“Doesn’t matter anymore. Bridge over troubled water.”
Harriet fought the urge to touch the bruise under his eye. “Water under the bridge, you mean?”
“Whatever. I don’t know your hippie songs.” He yawned. “Hey, Dad said my name isn’t from that hippie song. He said it’s from the saint.”
“He did, did he.”
“It’s not?”
She reached for his hands, weighing them in hers. “I guess it’s both. But really we gave you the name because of what it means.” His burn was twisted with scar tissue, healed to a muscley pink, and on the other hand, the X had healed, too. “When they brought you to me, ten days old, I couldn’t believe you were finally mine. I was so grateful. You were like a little bundle that had just fallen from the heavens. And I thought, Jude. In Hebrew, it means ‘Praise.’ Or ‘Thanks.’ ”
Harriet gave his hands a squeeze, and Jude, his blue eyes swimming back—or ahead—to some memory or dream she might never know about, squeezed back.
He had come home, and he would leave and come home and leave and come home again, with new scars and tattoos, but now he let her hold on to his two fragile arms, the limbs that might have been broken had he been home last Saturday evening, when five boys had knocked on the front door. Most were thick-necked football players in their jerseys. One was the dark-eyed boy who had knocked on her door with Hippie several months ago—though Hippie wasn’t here now—before the incident in her greenhouse. His knee was clamped into a brace, and he was fondling the handle of a wooden cane. Harriet did not care to know the details of the neighborhood wars that had sent Jude running. But perhaps it was this injury, she dared to wonder, that had prevented this gang from making their counterattack in a timelier manner.
“Is Jude home?” he’d asked, like any of the boys, in recent days, who’d come over to raid her fridge.
But this time Harriet had not moved aside. The hairs on the back of her neck had gone cool. And then Bob had come downstairs, the gun he never wore holstered now across his shoulders and under his armpit in one of those equestrian contraptions that made him look like a soap opera police chief. Maybe it was the moment she’d fallen in love, when he’d leaned silently, smilingly against the doorframe and slipped his arm around her waist. “No, he’s not,” she told the boys.
“Where is everyone?” Jude asked now, withdrawing his hands from hers. “I heard about your . . . man friend.”
“Bob,” she said, trying not to smile. “Bob’s on a job this morning.”
“What’s with Bob? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Bob’s cool,” said Prudence, who was leaning in the doorway in a towel. “He plays the pan flute, and he can say the Gettysburg Address backwards.”
Jude sat up. “Why would anyone want to say it frontwards?”
Bob came over for dinner. Bob made seven-spice couscous with the green beans and tomatoes from Harriet’s garden. He’d picked up the recipe in Casablanca, where he’d tracked a woman who’d married some rich guy and then emptied his accounts. He’d tracked a guy who’d stolen a helicopter, tenants who’d jumped rent, and an underground cockfighting league, run in a number of Bronx basements. He was done with that wretched place called New York. Two weekends after setting foot in Vermont, he’d moved his sick mother out of their condo and up to a cabin on the lake. And he started every other sentence with the word happily. “Happily, I was able to track down the no-good crook.” “Happily, they had a whole batch of fresh mint.” But he called Jude’s mom “honey” and she called him “honey” back. At one point, he took off her glasses, buffed them on his apron, and slipped them back on her face.
Jude and Prudence did the dishes. Jude washed, Prudence dried. Eliza lay on the couch, her wet bikini still dampening her dress from her swim in the lake that afternoon. “I just want to be weightless,” she’d said. Now Bob was doing hypnotherapy on her, showing her how to put herself to sleep. Prudence told Jude that Tory Ventura and Missy Sherman had broken up, that he was off crutches, and that he’d gotten a football scholarship to Duke. He’d be leaving town within a matter of days. Jude tried to conceal his relief.