Before You Go (10 page)

She was sitting on some long-haired guy’s lap.

Jude watched from fifty feet away as Becka fed the boy a french fry. She laughed, playful, bare-shouldered, gorgeous. Becka had a hand around the boy’s shoulder. Jude knew she had a couple of older brothers. But he could imagine Roberto’s voice in his ear:
“Dude, I don’t think that’s her brother.”

No, this guy was the drummer in the band.
The drummer!
Probably drove a freaking love van with cheap carpet in the back. A night’s worth of rum and coke mainlined to Jude’s brain, fogging his thoughts. He spun, turned, staggered as if punched, more buzzed than he realized, and made his way back to Corey and Roberto.

“We gotta go, we gotta go right now,” Jude announced.

“Sit down, man,” Roberto said. “Pull up a chair. I can’t drive for at least another hour.”

“I don’t care,” Jude said. “We’ll walk, whatever. I’m leaving
now.
” Jude bolted, had to get out of there, the spinning lights, the crowds. He fled in search of fresh air.

Corey and Roberto exchanged glances, followed Jude out the side door.

“You all right?” It was Corey in Jude’s ear, holding him by the upper arm. “What happened?”

“She’s playing Santa with the drummer—the freaking drummer!” Jude sputtered.

They eventually got the story out of him, not that it was anything new: Boy meets girl, girl rips heart out of boy’s chest, feasts on his entrails. Welcome to the zombie apocalypse. Same old, same old. Corey wrapped an arm around Jude’s shoulders, steadied him. “The high school isn’t far from here. We can hang by the bleachers, howl at the moon. You’ll be okay.” He turned to Roberto. “Can you go back inside and smuggle out a pitcher of Coke?”

“Aye-aye, me bucko,” Roberto grinned.

*   *   *

Three messy hours later, with great concentrated effort, Jude slid the key into his front door. It was late, past midnight. The house was dark. He felt tired, beat. Grabbed the banister by the stairs and groaned. Something caught his eye. Jude paused, stopped. “Mom, I didn’t see you there.”

She was in her bathrobe, sitting in the dark, waiting for her boy to come home.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Have you been drinking?”

Jude considered the question, brain misfiring. “It’s okay, Mom,” Jude said. “I’m home now. I’m going to bed. You should too.”

He looked at her from across the room. Her hair was beginning to turn white, her eyes were pink and small. She seemed frail, fragile. She had never been the same. Ever since Lily passed, his mother was present and absent at once. Here and not here.

Jude took a few steps up the stairs, almost losing his balance. He sat down on the fifth step, elbows on his knees, head in his hands.

His mother rose and took a tentative step toward him. “Are you going to be all right? Jude? Can I help you?”

He shook his head, “No, no. It’s just … tonight sucked.” He looked up, steadied his gaze, watched his mother stare at him. Her arms dangled uselessly at her sides, like a marionette with severed strings.

She didn’t move, frozen in place; didn’t speak, unable to find the words.

“Good night, Mom,” Jude finally said, slowly rising. “Love you.”

She nodded imperceptibly in the dark, a movement he did not catch, and otherwise made no reply.

Heart clouded in confusion, Jude climbed the stairs and fell—dreamlessly, noiselessly, thoughtlessly—into bed.

FIFTEEN

Jude hit the snooze button three times before rising. He felt sour, his mouth stale and parched, his teeth wearing sweaters after a night of too much rum and coke and heartache. The house was silent. Jude shambled into the bathroom for a long, reviving shower. It helped. Failing to find a fresh work shirt, Jude fished the cleanest dirty shirt from the hamper. Sniffed it, frowned:
pretty ripe.
The shirt matched his mood. Mad at the world.

In the kitchen, Jude gulped a tall glass of orange juice. A note on the counter informed him that his father had gone out for a long, slow run. His father ran to get away from it all, yet despite all the hours logged and miles slogged, he always returned to the same place; the road never rose to lift him to some new, shimmering elsewhere.

Jude considered himself a different kind of runner entirely. First of all, his father
jogged
; Jude
ran.
Big diff. His father was one of those old guys who stopped after his run, winded and panting, two fingers on his neck, counting the beats of his pulse while he stared at the watch on his wrist. Goofy shit, if you asked Jude. A lot of times, Jude headed out in just a pair of shorts. No shirt, no shoes, a barefoot runner in the burbs. Nobody could say nothing, because Jude was faster than them all.

His mother was a notorious late riser; Jude rarely saw her before he left for work. He knew he should eat, so cracked three eggs into a bowl, scrambled them with a fork, and added a splash of milk while a slab of butter sizzled in the skillet. Jude tossed torn pieces of ham into a second, smaller pan. He had grown into a capable cook, and ham and cheese omelets were his specialty. His mother wasn’t big on sit-down meals these days—or had the days becomes years?—so Jude was used to fending for himself. She used to have a job, selling medical supplies, but after Lily passed, things changed. She eventually got laid off for missing too many days and …

After Lily passed.

That phrase again.

Those three words like a sword that severed his life in two.

It was how everyone talked. Empty words in hushed, polite tones.
After Lily passed.

Passed?
Past
? And what of the present? It was defined by absence, what was no longer there. The empty mirror after someone walks away.

Lily was dead and that was that, no other way to skin the cat, yet she came to his mind every day. A visitor, a neighbor ringing the bell. Here to borrow a cup of sugar? Or with some other intent? Why ask why. Sometimes he called for her, conjured up images like a sorcerer. Lily at play, her lithe body wriggling inside a hula-hoop, the family cheering, “Go, girl, go!” The two of them drawing shoulder to shoulder on the hardwood floor. At Lily’s urging, Jude copied comics from the newspaper and she colored them in. He laughed at her crazy color schemes. The grass blue, the sun green, the sky a cockamamy blaze of orange and pink. Lily never saw anything wrong with it, and neither did Jude.

Most days he didn’t try to remember. But Lily would come to him unbidden, a spectral figure, a holographic image projected from the dreamworld ether. He would pass a playground and see her, like a vision, sitting idly on a swing as if waiting for a push. Or out on his own street, he’d see one of Lily’s old playmates riding a bicycle—little Zoe Buchman, older now, still growing, still alive—and the memories would come flooding back, drowning his thoughts with images and phrases. He remembered those silly songs she used to sing—“
Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any pizza
?”—her smiles, and her laughter. He remembered how his father had packed her things in boxes and stored them in the attic. But for the most part, Lily’s room remained unchanged, untouched by time: His mother had insisted on that. Jude dared not enter—after ever after—but could still picture it: that enormous stuffed bear in the corner, the posters of ballerinas on pink walls.

Gone, and yet she was everywhere.

He missed her so much.

They had turned her room into a kind of shrine, a mausoleum filled with her playthings. It was weird and upsetting, Jude thought. His mother called it the guest room, but who was she kidding? Nobody came. It was the Lily Museum, an internment room for her spirit. Jude looked at it once and never returned, nor did his father, but sometimes he’d catch his mother in there, sitting quietly in a chair, the door open, hands folded in her lap, as if waiting for a bus or something else to take her away.

His cell vibrated. Becka—again. She had tried him twice last night, and twice Jude ignored the messages before finally powering off altogether. He didn’t have the heart for it. Not yet. Had she seen him at the bowling alley? Snatched a glimpse as he stood there, watching her? Or as he turned, walking away? Did she merely want to give him a ride to work?

Jude had briefly considered running—it would be good to sweat out the toxins, clear his head—but he knew there was no life in his legs this morning.

He took the bus.

*   *   *

Becka was already at work, seated behind a register. Jude managed to stay busy, avoid eye contact. Jessup looked haggard, slumped in a chair at his desk, puffy around the eyes. Allergies or something worse. “You look like hell,” Jude said, not unsympathetically.

Jessup nodded, said he felt worse than that, told Jude in a hoarse voice to go clean up the picnic area. Jude grabbed a soapy washrag, bucket, and broom to wander among the yellow tables, searching the ground for fallen fries, used napkins, fluttering hot dog wrappers, assorted windswept litter. Most people didn’t bother clearing their tables after eating, figuring that somebody else would clean up after them. They figured right about that—somebody would, some sucker with a fierce hangover named Jude Fox.

He felt confused and angry, a bitter taste on the back of his tongue. Out of old habit, Jude tried to push his thoughts aside, focus on the bright morning sunshine, but it was useless. The same unhappy feelings yammered at his brain. Corey had tried to console Jude last night, hauling out that stale line about how there were plenty more fish in the sea. “Don’t obsess, Jude,” Corey advised. “She’s one girl. There are lots more babes out there. Look around. It’s a beautiful planet.”

Jude knew Corey didn’t believe a word of it. Neither of them looked at girls that way. Becka wasn’t another fish in the sea, some flat-bellied flounder in the deep blue water. Becka was different, special. They had a connection, Jude knew it. And this one hurt.

He checked the garbage cans, using cardboard trays to push down the contents, hoping he wouldn’t find one that had to be emptied. But it was part of the job, the grunt work, and when necessary, he pulled up the bulging, soggy plastic liners, tied them off, and inserted a new liner into each grimy, foul-smelling can. He half dragged, half carried the torn, dripping, disgusting bags over to the Dumpster around back. Good times.

Roberto found Jude by the Dumpster. “He’s coming!” Roberto exclaimed. “Jessup is going home sick. They’re shifting him over to West End Two.”

Jude’s brain was fogged. He didn’t understand.

“Kenny Mays,” Roberto said. “He’s filling in for Denzel.”

“Have you got a man crush on this guy?” Jude asked. “I’m starting to wonder about you, Roberto—not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

“Shut up, Lumbus,” Roberto replied. “You’ll see.” Then he returned to his post behind the counter, practically skipping with excitement. Jude sighed. He felt like crawling into the Dumpster for a nap.

The new manager, Kenny Mays, arrived when Jude was working the grill. Kenny was smallish with a large beak, a college boy with wavy hair that grew below his ears. Jude watched through sidelong glances as Kenny moved through the crew, introducing himself, learning names. There didn’t seem anything particularly wonderful about him, but at the same time, he seemed real. Unpretentious. Kenny slipped a hot pretzel from the warmer and took a bite. He turned to Jude. “Did you make this?”

Jude shook his head, pointed to Emilio.

“Emilio, right?” Kenny asked. “When did you make the pretzels?”

Emilio shrugged. “I don’t know, when I first came in, a couple of hours ago.”

“Here, take a bite.” Kenny ripped off a length of pretzel and handed it to Emilio, who chewed it thoughtfully.

“Are you proud of that pretzel?” Kenny asked.

Emilio glanced at Jude, shifted his eyes back to the new manager, wondering if he was getting punked or some other kind of joke. “It’s a pretzel.” He shrugged.

“No offense,” Kenny said, “but it tastes like an old shoe that’s been peed on by a dog.”

Emilio stopped chewing, swallowed.

“Pull all those out, throw ’em away,” Kenny said. “You can’t leave pretzels hanging in that warmer for too long; they turn to cardboard.” He instructed Emilio to make another batch, not so much salt this time. Less brown, more golden.

As the day dragged on, Kenny remained a ball of energy. Bouncing from one place to the other, joking with the crew, grabbing two strong guys and getting them to rearrange the kegs in the walk-in refrigerator, and on and on. He worked hard and made everyone else work hard too. That’s when Jude realized that it was like a guitar, all about
tone.
Not what you said, but
how
you said it. The words were just words, standard grammatical units,
floating on sound.
The weird thing was, Jude now understood, the sound meant more than the words themselves. You could say “close the door” eight hundred different ways. But Kenny could tell you to clean out the toilets in such a way that you’d race into the bathrooms, eager to swab away. He had a gift for making every task sound good.

In the late afternoon, with things slowing down, Kenny pulled Jude aside. “Hey, Jude, hey, Jude, hey, Judy, Judy, Jud-EEE!” he sang, as countless others had done before him. “You know this crew better than I do. Who do I send home, and who do I keep for the big rodeo?”

Jude arched his eyebrows. “A rodeo? Like a yee-ha kind of thing?”

“Closing this place, breaking it down, cleaning it up. I need real workers—no slackers,” Kenny said.

“How many?” Jude asked.

“Four guys and two cashiers.”

Jude pointed out a few likely crew members, Ivan, Roberto, and DaJon, the mustached twenty-one-year-old with a silky manner who was old enough to pour beer. DaJon was a good guy. Jude looked across the floor to the three cashiers who remained: Daphne, Becka, and the unlovely lump Margorie Watson, aka Sourpuss. “Maybe Daphne and Margorie?” he suggested.

Kenny laughed, took it like a joke. “Right, large Marge in charge. She looks like fun.” He picked Becka instead.