doesn’t seem to feel that I have any cause to feel irritated. Perhaps the tree trunk isn’t part of the lease? The porch certainly is.
“Hi, Jules. Did you want something from me?”
She shrugs in the manner of a fifteen-year-old, without putting down her phone.
“I just couldn’t stand it at home any more. They don’t talk about anything else any more but the…baby. It’s always the same—no, actually, it gets worse each time.” She shrugs again, pushes the phone into her kangaroo pocket. “And it always ends the same way.”
I lean against the railing and cross my arms. I sympathize with Jules, I do. But I don’t much feel like switching on the psychotherapist each time I talk to her.
“How’s your life going?” I ask, cheerfully. “How’s the driving coming along?”
She gives a hollow laugh. “Been grounded.”
“Why? Were you caught…” I end that question on three dots, because I suspect there may be several things she might be caught doing, particularly at the pickers’ camp, that wouldn’t amuse her family at all.
“No! I told you, I don’t do that stuff!” she insists hotly. “They’re making me help my mom cook and clean. School is allowed, but no fun.”
“You know this means an awful lot to your mom, right? It’s a really big thing you can do for her at this time, helping her and—you know, playing along. I understand that from where you’re sitting, all this sucks.”
“Sure does.”
“But you’re almost grown up, and you’ll begin your own life soon, and your mom will still be here, growing tomatoes and…well, being a wife and a mother. That is her job, and you gotta allow her to do that job.”
I’m impressed at how well I put that, and even Jules has no retort ready.
“Sweetie, not for nothing, but I gotta ask you to—”
“Oh, hiya!”
Her face lights up, and she bounds past me toward the steps. Startled, I turn round, and like a stray ginger dog, Logan Williams has appeared in front of my cottage.
“Nice place, Dr. Lieberman.” He smirks up at me.
“Come on.” Jules pulls at the sleeve of his over-sized sweater. “The others said twelve o’clock!”
Making sure that I see him grab hold of Jules’ hand, he follows her around the cottage and toward the pickers’ camp. It’s almost deserted now, except for a trio of Poles in a camper van. The boys I see working on the farm, the girl is the blond hippy I saw with Logan in the woods. If that’s the arrangement—sex with the Polish hippy, holding hands with Jules—fine. Presumably Logan knows that I know that Jules isn’t legal yet and that he is more than six years older than she is. If he were committing a felony, he wouldn’t flaunt it in my face like this. I hope.
“Hey, Jew girl.”
“Hey, gay boy.”
Over the music of some public place I hear Tim chuckle into his phone.
“Listen, you said you weren’t going with Freddy Katz to his synagogue, so my compassionate heart was rent at the thought of you sitting all alone on the tomato farm, in the Southern diaspora, pining for your people.”
“G’mar chatimah tovah to you, too. Tim, are you drunk?”
“It’s twenty past seven, how can I be drunk? I’m at Mairie’s Pub in Beanes Road, that’s off James, near that pizza place. D’you wanna come out? Or is that a terribly goyish thing to ask?”
“Would you stop getting at me for my religion?”
“Sorry, sorry. I just thought, if…if you’re lonesome tonight,” he starts crooning. “Are you?”
“A little, yeah,” I say. Understatement of the semester.
“Then come out! We’re sitting at the back, underneath The Pogues.”
“We?”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot, Cleve is here, too.”
I’m going from G’mar to Gehenna in a glass of Guinness.
The second thing that hits me when I push myself onto a three-legged stool in a corner of Mairie’s Pub is that Tim is, notwithstanding his protestations, on a fair way to being plastered. There is one empty pint glass on the table, one almost empty, and one half full. The latter one is Giles’s, who has just been brought a sandwich with fries.
Tim says he’ll do like they did in the olden times, have beer instead of solids, but what am I having? His innocent question makes me sigh. Well, since I’m obviously not doing Yom Kippur this year…
“You’re supposed to fast, aren’t you?” Giles states rather than asks.
“Moses supposes his toeses are roses.”
“But Moses supposes erroneously. So, not fasting. Have some of my chips.” Unfazed, he inches his plate toward me. “The sandwich