said. “I’m not.” She wasn’t lying. But she’d be lying if she said she didn’t think about it every day.
“Look,” he said, “you’re going to be fine. The baby will be fine. Look at Johnny and Teddy—they’re brothers, and they don’t look anything alike. Look at Matthew—he’s Korean, and his parents are Jewish. What’s it matter who the kid looks like?”
He was making an admirable case, but Eliza could see him struggling. They had learned only days ago, over twenty-cent tacos at San Loco, that Matthew was adopted. He’d reported this fact with perfect indifference, Tabasco sauce dripping down his chin, the same way he reported that he had two sisters, that he was from Ontario, and that his father was an orthodontist. In fact, he’d administered Jude’s braces, and Jude hadn’t even known they’d been the same Stein. Eliza had watched Jude watch Matthew. Was it possible, Jude must have been thinking, not to care?
“But what am I supposed to say,” she went on, “when people ask about her father? What am I supposed to tell her when she asks?”
There would be no pretending that Johnny, blond and blue-eyed, was Annabel’s dad. The idea seemed suddenly absurd: why would they even want to? Why not tell the truth? Why had they allowed the facts of her pregnancy to become so thickly veiled in secrecy? Fathers died all the time. They died before their children were born, or when they were babies. Fathers died in wars and accidents; fathers died of the flu while sailing across the Arctic; of aneurysms while sitting in their offices, on conference calls to L.A. Why then would Eliza allow her child to be born into shame, a particular condition the three of them, it seemed to her now, had conspired to invent?
She was jogging her charms again. Locket, star, keys, the engagement ring she had taken off when her hands began to swell, Teddy’s lucky subway token. This last she pressed between her fingers, feeling the warmth of her skin through the perfect void in the center. Something to remember him by. She knew nearly nothing about Teddy. This was what was shameful. Should she tell her daughter that?
Jude was saying something sweet and useless, about telling the truth, about love. His knees were pulled close to his chest so that Eliza could see the sculpted underside of his thigh. She had nearly exhausted herself with thinking. She could fall asleep right here, on the sidewalk, with the moths sweeping over their heads, listening to the dips and swells of Jude’s voice. Her head lolled back against the wall. She wasn’t sleeping but enjoying a half-awake dream about sitting next to a boy, and talking.
Through the white-hot month of July, the Green Mountain Boys became well acquainted with I-95. The black-hole beltway of Washington, D.C., the Richmond cathedral so close to the highway you could lean from your car and almost touch the stained glass window. In Vermont, they’d grown up without billboards, but on 95 they were as regular as cows—South of the Border, Yeehaw Junction, Café Risqué, JR. “From Brassieres to Chandeliers!” The grand, gray cities were one and the same, a cordillera of skyscrapers and bridges and no-shoulder construction lanes, an industrial plant hanging over the plain of a rust-colored bay. The air was sweaty and sweet, thick as saltwater taffy.
The venues themselves, and the places they slept, also took on a resemblance. They played two churches, a VFW Hall, the Knights of Columbus, a roller rink, a few clubs. In Atlanta, while Jesse Jackson and JFK Jr. slept at the Omni, where the Democratic National Convention was taking place across town, they stayed at the Super 8, which they learned had been dubbed the Eight-Ball Inn, for the coke outfit that ran out of a block of rooms. When they could, they stayed with friends, guys from other crews they met on the road. Once, they slept in someone’s dorm room; once, they camped out in a couple of tents in someone’s parents’ backyard. In return, the band offered free T-shirts, or copies of their record. Several nights, they slept in their cars—in cranked-back seats, in the musty roof compartment of the van. They parked under the extraterrestrial lights of rest stops, Jude’s gun tucked into the waistband of his shorts.
The money they made at shows—five- or six-dollar covers split among five or six bands of five or six guys each—barely covered gas. It would not pay for college or