BRENDAN HARRIS LOOKED at the phone and willed it to ring. He looked at his watch. Two hours late. Not exactly a surprise, since time and Katie were never on what you'd call a first-name basis, but man, today of all days. Brendan just wanted to go. And where was she, if she wasn't at work? The plan had been that she'd call Brendan during her shift at Cottage Market, go to her half sister's First Communion, and then meet him afterward. But she hadn't gone into work. And she hadn't called.
He couldn't call her. That had been one of the big downsides of their being together ever since the first night they'd hooked up. Katie was usually one of three places-at Bobby O'Donnell's place in the early days of her and Brendan's relationship, in the apartment she'd grown up in on Buckingham Avenue with her father, stepmother, and two half sisters, or in the apartment above where a shitload of her crazy uncles lived, two of whom, Nick and Val, were legends of psychosis and really, really bad impulse control. And then there was her father, Jimmy Marcus, who hated Brendan deeply and for no logical reason that either Brendan or Katie could figure out. Still, Katie had been clear about it-over the years her father had made it his mandate: stay away from the Harrises; you ever bring one home, I disown you.
According to Katie, he was usually a rational guy, her father, but she told Brendan one night, tears dropping to his chest, "He's nuts when it comes to you. Nuts. He's drunk one night, right? I mean, hammered, and he starts going on about my mom, how much she loved me and everything, and then he says, he says, 'The fucking Harrises, Katie, they're scum.'"
Scum. The sound of the word caught in Brendan's chest like a pile of phlegm.
"'You stay away from them. Only thing in life I demand of you, Katie. Please.'"
"So how'd it happen?" Brendan said. "You ending up with me?"
She'd rolled over in his arms and smiled sadly at him. "You don't know?"
Truth be told, Brendan didn't have a clue. Katie was Everything. A Goddess. Brendan was just, well, Brendan.
"No, I don't know."
"You're kind."
"I am?"
She nodded. "I see you with Ray or your mother and even everyday people on the street, and you're just so kind, Brendan."
"A lotta people are kind."
She shook her head. "A lot of people are nice. It's not the same thing."
And Brendan, thinking about it, had to admit that his whole life he'd never met anyone who didn't like him-not in a popularity contest type of way, but in a basic "That Harris kid's all right" type of way. He'd never had enemies, hadn't been in a fight since grade school, and couldn't remember the last time he'd heard a harsh word directed his way. Maybe it was because he was kind. And maybe, like Katie said, that was rare. Or maybe he just wasn't the type of guy who made people mad.
Well, except for Katie's father. That was a mystery. And there was no denying it for what it was: hate.
Just half an hour ago, Brendan had felt it in Mr. Marcus's corner store-that quiet, coiled hatred emanating from the man like a viral infection. He'd wilted under it. He'd stammered because of it. He couldn't look at Ray the whole way home because of how that hatred had made him feel-unwashed, his hair filled with nits, teeth covered in grime. And the fact that it made no sense-Brendan had never done anything to Mr. Marcus, hell, barely knew the man-didn't make it any easier. Brendan looked at Jimmy Marcus and saw a man looking back who wouldn't stop to piss on him if he was on fire.
Brendan couldn't call Katie at one of her two numbers and risk somebody on the other end having caller ID or star-69ing him, wondering what the hated Brendan Harris was doing calling their Katie. He'd almost done it a million times, but just the thought of Mr. Marcus or Bobby O'Donnell or one of those psycho Savage brothers answering the other end was enough to make him drop the phone from a sweaty hand back into the cradle.
Brendan didn't know who to fear more. Mr. Marcus was just a regular guy, owner of the corner store Brendan had been going to for half his life, but there was something about the guy-more than just his obvious hatred for Brendan-that could unsettle people, a capacity for something, Brendan didn't know what, but something, that made you lower your voice around the guy and try not to meet his eyes. Bobby O'Donnell was one of those guys nobody knew exactly what he did for a living but you'd cross a street to avoid him in either case, and as for the Savage brothers, they were a whole planetary system away from most people in terms of normal, acceptable behavior. The maddest, craziest, most dyed-in-the-wool, lunatic motherfuckers to ever come out of the Flats, the Savage brothers had thousand-yard stares and tempers so hair-trigger you could fill a notebook the size of the Old Testament with all the things that could set them off. Their father, a sick chucklehead in his own right, had, along with their thin, sainted mother, popped the brothers out one after another, eleven months apart, like they were running a midnight assembly line for loose cannons. The brothers grew up crammed and mangy and irate in a bedroom the size of a Japanese radio beside the el tracks that used to hover over the Flats, blotting out the sun, before they got torn down when Brendan was a kid. The floors in the apartment sloped hard to the east, and the trains hammered past the brothers' window twenty-one out of twenty-four hours each and every goddamned day, shaking the piece-of-shit three-decker so hard that most times the brothers fell out of bed and woke in the morning piled on top of one another, greeted the morning as irritable as waterfront rats, and pummeled the piss out of one another to clear the pile and start the day.
When they were kids, they had no individuality to the outside world. They were just the Savages, a brood, a pack, a collection of limbs and armpits and knees and tangled hair that seemed to move in a cloud of dust like the Tasmanian Devil. You saw the cloud coming your way, you stepped aside, hoped they'd find someone else to fuck up before they reached you, or simply whirl on by, lost in the obsession of their own grimy psychoses.
Hell, until Brendan had started dating Katie on the sly, he wasn't positive just how many of them there actually were, and he'd grown up in the Flats. Katie laid it out for him, though: Nick was the oldest, gone from the neighborhood six years to serve ten minimum at Walpole; Val was the next and, according to Katie, the sweetest; then came Chuck, Kevin, Al (who usually got confused with Val), Gerard, just fresh from Walpole himself, and finally, Scott, the baby boy and mother's favorite when she'd been alive, who was also the only one with a college degree, and the only one who didn't live at home in the first- and third-floor apartments the brothers had commandeered after they'd successfully scared the previous tenants to another state.
"I know they have this rep," Katie said to Brendan, "but they're really nice guys. Well, except for Scott. He's kinda hard to warm up to."
Scott. The "normal" one.
Brendan looked at his watch again, then over at the clock by his bed. He looked at the phone.
He looked at his bed where just the other night he'd fallen asleep with his eyes on the back of Katie's neck, counting the fine blond hairs there, his arm draped over her hip so that his palm rested on her warm abdomen, the smell of her hair and perfume and a light sweat filling his nostrils.
He looked at the phone again.
Call, goddamnit. Call.