Mercy Street(30)

Anthony followed him into the apartment. The massive TV was tuned to the Guide channel, an endless scrolling chart listing all the shows they weren’t watching because they were watching a list of their names.

They sat in silence, staring at the list. Finally Timmy chose a show about cops in Miami. It gave Anthony an idea of something to say.

“My ma is going to Florida. Didn’t you use to live there?”

Timmy grunted what could be a yes or a no. He reached behind his chair for a jar of weed.

“Jupiter, Florida. Is that a place?”

“I have no fuckin idea,” Timmy said.

“Her sister lives there. She’s going to stay for a month, until the snow melts.”

Timmy said, “I’ve seen this one before.”

The Miami cops were conducting a traffic stop. The driver, a scrawny dark-skinned guy with Rasta dreads, was asked to step out of the car.

Timmy said, “Dude is gonna run.”

Anthony had never been to Florida, or anywhere else.

“There he goes!” Timmy shouted, pointing at the TV screen, where the Rastafarian was running full tilt across eight lanes of traffic. “Did I tell you?”

“You told me,” Anthony said, reaching for his wallet.

When the excitement died down, Timmy double-bagged the weed and handed it over. Anthony took his pipe from his pocket and packed a substantial bowl. “How’s your sister?”

Timmy looked surprised. “How do you know Maureen?”

“From school,” Anthony said.

Timmy felt around for the remote and found it behind him. “She’s all right. Mick got a job in Nashua. Her husband.”

The word husband soured Anthony’s mood somewhat. “I thought they were separated.”

“They were. Now they’re back together. Don’t ask.”

When Timmy began clicking through the channels, Anthony closed his eyes. The rapidly changing picture gave him vertigo. The TV screen was the size of a child’s swimming pool, far too large for the room.

ON THE BOAT BACK TO GRANTHAM, HE THOUGHT ABOUT TIM’S sister, whom he had not known in school. He’d lied because the truth was humiliating: Maureen Flynn had been his babysitter. Anthony was, at the time, twelve years old—by Grantham standards, old enough to stay home alone while his mother played Monday night bingo. He had done this many times without incident, until the night of the toaster fire, which he extinguished by the accepted method of throwing a carpet over it. His mother was mad about the carpet, so she paid Maureen Flynn to stay with him, unaware of the shame it caused him. Maureen was only four years older, a junior in high school and the great love of his life, a title for which there’d been, to date, no serious competition.

His experience with women had been lackluster.

With Maureen he blamed the circumstances, which were not auspicious. Looking back he wondered: What the hell was wrong with her? Why was she messing around with some little kid? Which probably should have occurred to him at the time, but didn’t.

When it was over she said, It’s supposed to take longer.

He said, I’ll do better next time.

But there was no next time. When he heard some years later that she’d gotten married, the news affected him powerfully. It was as though he’d missed the bus that was supposed to take him to the rest of his life.

The rest of his life was a country he had yet to visit. Nothing, nothing had turned out as planned.

He’d made a promising start, two semesters at Curry College. When he ran out of money, he worked as a helper at Mancini Construction. Each morning, with his dad, he rode to the job site at dawn, not talking but listening to the same radio. It was the most time he’d ever spent in his father’s company. This lasted five weeks, until he was loaned out to another crew driving piles on the Big Dig, the biggest mistake of his life.

WHEN HE DISEMBARKED AT GRANTHAM PIER, HE FELT THAT he’d been gone a long time, though of course the town was exactly as he’d left it. This would be true if he’d been gone ten minutes or twenty years. A beer-drinking teenager loitered at the waterfront, pursuing his delinquency. Fifty years ago, he might have been Anthony’s father. Thirty years ago, he might have been Tim Flynn. In the sad B movie that was life in Grantham, actors were recast periodically, replaced with younger models, but the script itself never changed. It was that kind of town.

He found the house empty, his mother at the beauty parlor for her weekly wash and set. There was nothing interesting in the refrigerator, so he filled a bowl with Lucky Charms and took it downstairs to his headquarters. As a teenager, for privacy, he’d relocated his bedroom to the basement. Over the years he’d made key improvements: a stereo system, cable TV, and wireless internet. Plugged into headphones, he could ignore the creaking overhead, his mother going about her business in the kitchen, where she spent ninety-eight percent of her waking life.

His headquarters was comfortable, if a little dark. The only daylight came from a couple of high windows set at ground level. They looked out on window wells made of corrugated tin.

The darkness had come in handy in the year of holding his head.

He ate his cereal in front of the computer, scrolling through the site. For two years, he’d been the webmaster for Catholic Heritage of New England, an organization that existed for one reason only: to convince priests to say the Latin Mass.