?”

“Sorry, Steph. I’m just distracted.” She points to her lips. “Too much?”

“Not if you’re gonna give him a blow job on the way to the restaurant.”

“So yes, definitely too much.”

She starts blotting off the lipstick.

“Might be a good thing. Ease the sexual tension right off the bat. That way you can both enjoy your dinner. Well, maybe not you, depending.”

Stephanie does this, pushes the conversation toward sex, tries to make Tina uncomfortable. She’s done it since high school. The smallest details of Stephanie’s sex life with Vinny are conveyed to Tina, who long ago learned not to share in kind. Instead, she employs a simple trick to swat away intrusive questions: redirection. Stephanie is always eager to talk about herself.