Mystic River

"No way," he said. "I'm sticking with you."

"I'm hungry."

And it hit Jimmy all the way? Oh, my God, I have to feed this girl whenever she's hungry. For the rest of our lives. Jesus Christ.

"Well, okay," he said, feeling the smile shake on his face. "We'll eat."

* * *

JIMMY GOT TO Cottage Market, the corner store he owned, by six-thirty and worked the cash register and the Lotto machine while Pete stocked the coffee counter with the doughnuts from Yser Gaswami's Dunkin' Donuts on Kilmer and the pastries, cannolis, and pigs-in-a-blanket delivered from Tony Buca's bakery. During lulls, Jimmy ran coffee from the brewing machines in back out to the oversize thermoses on the coffee counter and cut the twine on the Sunday Globes, Heralds, and New York Timeses. He placed the circulars and comics in the middle, then stacked them all neatly in front of the candy shelves below the cash counter.

"Sal say what time he'll be in?"

Pete said, "The best he could do was nine-thirty. His car shit the bed so he's going to have to T it. That's like two train lines and a bus transfer from here and he said he wasn't even dressed."

"Shit."

Around seven-fifteen, they handled a semirush of folks coming off the night shift? cops, mostly, from the D-9, some nurses from Saint Regina's, and a few working girls who serviced the illegal after-hours clubs down on the other side of Buckingham Avenue in the Flats and up in Rome Basin. All of them were weary but convivial and wired, too, emitting an aura of intense relief, as if they'd just walked off the same battlefield together, muddy, bloody, but erect and unmaimed.

During a five-minute recess before the early-mass crowd stormed the gates, Jimmy called Drew Pigeon and asked him if he'd seen Katie.

"I think she's here, yeah," Drew said.

"Yeah?" Jimmy heard the spike of hope in his voice and only then realized that he'd been more anxious than he'd allowed himself to admit.

"Think so," Drew said. "Lemme go check."

"'Preciate it, Drew."

He listened to Drew's heavy feet echo away down a hardwood hallway as he cashed two scratch tickets for Old Lady Harmon, trying not to blink away tears from the sharp assault of her old lady perfume. He heard Drew coming back toward the phone and felt a mild flutter in his chest as he handed Old Lady Harmon her fifteen bucks and waved bye to her.

"Jimmy?"

"Here, Drew."

"Sorry. It was Diane Cestra slept over. She's in there on the floor of Eve's bedroom, but no Katie."

The flutter in Jimmy's chest stopped hard, as if it had been pinched between tweezers.

"Hey, no problem."

"Eve said Katie dropped them off round one? Didn't say where she was going."

"Okay, man." Jimmy put a false brightness into his tone. "I'll track her down."

"She seeing anyone maybe?"

"Nineteen-year-old girls, Drew? Who could keep a tally?"

"That's the cold truth," Drew said with a yawn. "Eve, Jimmy? All the calls she gets from different guys, I'd swear she needs a roster by the phone to keep 'em straight."

Jimmy forced a chuckle. "Hey, thanks again, Drew."

"Anytime, Jimmy. Take care."

Jimmy hung up and looked down at the register keyboard as if it could tell him something. This wasn't the first time Katie had stayed out all night. Hell, it wasn't even the tenth. And it wasn't even the first time she'd blown off work, though in both cases, she usually called. Still, if she'd met a guy with movie-star looks and city-boy charm?Jimmy wasn't so far removed from nineteen himself that he couldn't remember what that was like. And while he'd never let Katie think he condoned it, he couldn't be so hypocritical in his heart as to condemn it.

The bell hanging from a ribbon tacked to the top of the door clanged and Jimmy looked up to see the first group of coiffed blue-hairs from the rosary-bead crowd charge into the store, yapping away about the raw morning, the priest's diction, the litter in the streets.

Pete stuck his head up from the deli counter and wiped his hands with the towel he'd been using to clean the prep table. He tossed a full box of surgical gloves up onto the counter and then came over behind the second cash register. He leaned in toward Jimmy and said, "Welcome to hell," and the second group of Holy Rollers followed fast on the heels of the first.

Jimmy hadn't worked a Sunday morning in nearly two years, and he'd forgotten what a zoo it could turn into. Pete was right. The blue-haired fanatics, who packed the seven o'clock mass at Saint Cecilia's while normal people slept, took their biblical shopping fury into Jimmy's store and decimated the pastry and doughnut trays, drained the coffee, stripped the dairy coolers to a shell, and reduced the newspaper stacks by half. They banged into display racks and stepped on the chip bags and plastic sleeves of peanuts that fell to their feet. They shouted out deli orders, Lotto orders, scratch ticket orders, and orders for Pall Malls and Chesterfields with a rabid indiscrimination as to their places in line. Then, as a sea of blue, white, and bald heads bobbed behind them, they dawdled at the counter to ask after Jimmy's and Pete's families while they fished for exact change down to the last lint-enfuzzed penny and took prolonged eons to lift their purchases off the counter and move out of the way for the raging clamor behind them.

Jimmy hadn't seen anything resembling this kind of chaos since the last time he'd attended an Irish wedding with an open bar, and when he finally glanced up at the clock at eight-forty-five as the last of them went out through the door to the street, he could feel the sweat drenching the T-shirt under his sweatshirt, soaking into his skin. He looked at the bomb that had exploded in the middle of his store and then over at Pete, and he felt a sudden flush of kinship and fraternity with him that made him think of the seven-fifteen crew of cops, nurses, and hookers, as if he and Pete had ascended to a new level of friendship just by surviving the eight o'clock Sunday blast of ravenous geriatrics.

Pete tossed him a tired grin. "Slows for about half an hour now. Mind if I step out back and grab a smoke?"

Jimmy laughed, feeling good now and swept by a sudden, odd pride at this little business he'd built into a neighborhood institution. "Fuck, Pete, smoke a whole pack."

He'd tidied the aisles, restocked dairy, and was replenishing the doughnut and pastry trays when the bell clanged, and he looked over to see Brendan Harris and his little brother, Silent Ray, walk past the counter and head for the small square of aisles where the breads and detergents and cookies and teas were stocked. Jimmy busied himself with the cellophane wraps over the pastries and doughnuts, and wished he hadn't give Pete the impression he could take a mini-vacation out back and that his ass would get back in here immediately.