Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [23]
The Donahoes have been coming over to play poker for years, dancing in the living room and smoking the Donahoes’ hookah after sending Jude and Prudence to bed. One night that summer, when his parents went to the Donahoes’ house for dinner, they left Jude and Prudence in the van parked in the Donahoes’ driveway, too cheap to hire a sitter, with their comic books and Cracker Jacks. A slumber party, Les said. Jude told Prudence ghost stories, swallowing the orange glow of the flashlight in his mouth, until she cried herself to sleep in her sleeping bag.
And one morning not long ago, when Jude asked his mother where his father was, she looked at Jude as though trying to think of a good lie, and then, changing her mind, said, “He’s on the Donahoes’ boat with Mrs. Donahoe.” She was emptying a glass ashtray in the garbage can, and she banged it so hard it split down the middle and sliced her finger open. Jude has been on the Donahoes’ sailboat before. It’s named Feelin’ Groovy, and below deck there’s a bed.
But the way Mr. Donahoe is leaning into Jude’s mother’s hair is more businesslike than romantic, conspiratorial in the way Jude and Prudence occasionally are. They look worried, Jude thinks. He can’t hear their whispers, only the music inside, and the early fireworks bursting here and there over Tamarack Street, and over the lake, where other people are having parties. Jude’s mother pours the green liquid from her glass into the snow, drops her cigarette in the puddle, and goes inside. After she leaves, Mr. Donahoe, who once for no reason gave Jude a very valuable collector’s copy of Captain America 100, takes a piss beside the van, then follows her. The snow has started again, white flakes floating down like feathers in a pillow fight.
It’s snowing still, maybe several hours later, when Jude wakes up to more sounds in the alley—the slamming of the van door. Crawling from his bed, still in his bathrobe and boots, he opens the window and hangs his head outside. The bottom half of his father is disappearing into the Purple People Eater, a flashlight bobbing inside. Jude thinks he must be sleeping in the camper, as he has been known, in warmer weather, to do. Instead he emerges with the sleeping bag in his arms. He’s now wearing a pair of snow boots, a parka, and the dashiki he wore to Woodstock. He’s halfway to the greenhouse, waddling through the snow, when he stops, panting heavily, then looks up at Jude’s window.
“What?” he says.
Jude doesn’t say anything. The cold air is burning his ears and his nose.
“Come on, then,” says his father, shuffling along again.
By the time Jude reaches the greenhouse, his father has turned on all the lights—twelve overhead lamps, plugged into a network of extension cords—and the warm room is getting warmer. The light is bright and orange, and the air smells sweet and spicy at the same time. It’s been a while since Jude was allowed in here.
There is no glass, no hothouse plastic, no natural light. But it’s green, and it’s a house of sorts: an aluminum shed painted the color of a tennis court. All around—on shelves, beneath tables, in a kiddie pool that neither Jude nor his sister has ever played in—are his plants. They’re the greenest green Jude has seen all winter, and some of them, the ones wrapped in chicken wire, the ones sprouting purple flowers, are taller than he is. Jude’s father takes out his army knife. From one of the dried branches hanging upside down from the clothesline, he carefully cuts away the outer leaves, removes a thimbleful of hairy bud, and then, sitting down in the old rocking chair, packs his brown glass pipe with it. The greenhouse is the size of Jude’s bedroom—big, the whole third floor of the warehouse—and as he burrows into the sleeping bag at his father’s feet, he wishes he could sleep in here instead.
“I thought the lights weren’t supposed to be on at night,” Jude says. In the orange light his father’s left cheek is an angry red. “What happened to your face?”
His father puts two fingers to his cheek. He has a soft, pale, leathery face, with splotches