“I wish I were.”
A long hard silence hung over the line between us.
“And now,” Grace said eventually, “he’s in my life? In my daughter’s life, Patrick? In my daughter’s?”
“Grace, I—”
“What?” she said. “What, what, what, what? Huh? That freak in the trenchcoat, he’s supposed to be my guardian angel? He’s supposed to make me feel safe?”
“Sort of.”
“You brought this into my life. This violence. You…Jesus!”
“Grace, listen—”
“I’ll call you later,” she said and her voice was distant and small.
“I’m at Angie’s.”
“What?”
“I’m staying here tonight.”
“At Angie’s,” she said.
“It’s possible she’s the next target of the guy who killed Jason Warren and Kara Rider.”
“At Angie’s,” she said again. “I’ll call you later maybe.”
She hung up.
No good-bye. No “take care.” Just a “maybe.”
It took her twenty-two minutes to call back. I was sitting at the table, staring at photographs of Hardiman and Rugglestone and Cal Morrison until they all blurred in my head and joined as one, the same questions nagging my brain, the answers, I knew, lying in front of me, but floating simultaneously, just beyond the limits of my vision.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“How’s Angie?” she said.
“Scared.”
“I don’t blame her.” She sighed into the phone. “How are you, Patrick?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Look, I won’t apologize for being pissed earlier.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
“I want you in my life, Patrick…”
“Good.”
“—but I’m not sure I want your life in my life.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
The line hummed, empty, and I found myself eyeing Angie’s cigarette pack, wanting one very badly.
“Your life,” Grace said. “The violence. You seek it out, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “The other day, I went into the library. I looked up those newspaper articles on you from last year. When that woman got killed.”
“And?”
“And I read about you,” she said. “And I saw the photos of you kneeling by that woman and the man you shot. You were covered in blood.”
“It was hers.”
“What?”
“The blood,” I said. “It was Jenna’s. The woman who got killed. Maybe some from Curtis Moore, the guy I wounded. But not mine.”
“I know,” she said. “I know. But as I was looking at pictures of you and reading about you, I felt, well, ‘Who is this guy?’ I don’t know the guy in those photos. I don’t know the guy who shoots people. I don’t know this person. It was so strange.”
“I don’t know what to say, Grace.”
“Have you ever killed anyone?” Her voice was sharp.
I didn’t answer at first.
Eventually, I said, “No.”
So easy, the first lie I ever told her.
“You’re capable of it though, aren’t you?”
“We all are.”
“Maybe so, Patrick. Maybe so. But most of us don’t choose situations that force the issue. You do.”
“I didn’t choose this killer in my life, Grace. I didn’t choose Kevin Hurlihy in it either.”
“Yes,” she said, “you did. Your whole life is a conscious attempt to confront violence, Patrick. You can’t beat him.”
“Who?”
“Your father.”
I reached for the pack of cigarettes, slid them across the table until they were in front of me.
“I’m not trying to,” I said.
“Could’ve fooled me.”
I removed a cigarette from the pack, tapped it in the center of the fan of photos of Hardiman and Rugglestone’s burned corpse, a crucified Cal Morrison.
“Where’s this conversation going, Grace?”
“You hang around with people like…Bubba. And Devin and Oscar. And you live in a world of such violence and surround yourself with violent people.”
“It’ll never touch you.”
“It already has. Shit. And I know you’d die before you’d let anyone harm me physically. I know that.”
“But…”
“But at what price? What happens to you? You can’t clean sewers for a living and come home smelling like soap, Patrick. It’ll eat at you, as long as you do this work. It’ll hollow you out.”
“Has it so far?”
For a long dark moment, I heard only silence.
“Not yet,” she said. “But it’s a miracle. How many miracles do you have left, Patrick?”
“I don’t know,” I said and my voice was raw.
“I don’t either,” she said. “But I don’t like the odds.”
“Grace—”
“I’ll talk to you soon,” she said and her voice stumbled around the soon.
“Okay.”
“G’night.”
She hung up, and I listened to the dial tone. Then I crushed the cigarette between my fingers and pushed the pack away from me.
“Where are you?” I asked Bubba when I finally reached him on his cell phone.
“Outside one of Jack Rouse’s chop shops in Southie.”
“Why?”
“Because Jack’s in there and so’s Kevin and so’s most of their crew.”
“You fucked up Kevin good today,” I said.
“Christmas came early, yeah.” He chuckled. “Ol’ Kev’s sucking his boiled dinner through a straw for a while, buddy.”
“You broke his jaw?”
“Nose, too. Got the two-for-one special.”
I said, “But, Bubba—in front of Grace?”
“Why not? Lemme tell you something, Patrick, that’s one ungrateful woman you’re dating.”
“You were expecting a tip?” I said.
“I was expecting a smile,” he said. “A thank you or just a grateful roll of the eyes would have been acceptable.”
“You bludgeoned a man in front of her daughter, Bubba.”
“So? He had it coming.”