Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [62]
“What’s wrong with Pru?”
“Nothing. She’ll be fine. Of course I’ve been hoping this would happen for you, this was my distinct hope, but it just seems too good to be true. Living with your dad . . . I didn’t expect . . .”
“I gotta go, Mom. I’m going somewhere.”
“Wait. How’s school?”
“Fine.” He had generated a setting and cast of characters for this lie—East Side Community High School on Twelfth Street, where he had seen some sketchy-looking kids shooting hoops behind a chain-link fence; teachers named Mr. Prabhupada and Mr. Omfug. “I got a ninety-nine on my British Lit midterm.”
Harriet paused. He’d gone too far, he realized. “Jude. You telling me the truth?”
The fact that she didn’t believe him—that his recovery was so implausible, his soul so unsaveable—made him want to hang up. She was the fucking Glass Lady.
“True till death,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. It means you don’t have to worry about me anymore.”
Don’t be so hard on your mom,” Les said after Jude hung up. “She’s got reason to be worried.” One thing Jude knew about his father, had known about him since he turned nine years old, was that he couldn’t keep a secret. Still, he was caught off guard when Les spilled the beans. Some weeks back, Harriet’s studio had been vandalized. Smashed to shit. All the fish tanks full of all her glass pieces. Vases, bowls, bongs, pipes. A baseball bat, probably, but the only evidence left behind was a beer bottle, scattered among the broken glass.
“What? Who was it?”
Jude had been sitting on the floor in the kitchen, slumped against the refrigerator while he talked to his mother, his back still sticky with sweat from the matinee at CB’s. Now he sat up straight.
“She doesn’t know for sure. But she says the kid you ripped off came looking for you the day before with some other dude.”
Jude ran a frantic hand over his head. Hippie. Tory. He’d just spent hours slamming his body against a roomful of shirtless New York hardcore boys. The boys of Vermont seemed very far away.
He saw his mother standing over the shards of her studio, the glass twinkling around her. He saw her sweeping it into the dustpan, heard the heavy thud of the glass sliding into the trash.
“I’m going to kill those drunk fucks,” he said. “I’ll kill them.”
“Slow down now, champ.” Les was packing the bowl of Gertrude, his second favorite bong. “For one thing, your mom doesn’t want you to get upset. She thinks you’re not strong enough. But you got to know who you’re dealing with here.”
“Why didn’t they just steal everything? Why’d they go and smash it all?”
Les shrugged. “Maybe they just wanted to scare you. Sounds like the damage has been done.”
“My ass. It’s a threat!” Jude got to his feet, opened the refrigerator, and emptied a bottle of chartreuse Gatorade down his throat.
“They’re just hicks, these kids,” Les said. “Still, you don’t really want them using their baseball bats on you. It’s a good idea for you to stay here a while, don’t you think?”
“Fuck that,” Jude said, tossing his empty bottle in the sink. “We have to go back. You can bring McQueen.”
Les lowered his lips to Gertrude and, with his barbecue lighter, took an experimental hit. He liked to believe he was the kind of father who would teach his son to fight back, but his son’s extremes made him want to offer him the peace pipe instead. The kid had come to him in a coma, and now he was raging for combat. When Harriet had called him to Jude’s rescue, he had felt a startling kinship with the boy, a sense of molecular fulfillment that, despite Les’s absence in his life, Jude had become the idle, brooding pothead that Les had been as a teenager. Now he recognized none of himself in his son. Surely this turbulent little reverend with the military haircut was not Les’s flesh and blood. And then he remembered, with a slow, dismal shame—he was always forgetting—that he wasn’t.
“Jude,” said Les. “I know you feel guilty about dragging your mom into this