(no subject)
When they were first in America, Murphy and Connor spent a couple months in a motel on the edge of Boston.
Their mother would take the transit into the city everyday to look for a job, and the two of them, since they weren't exactly enrolled in school, would watch a lot of TV in the lounge. Would chat with some of the other people living there, would try their Spanish out on the cleaning crew, and would, also, play a lot of cardgames with each other using the pack from the airline.
In fact, they got the man at the front desk to teach them how to play hearts. They modified the game so that they could play two hands at a time and thus have something of a game even when there were only two people, and they also used to joke and call, when she wasn't around to hear, the Queen of Spades Ma. Seeing her at an inoppurtune time was going to hurt you something motherfucking bad, or so the joke went, and Murphy also pointed out that the pissed-off looking woman in the card actually sort of looked like their Ma back from a day of job-hunting.
Shooting the Moon was Going Home, A Real Hot Dinner or Getting A Real Hot Shower In This Place. Winner didn't actually get to go home or have an actual hot dinner or shoot anything at all, but he would get first dibs when the boiler at the hotel got water again, as evidenced by the banging of the pipes, and half the time, Murphy would let Connor shoot the moon after they walked back from morning Mass just so that Connor could take a half-hour long shower and shut the fuck up with the whining about how he could never get warm in America.
During those showers of Connor's, Murphy would lie down on top of the working heater and soak up every particle of warm air that came out from it. They had newspapers taped in the corners of the windows to keep the draft out; they couldn't afford a space heater because they had no income. They had no money coming in, and Connor would inevitably come out of the shower bitching about how cold the room was because Murphy was sucking up all the heat by lying on top of the heater like that and Murphy would point out in return that maybe if Connor had the sense that God gave earthworms and mosquitoes, he'd get dressed before coming out of the shower, and then he wouldn't be cold.
One day, their mother, Ma finds one of Da's old Army friends, and even though he couldn't help her out with a job, he lets her use his address to enroll the McManus boys in school until she could find someplace to live. Consequently, when she showed up that night for eggs-and-bread, made-by-Connor-on-the-room heater supper, she did so holding enrollment papers for a high school in the south of Boston.
Connor was appropriately excited and was asking her all questions about whether he would have to take maths and whether they had foreign languages and if they had a music program where he might be able to get his hands on something to play.
Murphy, on the other hand, stayed quiet and poked at the mess of eggs that Connor had boiled by hotwiring the second heater in the room so that it'd give him extra heat.
The other heater gave out that night, and even though it really had nothing to do with Connor, Murphy blamed him for it getting cold enough to see their breath hang in the air by way of the parking lot lights coming through the blinds, and after a while of Murphy bitching low and soft in Connor's ear about it while Ma snored on the other side of the bed, Connor got up, went to the bathroom, said his prayers again, then went to sleep in the bathtub.
Sometimes, Murphy wonders what he would have done in those few weeks where Connor was going to school and he wasn't if he'd had a gun. He makes it very clear in these wonderings that he wouldn't have gone out and done anything illegal in order to get enough money for them to move into a decent house or to buy Ma a decent set of clothes so that she could get a job or so that they could take the taxi to Mass sometimes instead of walking in the cold, but Murphy nevertheless wonders what he would have done if he'd had a little bit more power over those days where he played all four places in Hearts by himself and started making both hearts and clubs point-bearing suites in order to keep himself entertained.
Sometimes, Murphy wonders how his life would be different if they'd been able to land on their feet in America, if their mother hadn't gone back to Ireland so quick afterwards, and he tends to do this especially much on nights when he and Connor are alone in the loft, where Connor is muttering through his evening rosary, and where the heat is out again. Murphy goes and lies down on his mattress, and eventually, once the lights are off and the illumination is coming in from the street lamps and the high buildings up around them, when it's cold enough that his breath mists up in the air inside the loft and they have to be up at five in the morning to be at their meat-packing plant.
Then, Murphy will close his eyes, and at that point, he will see nothing but hands and playing cards and endless afternoons at the motel both before Connor went to school and, again, after Connor left, and Murphy will know that no matter what happens, he doesn't regret any of this. He didn't like the days in the motel; he's not particularly fond of the loft they're living in these days, nor does he like the poverty, but he knows that, in the end, it's the game of hearts that matters for him.
The only thing is that, despite the steady sound of Connor's breath close by and because of the books he knows his brother keeps under his mattress, Murphy has never been entirely sure whether this is how his brother feels about it too.