him before he can find us,” said Jude.
Neither Delph nor Kram stopped him from handing over the five crisp hundred-dollar bills, along with his old guitar, and leaving with the Les Paul. They walked through the dazzling sunshine to the Kramaro, Jude’s guitar case heavy as a cannon. He was out of hiding.
The next morning, when Harriet again made her plea, Jude fed his toast into the toaster and said, “Taken care of.”
This is what Harriet knew about the girl who had given birth to her son: she was Caucasian, and in 1971, she was unmarried and she was sixteen. With these stark facts Harriet had sculpted a number of identities over the years, characters who would visit but not quite haunt her dreams. Most often she appeared as a flower child, a freckled Village nymph with miles of long red hair. She was a girl who liked boys and Dusty Springfield and getting stoned, and one night had had too much fun in the back of a car; she was the girl Harriet would have been if she were ten years younger and hadn’t spent her adolescence in a sweater set and a Maidenform bra it would take years for her to burn. For the young city girl who Did the Right Thing, Harriet felt a dangerous sense of gratitude, as though Harriet owed her, as though one day the girl would come to collect, would materialize to reclaim Jude and see what a mess Harriet had made of the boy.
It was not until last January, when the young doctor had offered her brisk diagnosis, that Harriet’s image of Jude’s birth mother had changed. Now she was a drunk. A sixteen-year-old drunk, a ghetto dweller, a street urchin, with questionable hygiene and poorly fitting clothes and the same alcohol-melted facial features, as though they were a family trait. Or she was a prostitute. Or she was a junkie. It pained Harriet, the distaste she now felt for the mother of her own child. The only silver lining in this dim picture was that the girl (she was a woman now, of course, but she would always be a girl to Harriet) would be too drunk, too uncaring, or too dumb to look for Jude, and even if she did—this was perhaps an even greater relief—too incompetent to recognize Harriet’s own incompetence.
Still, she’d had an irrational fear that he would run into his birth mother in New York—the place of his birth—that one day he would see his own face looking back at him on the subway.
Or worse: that he’d seek her out.
But he had come home to her instead. And he’d brought with him a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl. One morning while the boys were out and Prudence was at school, Harriet fed Eliza a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar to soothe the heartburn she’d woken up with. “It sounds backward, but it works,” she assured her. They stood at the butcher-block kitchen counter, both of them still in their pajamas. Eliza cringed as it went down, but after a few seconds, her face softened. “It does,” she said in wonder.
“When I was pregnant, I drank this stuff like water.” Automatically, Harriet was careful not to say When I was pregnant with Prudence, to exclude Jude unnecessarily. “They don’t tell you about the heartburn, do they? Or the hemorrhoids? The varicose veins?”
“Hemorrhoids?”
“You still have those to look forward to. They should include those in the sex ed video, right? That would solve the teen pregnancy crisis.”
Eliza’s eyes closed, and her hand went to her chest. She was either absorbing the molecules of her relief or fighting off tears. Harriet had meant her comment as a joke, but of course it hadn’t been received as one. She put her hand to her own chest. Maybe she hadn’t meant to joke. Maybe she was trying, in her sarcastic way, to parent someone in this house. Jude had admitted, before she could bring it up, that he’d lied about going to school in New York. This she had suspected, and it was an affirmation to know that of all the dark and mercurial sentiments that commanded her parental life, the one she could still count on was distrust. She had known it was too good to be true! Strangely, Jude’s disclosure of this fact made the rest of his conversion more plausible. Of course, he didn’t plan on returning to school in Vermont, either. He was working on his music. He was no