Free Small Mercies by Eddie Joyce Page B

before the weather turned. Excitement, bordering on panic, in the air.
    The men in the street stared at Gail as she passed, as if she were some rare beauty, which she knew she wasn’t. Her looks fell somewhere between plain and pretty. Reddish hair, but not the luxuriant fire of a movie star, just a dull auburn that most people mistook for brown. A smattering of freckles haphazardly strewn across her face. A lack of curves generally, highlighted by the near absence of breasts. In high school, the boys used to tease her, call her a pirate.
    Like a pirate, Gail.
    With your sunken chest.
    Get it? Ha ha.
    Her eyes have always been her saving grace, capable of conveying emotion with a bracing intensity. A watery blue, cool and pure. Some girls spun and their skirts lifted ever so slightly; others leaned and left a button loose. Gail stared.
    Once, when her tormentors called her a pirate, she fixed her eyes on the their ringleader, Andy Tormey, whose confidence flagged in the ferocity of her stare. A few weeks later, Andy stuck his tongue in her mouth behind the brick outhouse on the playground on Ridge Boulevard. When he moved his hand up toward the tit that he’d joked wasn’t there, Gail laughed but absorbed the lesson: play to your strengths. After that, she did all that she could to draw attention to her eyes. She was never as popular as the girls with big chests or the girls who let the boys fiddle under their skirts, but she got her fair share of attention. And the jokes about her chest ended, especially after she dumped Andy before he could get his hands up her shirt.
    No beauty queen, but she’s okay with that.
    The men stared anyway. They ignored the ring on her finger, the old woman at her side. They will disregard a stroller too. Michael was right; there were better places to raise a family.
    She stared back at the men, hoping to embarrass the more brazen oglers. They laughed but looked away.
    The remainder of the walk was slow and silent. Constance shuffled along and Gail followed a pace behind her. They reached her mother’s building. Her parents lived on the third floor and she usually helped her mother up the stairs, but Constance turned to her at the building’s entrance. They hadn’t spoken a word since the diner. Through her mother’s glasses, Gail saw her own eyes, the one gift her mother had given her without condition.
    Constance’s eyes were older, but held the same power as Gail’s. She found Gail’s gaze and held it.
    My husband is a drunk. One of your brothers is in Vietnam, another is a junkie, and I don’t know where the third is. Probably dead. I lost a child, your sister, when she was two. You are my youngest child. You are all I have.
    Gail nearly faltered.
    “Mom, I . . .”
    “Yes, Gail?”
    She smelled the soup on her mother’s breath, mixed with cigarettes. Another wave of nausea hit her. She found a reserve of strength somewhere.
    “Do you need help getting up the stairs?”
    Constance didn’t answer. She walked inside and closed the door behind her.
    * * *
    Three weeks pass. They haven’t spoken. No calls. No visits. Two nights before the move, her father calls.
    “Everything all right, Goodness?”
    “Everything’s great, Dad.”
    “We haven’t seen you. Everything all right?”
    “Grand.”
    “Okay then. Maybe I’ll see you Saturday before mass?”
    She hadn’t told him.
    “Sure, Dad. See you Saturday.”
    If she had, he would have asked Gail to meet him at Kelly’s or Leggett’s or whatever shit hole he was still welcome in. He would have tapped the stool beside him and picked a quarter from his pile of change on the bar. A smile. Always charming, never belligerent. “Feckless,” that’s what her mother said, a “feckless man.” Feckless, like it was the worst thing someone could be.
    And maybe it was.
    “Okay, Goodness,” he would have said, “we’ll spin this twenty-five-cent piece here and if it comes up heads, you leave for that godforsaken place.