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so terrific and terrible she had written him off as dead, and so maybe his dad was as much of a drunk as his mom and so maybe he’d known he’d knocked her up, but he’d rambled on, that’s what the rockers did, Robert Plant and maybe even Bob Seger and those silly hippies, didn’t they all have love children scattered all over the map? And then the next morning, seventeen days after Johnny had moved in with his dad, the blackened husk of the Chevy was found in a parking lot off the Long Island Expressway, the Blazer blazed, a witticism at least one local paper picked up on in its back-page crime log, and not long after, Max and Marshall Cheshire were arrested for insurance fraud, shipped off to Arthur Kill—shipped back to Arthur Kill—but not before Marshall had managed to cosign a checking account in Johnny’s name and make off with all the $469 Johnny had earned shoveling Lintonburg driveways. Brothers went down together, they went down in flames, but your kids, they were expendable. That was when Johnny moved into Tompkins. He didn’t have bus fare back to Vermont, and even if he did, he wouldn’t have gone home. He would not return with his tail between his legs for his mother to say “I told you so.”

So he left his brother at home to go down in flames alone.

On Teddy’s birthday, watching his old house from across the street, Johnny had pictured Queen Bea packing up her car in the middle of the night. He’d come close to telling Eliza then that his mother had left because of him, because he’d done something stupid: he’d called her. From the same phone booth where he’d received the news of Teddy’s death, he had spoken to her on Christmas. In his last letter, Teddy had affixed a surprising PS: I want to find out if my dad is alive. Ha-ha, I know you said not to bother, but will you help?

When Johnny had finally started talking to his mother again after his father went to jail, she’d said she’d been trying to protect him from Marshall. “I was trying to save you the trouble,” she said, and Johnny had almost felt sorry for her. Who knew how far you could trust her (you certainly couldn’t throw her very far), but she said Marshall had also ripped her off, and slapped her around, and when she was pregnant, too. That was why she’d changed her name, she said. That was why she’d told Johnny he was dead. They’d shared accounts. He knew how to find her. She didn’t want him tracking her down.

But what about Teddy’s dad?

“He’s dead,” she’d said quickly. “Dead, dead. Don’t go looking for him, John.”

He didn’t believe her. But he believed she was scared. He believed that Teddy’s father must be a monster, too, a monster worse than Marshall Cheshire. He told his brother to forget his dad. “It’s not worth the trouble, Ted.”

After he got Teddy’s letter, though, Johnny stewed over it for days, the letter propped up over his sink. He remembered the white moons of Ravi’s fingernails, the black hairs on the back of Ravi’s hands. He had to be Teddy’s dad. What if he was a good guy? What if he wouldn’t break Teddy’s heart?

Finally, on Christmas morning, he called Queen Bea. He wanted to give her the chance to tell Teddy herself. “He’s asking about his dad,” he said. “I know it’s Ravi. I know he’s alive. He deserves to know him.” If she didn’t tell them where he was, he told her, Johnny would find him on his own.

And on New Year’s Eve, she was gone. What had spooked her so powerfully Johnny didn’t know, but it was enough to send her away for good. Queen Bea was the one who’d left Teddy alone for Eliza and Jude to pump full of drugs. But Johnny might as well have packed up her car and driven her away.

Twelve

What was there to do, back in Lintonburg, but start a band? “We’ll bring straight edge to the people,” Jude told Johnny. “It’ll be a sight to behold.” Kram and Delph were on board. They’d both been dumped by their girlfriends. They had no college plans. The grassy summer stretched before them.

And so one Saturday morning in May, the former members of the Bastards gathered in Jude’s basement for their first practice in two and a half