Ten Thousand Saints Page 0,75

and khaki pants that matched his khaki hair. When he saw Jude and Johnny file in, he whistled. “Jeezum Crow! What are you guys doing here?”

He furnished them both with quick, back-pounding hugs, wrestling Jude in half and sawing his knuckles over his skull. “I didn’t recognize this little shit without the hair! What’d you do with your devil lock?”

“The demon has been exorcised,” Johnny said. “He’s an angel now.”

“Yeah, right!” Kram let Jude go and grabbed a fistful of Johnny’s white wedding robe. “You’re the angel! Look at this. What is this, Halloween?”

“You look the same,” Johnny said. “Still got your gut.”

“That’s all muscle, McDickless. The ladies love it.”

“Pizza Slut, huh?” Jude asked.

Kram stood up straight, hitching up his khakis. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t getting any hours at the Record Room. You know Delph made assistant manager over there?”

“Oh yeah?”

“I’m the one got him the job there. And I’ve got a hell of a lot better taste in music.”

“That’s debatable,” said Johnny.

“Shit, you grew up, Judy. You’re taller than me.”

Jude did feel older, but maybe that was just because Lintonburg felt the same. Following route 7 north past the twinkling vistas of Middlebury and Vergennes and Charlotte, past the shuttered flea market grounds and the round sheep barn and the shore of the thawing lake, past the snake’s tongue where route 7 forked into Grammer and Champlain, and then two rise-and-falls until they reached the Day-Glo torch of the gas station, Jude had felt that he could drive that road with his eyes closed, even if it was his first time actually driving it.

Nothing had changed.

“Fucking bullshit is what it is.” Kram was telling them about the P.E. credit that would keep him from graduating next month. A starting linebacker for four years, and they were talking about a P.E. credit. He didn’t want to go to college anyway; he wanted to get back into music. “This is perfect. You still got my old drum kit in your basement, Judy? You guys still got guitars? We could revive the Bastards! The Bastards live!”

Johnny put his hands on Kram’s shoulders. “You high, man?”

“No, man, I haven’t done that shit in weeks. Delph doesn’t sell no more.”

“Really?”

“He’s a working man now. More money, more hours, more responsibilities, blah blah.”

Johnny now offered Jude a look. Jude knew he was wondering the same thing he was—whether, during the time Jude had spent in New York, despite Kram’s late-night beer run, he and Delph had taken their own steps, however blind, toward sobriety. Whether they might not be so hard to recruit to their team.

“We got to let Delph know you’re in town. What are you lesbians doing back here, anyway?”

A bell jingled, and Eliza entered the store. Pregnant, barefoot, in her sari. Her cheek was impressed with the handle of the suitcase she’d slept against. “Hey,” she said, “do you think they have any Yoo-hoo?”

Harriet had been dreaming of her ex-husband, the two of them trying to catch fish in nets on a boat very much like Jerry and Ingrid Donahoe’s—had she ever been on another boat in her life, in forty-three years of living on a lake?—when the wheels of his ancient van turned over the gravel behind her house. It took her a moment to remember that he was not the one driving. She leapt out of bed, pulled on her robe, and ran a toothbrush across her teeth before stalking downstairs, where her son was filling a bowl at the sink. He’d packed some muscle on his frame, and she watched from the bottom step of the spiral staircase as he placed the water on the floor and a tiger-striped cat, purring at his ankles, drank gratefully from the bowl. Through the kitchen door, two more teenagers appeared, each of them holding another cat, and while the scene should have terrified her—six new bodies in the house, seven if you counted the baby—the way the kids carried themselves, tiptoeing, whispering, stroking the animals’ ears, reassured her.

She did not wish to be in the middle of Les’s girlfriend’s business—or ex-girlfriend, as the case may have been—but she found herself without much choice. If she’d refused Eliza and Johnny, she’d be refusing Jude, too, and the fact was she’d missed him. So she wouldn’t think about the pregnant girl, about what would happen to her when she was no longer pregnant. It was not her business. She was merely providing temporary shelter to two kids who needed help. Every summer her favorite