Mystic River

So why would she blow off Nadine's First Communion?

Maybe she'd tied on one of legendary proportions. Or maybe she really had met that new guy with movie-star looks and attitude to spare. Maybe she'd just forgotten.

Jimmy left the pew and walked down the aisle with Annabeth and Sara, Annabeth squeezing his hand and reading the clench in his jaw, his distant gaze.

"I'm sure she's fine. Hung over, probably. But fine."

Jimmy smiled and nodded and squeezed back. Annabeth, with her psychic reads of him, her well-placed hand squeezes, her tender practicality, was Jimmy's foundation, plain and simple. She was his wife, mother, best friend, sister, lover, and priest. Without her, Jimmy knew beyond a doubt, he'd have ended up back in Deer Island or, worse, out in one of the maximum pens like Norfolk or Cedar Junction, doing hard time, his teeth rotting.

When he'd met Annabeth a year after his release, two to go on his probation, his relationship with Katie had just begun to jell, in increments. She had seemed to have gotten used to him being around all the time? wary, still, but warming? and Jimmy had gotten used to being permanently tired? tired from working ten hours a day and scuttling all over the city to pick up Katie or drop her off at his mother's, at school, at day care. He was tired and he was scared; those were the two constants in his life back then, and after a while he took it for granted they'd always be there. He'd wake up scared? scared Katie had managed to roll over wrong in her sleep at night and smother herself, scared the economy would continue cycling downward until he was out of a job, scared Katie would fall from the jungle gym at school during recess, scared she'd need something he couldn't provide, scared his life would continue as this constant grind of fear and love and exhaustion forever.

Jimmy carried that exhaustion into the church the day one of Annabeth's brothers, Val Savage, married Terese Hickey, both the bride and groom ugly, angry, and short. Jimmy pictured them having a litter as opposed to kids, raising a pack of indistinguishable, pug-nosed rage balls to bounce up and down Buckingham Avenue for years to come, igniting. Val had worked for Jimmy's crew back in the days when Jimmy had a crew, and he was grateful to Jimmy for taking a hard two-year fall and another three suspended on behalf of the whole crew when everyone knew Jimmy could have dimed them all out and skated. Val, tiny-limbed and tiny-brained, would have probably idolized Jimmy outright if Jimmy hadn't married a Puerto Rican chick, and one from outside the neighborhood, too.

After Marita died, the neighborhood whispers said, Well, there you go, don't you? That's what happens when you go against the way of things. That Katie, though, she'll be a real looker; half-breeds always are.

When Jimmy had gotten out of Deer Island, the offers rolled in. Jimmy was a pro, one of the best second-story guys to ever come out of a neighborhood that had a Hall of Fame roster's worth of second-story guys. And even when Jimmy said no, thanks, he was going straight, for the kid, you know, people nodded and smiled and knew he'd come back to it the first time things got tough and he had to choose between a car payment and Katie's Christmas present.

Didn't happen, though. Jimmy Marcus, B & E genius and a guy who'd run his own crew before he was old enough to legally drink, the man behind the Keldar Technics heist and a ton of other shit, stayed so straight it got to where people thought he was taunting them. Hell, rumor was Jimmy had even been discussing buying out Al DeMarco's corner store, letting the old man retire as owner-in-name with a chunk of the money Jimmy'd allegedly stashed away from the Keldar job. Jimmy as shopkeeper, wearing an apron? okay, sure, they said.

At Val and Terese's reception at the K of C on Dunboy, Jimmy asked Annabeth to dance, and folks there saw it right away? the curve of them as they leaned into the music, the tilt of their heads as they looked right at each other, bold as bulls, the way his palm lightly caressed the small of her back and she leaned back into it. They'd known each other as kids, someone said, though he'd been a few years ahead of her. Maybe it had always been there, waiting for the Puerto Rican to pack up, or God to pack up for her.

It had been a Rickie Lee Jones song they'd danced to, a few lines in the song that always got to Jimmy for some reason he didn't understand? "Well, good-bye, boys/Oh my buddy boys/Oh my sad-eyed Sinatras?" He lip-synced them to Annabeth as they swayed, feeling loose and at ease for the first time in years, lip-synced again at the chorus along with Rickie's mournful wisp of a voice, "So long, lone-ly ave-nue," smiling into Annabeth's crystal green eyes, and she'd smiled, too, in a soft, hidden way she had that cracked his heart, the two of them acting like this was their hundredth dance instead of their first.

They were the last ones to leave? sitting outside on the wide entrance porch, drinking light beers and smoking cigarettes and nodding to the other guests as they walked to their cars. They stayed out there until the summer night had chilled, and Jimmy slid his coat around her shoulders and told her about prison and Katie, and Marita's dreams of orange curtains, and she told him about growing up the only female Savage in a house full of maniac brothers, of her one winter dancing in New York before she figured out she wasn't good enough, of nursing school.

When the K of C management kicked them off the porch, they wandered over to the after-party in time for Val and Terese's first screaming match as a married couple. They clipped a six-pack from Val's fridge and left, walked off into the dark of Hurley's Drive-in and sat by the channel, listened to its sullen lapping. The drive-in had shut down four years before, and squat yellow diggers and dump trucks from Parks and Recreation and the D.O.T. convoyed onto the land every morning, turned the whole area along the Pen into an eruption of dirt and torn cement. Word was they were turning it into a park, but at that point it was just a mangled drive-in, the screen still looming white behind mountains of brown dirt and black-and-gray cakes of disgorged asphalt.

"They say it's in your blood," Annabeth said.

"What?"

"Stealing, crime." She shrugged. "You know."

Jimmy smiled at her around his beer bottle, took a sip.

"Is it?" she said.

"Maybe." It was his turn to shrug. "Lotta things are in my blood. Doesn't mean they have to come out."

"I'm not judging you. Believe me." Her face unreadable, even her voice, Jimmy wondering what she wanted to hear from him? that he was still in the life? That he was out? That he'd make her rich? That he'd never commit a crime again?

Annabeth had a calm, almost forgettable face from a distance, but when you got up close, you saw so many things in there that you didn't understand, a sense of a mind furiously at work, never sleeping.