Small Mercies


 
 
 
 
 
 
 Contents
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Epigraph
 Contents
 Historical Note
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 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 Also by Dennis Lehane
 Copyright
 About the Publisher
 
 
 
 
 
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 ii
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 Guide
 
 Cover
 Contents
 Historical Note
 
 
 
 
 Dedication
 
 
 For Chisa
 
 
 
 
 
 Epigraph
 
 
 To cut oneself entirely from one’s kind is impossible. To live in a desert, one must be a saint.
 —Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
 
 
 
 
 
 Historical Note
 
 On June 21, 1974, U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., ruled in Morgan v. Hennigan that the Boston School Committee had “systematically disadvantaged black school children” in the public school system. The
 only remedy, the judge concluded, was to begin busing students between predominantly white and predominantly black neighborhoods
 to desegregate the city’s public high schools.
 
 
 The school in the neighborhood with the largest African American population was Roxbury High School. The school in the neighborhood
 with the largest white population was South Boston High School. It was decided that these two schools would switch a significant
 portion of their student bodies.
 
 
 This order was to take effect at the beginning of the school year, on September 12, 1974. Students and parents had less than
 ninety days from the date of the ruling to prepare.
 
 
 It was very hot in Boston that summer, and it seldom rained.
 
 
 
 
 
 1
 
 The power goes out sometime before dawn, and everyone at Commonwealth wakes to swelter. In the Fennessy apartment, the window
 fans have quit in mid-rotation and the fridge is pimpled with sweat. Mary Pat sticks her head in on Jules, finds her daughter
 on top of her sheets, eyes clenched, mouth half open, huffing thin breaths into a damp pillow. Mary Pat moves on down the
 hall into the kitchen and lights her first cigarette of the day. She stares out the window over the sink and can smell the
 heat rising off the brick in the window casing.
 
 
 She realizes she can’t make coffee only when she tries to make it. She’d brew some on the stovetop—the oven runs on gas—but
 the gas company grew sick of excuses and killed their service last week. To get the family out of arrears, Mary Pat has picked
 up two shifts at the shoe warehouse where she has her second job, but she still has three more shifts and a trip to the billing
 office before she can boil water or roast a chicken again.
 
 
 She carries the trash can into the living room and sweeps the beer cans into it. Empties the ashtrays from the coffee table and the side table and one she found on top of the TV. It’s there she catches her reflection in the tube and sees a creature she can’t reconcile with the image she’s clung to in her mind, an image that bears little resemblance to the sweaty lump of matted hair and droopy chin dressed in a tank top and shorts. Even in the flat gray of the picture tube, she can make out the blue veins in her outer thighs, which somehow don’t seem possible, not yet. Not yet. She’s only forty-two, which, okay, when she was twelve seemed like one foot over the threshold into God’s waiting room, but now, living it, is an age that makes her feel no different than she always has. She’s twelve, she’s twenty-one, she’s thirty-three, she’s all the ages at the same time. But she isn’t aging. Not in her heart. Not in her mind’s eye. 
 
 She’s peering at her face in the TV, wiping at the damp strands of hair on her forehead, when the doorbell rings.
 
 After a series of home invasions two years back, in