Mercy Street(45)

“Nope.” The P landed with an aggressive pop, a tidal wave of adolescent anger packed into a single consonant. “Mom took it away.”

“Why’d she do that?”

Another silence. Timmy eyed the water pipe on the coffee table, contemplating another hit.

“I know she told you,” said the Tuna. “Why ask me, if you already know?”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“I got suspended.” The voice was a little shocking. Just a few weeks ago, he’d sounded like a little kid.

“What for?” Timmy said.

The Tuna didn’t answer, which wasn’t surprising. He was a brick wall when confronted. At fourteen, Timmy had been the same way.

“Mom said you cut class.”

The kid inhaled loudly, a moist snotty sound. “It wasn’t a class. It was a fucking pep rally. Did she tell you that?”

“No,” said Timmy. Fucking Tess! It was a lesson he’d learned a hundred times: her version of events, any events, was not to be trusted.

“I mean, why do I have to sit there and clap for some asswipe with a basketball?”

“That is some bullshit,” Timmy agreed.

Another silence.

Timmy said, “Well, at least you get a couple days off school.”

“And sit here all day with Rudy? No thanks. I’d rather go to school.”

Rudy was Tess’s Cuban boyfriend, a Lexus-driving douchebag.

“Doesn’t he have his own place?” Timmy knew, had been repeatedly told, that the answer was none of his business. He felt it was entirely his business if some random guy was living under the same roof as his kid.

“Supposedly,” said the Tuna. “But he’s always here.”

Another silence. There was plenty Timmy could say, should say. Parental shit like Your mother’s a pain in the ass, but she’s still your mother. High school isn’t forever; in a few years you’ll graduate and do whatever the fuck you want.

When he opened his mouth, he said none of those things.

“You could come up to Boston,” he said. “Not to visit. To live.” He hadn’t planned to say it, not yet. The words had simply fallen out of his mouth.

“Not right away,” he added hurriedly. “But soon. Next year, maybe.” In a year his Laundromat would be up and running. The Tuna could help out nights and weekends, valuable work experience for a kid. It would get him started on the right path in life, a path that had eluded Timmy for forty years.

“I’ll see you next month,” he promised. “I have some business down there.”

A month seemed reasonable: ten days to install the traps in the Civic, another week or two to scrape together some dough. He was three months behind on child support. Unless he showed up with a fistful of cash, there was no way Tess would let him see his son.

IN THE EVENING SEAN BARRY WASHED UP ON HIS DOORSTEP—Timmy’s uncle, his mother’s brother. In the family he was referred to, always, by both names—this to distinguish him from Sean Flynn, Timmy’s uncle on his dad’s side.

There was a recognizable Barry look, snub-nosed and round-cheeked. As a young man Sean Barry had camouflaged it with hippie hair to his shoulders, a goatee to cover the leprechaun chin. In his sixties he was clean-shaven, his face grown soft and womanish. His hair, what was left of it, was slicked back from his forehead with some brittle-looking adhesive.

“Christ on a cracker,” he said. “What happened to your face?”

Timmy’s hand went to his chin. “I figured it was time. What are you doing here?”

“What do you think?”

They went inside, Sean Barry stepping elaborately around the pile of shoes, the snow shovel, the pail of rock salt. “I love what you’ve done with the place.”

“Fuck you.” Timmy wasn’t in the mood for company. But Sean Barry, being both his uncle and his landlord, couldn’t be turned away.

How this arrangement came to be was Barry family legend. After Timmy’s grandmother died, the house was left to her two children, and Timmy’s mother sold her share to Sean Barry. No one could have predicted, then, how the neighborhood would change, the shabby houses gutted and carved up into apartments. Twenty years later, the street was still noisy and trash-strewn and pocked with potholes, but somehow the rents had tripled. Timmy’s mother lived in a constant state of outrage. Her brother had taken advantage of her youth and greed, her ignorance about real estate and business and, let’s be honest, everything else in life. (I paid her fair market value, Sean Barry insisted to anyone who’d listen.) To shut her up, he rented the ground-floor apartment to her drug-dealer son at a special family rate.

He took a seat on the couch and Timmy brought two beers from the kitchen. From the cigar box he handed over an envelope of cash.

“Feels a little light.” Sean Barry picked through it skeptically. “That’s it?”

“How much did you smoke last month? You should be paying me.”

For years they’d operated on the barter system, Timmy’s monthly rent weighed against Sean Barry’s epic consumption of what he still called reefer. At this point Timmy effectively paid his rent in weed.

“How’s your mother?” Sean Barry asked.

“The same, I guess. I’ll tell her you said hi.”