Chapter 13

The only thing that would have been worse was if they were taking pictures…oh, ok. Addie got out her phone and under the stated pretext of getting a shot of the fireplace in my parents’ living room, she totally snapped some of Jude. The lens was pointed directly at him but she was my least sneaky sister, so I’d already smelled a rat. Why would she have wanted pictures of that fireplace and why would she have announced it to the rest of us?

Then she typed something, smiling and nodding a little. When she looked up and saw my gaze on her, she said she had to go help Mom and took off. At that moment, Sophie, Brenna, and JuJu all looked down at their phones and I was pretty sure she’d sent the images to them along with some kind of message. Grace, of course, had lost all her electronic devices, so she missed out on whatever gossip they were passing around and I hadn’t been included in that group chat so I wasn’t supposed to know what she’d written, either.

Except they had all forgotten that I was still the big sister. No, I wasn’t physically the largest anymore, but I still fought the meanest. “Let me see,” I ordered, and I grabbed Brenna’s phone and pinched her ribs at the same time to distract her with pain.

“OW!” she bellowed and lunged for her device, but she was too slow.

“He’s so cute!!!” Addie had written to them below the pictures of Jude. “I think he’s into her. Look at this body language! And her progressed Venus is conjunct—”

Brenna managed to get the phone back. “Sugar, Nicola! Why did you pinch me so hard?” She slapped at my hands.

“I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” Jude said. “You guys still fight like…like…”

“Siblings,” Sophie told him. “No matter how old we get, sometimes one of us gets a pinch in the ribs.”

“At the last barbecue you kicked me in the knee,” Juliet reminded her, and Sophie said JuJu had deserved it for taking the last hot dog, her second when other people (Sophie) hadn’t even gotten to eat her first one.

“Damn,” Jude murmured. “Maybe I’m not tough enough for sisters.”

“I can tell you their weaknesses,” I assured him. “I’ll also protect you.” I wasn’t giving the conversation my full attention, though. What had Addie meant about body language? I wanted to study the pictures she’d taken so I could try to catch that, too. I didn’t care about her comments about Venus, which I hadn’t gotten the chance to completely read—although, if there was something good on the horizon and she could somehow see it with her star stuff…

“Jude, you and I haven’t gotten a chance to talk yet,” my dad broke in. He’d been quiet throughout the physical altercation, because he usually didn’t like to see that kind of thing happening. Since he didn’t like to see it, he ignored the evidence in front of his eyes.

“No, Dad, you don’t have to do that,” I told him. “He isn’t…”

All the blue eyes of my family members turned and stared hard at me.

“Never mind,” I finished weakly. I’d been about to say that my father didn’t need to arrange a special talk, because Jude wasn’t really my boyfriend. But I’d brought him here today for exactly that reason: his presence was meant to trick my parents, and my mother specifically, into thinking that I was in a relationship. That way, she would have to leave me alone and desist from any additional criticism about my singlehood.

I’d been hearing from her a lot. A real lot. In fact, she’d pestered me relentlessly to come to this dinner, which she claimed was for a special announcement that she hadn’t yet made. I could have tried to ignore her complaints about me, except that in one of her texts a few days before, she’d also mentioned that she’d had a great idea to fix my life.

“Online dating!” she’d typed excitedly. “Have you heard of that?”

I had.

“I signed you up!”

“No,” I’d said aloud, and Jude had looked up from hammering and asked me what was wrong. Then he’d laughed his head off when we’d looked up the profiles she’d created for me. One of them used a picture that she’d taken over the Fourth when I’d been red in the face from the heat and was looking so tired and bleary-eyed that I most resembled a strawberry zombie. She’d completed it by writing that my interests were skiing (I hadn’t skied in fifteen years), homemaking (I didn’t know what that meant), and foreign films (I didn’t watch them).

For the other dating app she’d chosen, she’d used a different picture. That one was of me in my high school cheer squad outfit and it was truly disturbing how much interest it had already received.

“Delete those now. Right now!” I’d written back, which had caused a lot of angst on her end. Finally, Jude had stopped laughing and come up with a solution.

“Tell her that you’re bringing your boyfriend over to her dinner party,” he suggested.

“You think I should make Eddie come with me to fake everyone out?” I’d asked, pointing at the man on the other side of my yard. He was supposed to have been painting corbels for the shed, but mostly he and Tamara were braiding her hair. He was pretty good at it.

“I’m busy that night,” he’d called back. And he probably was, because he’d been spending a lot of time with the woman who lived across the street from him, Monique. He’d told me that it was to discuss their real estate deal, but then he’d also casually ordered, “Pick me up a jumbo-sized box of rubbers while you’re out.”

“Not Eddie. I meant that you should bring me to her party, ding-a-ling,” Jude had told me.

“You shouldn’t call Nicola that,” Michael had chastised from inside the shed. “I’m not supposed to say it to Tam.” He stuck his head out of the top of the Dutch door. “Aren’t you her boyfriend for real?” he’d asked Jude.

“We’re housemates,” I’d interjected quickly. “Housemates.”

But here, at my mother’s announcement party, he was supposed to have been more. So he’d been putting on a bit of a show, I thought, by doing things like holding my hand, resting his palm on my shoulder and once, when I’d been bending to get something out of the vegetable drawer in the fridge, resting that palm on my lower back. And it had worked, clearly it had, because my sisters were writing gossipy texts about body language and Venus.

I could even have been fooled myself. Every time he’d touched me, I’d jumped and then had felt…gooey. It had ramped up to the point that, at this moment, I wanted to go throw my arms around his neck and kiss him. It would have been inappropriate behavior for me to engage in anywhere but especially in my parents’ living room, so I was actively restraining myself.

Anyway, Jude went with my father to talk about something in the back yard, and I was so curious about what they were going to say that I crept along after them. But my dad shut the door firmly behind himself and that left me with my sisters and their unbounded curiosity. They’d already questioned my “boyfriend” over dinner about his job, his family, and his past. He’d said that he was a woodworker who had never been married, that his parents were deceased, that he didn’t have brothers and sisters. He’d answered everything honestly, except for the part that our relationship was a lie.

“How did you meet?” JuJu asked me now.

I had decided to keep my responses as vague as possible—honest, but vague. “We met at the hospital.”

“He works there?” Sophie questioned.

“No.”

“What are you saying?” Brenna demanded. “Was he your patient? Ew, Nicola! That’s so gross and unethical!”

“What do you know about medical ethics?” I responded furiously. “What do you know about ethics in general? I saw you take a twenty out of Dad’s wallet before we ate!”

“Brenna, you didn’t…” Addie breathed.

“He was in the ER for a few hours on one occasion and yes, he was briefly my patient,” I stated. “It’s coming up on two years ago this fall. There’s nothing in my professional code of conduct that forbids dating someone whom I only treated once, a long time ago, and there’s nothing in the hospital rules, either. A nurse at DSR married a former patient. I know an EMT who has three kids with a woman he saved. It happens.”

“Remember that you’ll also turn thirty-one this fall,” my mother called from the kitchen. “The clock is ticking, ethics or no ethics.”

“Thanks, Mom!” That type of comment was exactly why Jude was here tonight but I was regretting the decision to play this game. I wondered if my dad was grilling him like the hamburgers he’d made earlier but when I looked through the window at the yard, I saw them laughing together.

“So you met him once when he was sick, and you started dating after that?” JuJu persisted, her tone much lower so that we wouldn’t be overheard by the person in the kitchen.

“No, I met him and then a year and a half later, he came to find me because he wanted to say thank you,” I explained.

Sophie was making the face that she always did when she was working something out in her head, and she’d always been able to solve mental puzzles very quickly. “So you and Jude haven’t been together for very long,” she stated. “You said that he came to the hospital in the fall two years ago and you met again eighteen months later. It’s not a very lasting relationship.”

What did she know about lasting relationships? She was currently only seeing her laptop; she’d brought it today, in fact, since they couldn’t be separated. But Addie responded before I did.

“It’s been long enough,” she said happily, and showed them something on her phone. I didn’t have to pinch her; I just reached over and took it.

“What it this picture supposed to demonstrate?” I asked her, and she shook her head at me, disappointed.

“Look at his expression!” she answered. “He’s clearly so—”

“Oh, wow.”

We all turned to Sophie and she looked up guiltily from her computer screen. “What?” I asked.

“I found some stuff about Jude,” she said. She had a funny expression on her face. “It’s…”

“What? Is he married? Don’t worry, Nic, we’ll all get him,” Brenna said, and she leaned over Sophie to see what was on her laptop screen. “Oh.”

“What? What did you find?” I asked. I’d done searches of my own, but I’d hardly come across any information. Sophie was good, though, and my heart beat harder. “What is it?”

“Jude is his middle name,” she said. “His first name is Jonathan.”

“That’s his father’s name,” I corrected. “I’ve seen his driver’s license, and his name is Jude. Jude Bowers.”

“Maybe that’s what he goes by and maybe he changed it legally, but I always do a search with wide perimeters to catch name discrepancies. I found something under ‘Jonathan Bowers’ and it says that he makes custom wood furniture in Detroit. I think it’s him.”

“Detroit’s a big city,” JuJu said.

“No, I’m pretty sure about this,” Sophie answered, and Brenna nodded. “Because there’s a picture…” She flipped the screen around so that we all could see.

It was an obituary, an obituary for a little girl. It described her as a beloved daughter and yes, there was a picture of her. I hadn’t thought that anyone else could have had Jude’s beautiful, thoughtful eyes, but she did. She was so much like him, in every way. She looked out of the screen and I remembered how he hadn’t even been able to say that he’d lost her. He’d lost his child and he’d nearly lost his life because of it.

“Oh, that’s so sad,” Addie whispered. She was already crying. “Nic, did you know?”

“I did know.” My own eyes were stinging and when JuJu took some tissues for herself, she passed a few to me as well. “He doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“Of course not,” Sophie said. She sniffed and closed the laptop. “We don’t need to look at this anymore.”

Jude and my dad came back in, then, all smiles. My dad didn’t seem to notice a change but my “boyfriend” was startled when he glanced around at the six of us. “The mood dipped while we were gone,” he commented, but then my mother stuck her head around the corner and said that we all needed to be seated. In the next moment, she was carrying in a huge cake with sparklers whizzing on the top of it. Beneath them, some words were spelled out in pink and blue icing.

“Congratulations, Jacqueline!” I read aloud once the fire had died down. “What is this for, Mom? Why are we congratulating you?”

“I’m going to be a grandmother!” she announced, and then beamed around the table.

My sisters and I looked at each other, our eyes meeting and then dropping down to where our uteruses were situated. Mine was empty of a baby, and I was pretty sure from their expressions of confusion that they were in the same state. I looked over at my father, and he was staring at the ceiling, utterly resigned. I understood.

“Oh, holy Mary. Patrick got somebody pregnant?” I asked, and the place went nuts.

“My brother is such an idiot,” I fumed on the way home. Jude was behind the wheel so I was free to gesticulate angrily, and I took advantage of that. “Did you know that one time, he got a goldfish for free?”

“No, I wasn’t aware of a goldfish.”

I nodded furiously. “Well, it’s true! His stupid friend gave it to him because that kid’s mom wouldn’t let him keep it and Patrick swore up and down that he would be the best fish owner ever. I told my mom, no. No, he wasn’t going to take care of a pet and I wasn’t going to do it for him.”

“I have a feeling things didn’t end well.”

“They sure didn’t!” I answered. “The goldfish went belly-up, literally, and Patrick had a fit and so did my mom. They were both shocked, totally thunderstruck, that when he forgot to feed it and change its water, the poor thing died. I would have helped it, but I was so busy that by the time I checked, it was too late.” I still felt bad, and that infuriated me now. “So that fish murderer is going to take care of a human child?”

“With any luck, the baby’s mom will step in and be the responsible one.”

“But…” I’d been about to say that they didn’t have any commitment to each other, that they had no ties of love or legality that would force them into proper parenthood. Jude hadn’t had those things either, though, and I felt sure that he’d been an amazing father. I looked across the car as I remembered the little face on Sophie’s laptop screen, and I felt my eyes burn.

“I can’t believe that your mom got a cake congratulating herself,” he was saying. “You told me that she was driving you crazy with the marriage and kid talk, but I didn’t understand the depth of it. Not until I saw the sparklers.”

“I have to tell you something.”

“What? Are you going to try to adopt your brother’s baby?” He glanced over at me and smiled a little, but then shook his head. “You know that if he comes back to Michigan, everyone will expect you to step in and be a mother to this kid just like you were to your siblings.”

“I won’t do that,” I answered, but I had to continue. “Jude, I need to confess something. I got really mad at you when you knew something about me but kept it secret. And…” And I didn’t want him to get upset, not while he was driving. “You know, we can talk at home.”

“What the ever-loving fuck? Nicola, you can’t do that!” He pulled into a party store parking lot and stopped. “You can’t make some dire announcement and then finish with, ‘We’ll talk later.’”

“Fine!” But as I looked at him, I saw the face of his daughter, too.

“Are you crying?”

“No!” I told him, and then said, “Sophie looked you up and found—she saw the—it was a picture of your daughter. I’m sorry. She was researching you because she thought that you and I were really together, and that’s what she does—she makes these, like, dossiers on our boyfriends, and it was under the name ‘Jonathan Bowers’ but it was your daughter.”

“Her obituary,” he said quietly.

I took a breath in. “Yes.”

“I was born Jonathan Jude, but that was my dad’s name and I never went by it.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated.

“Her mother and I didn’t write the obituary and I never read it. When she died, we let her grandparents do it,” he explained. “They liked things to be formal. It probably says that her mom was ‘Margaret’ instead of ‘Molly,’ too.” He stopped. “What else did it say?”

“I didn’t read most of it. The part I saw said that she was your beloved daughter, and there was a picture. She was just like you.”

He blinked and jerked back, just a little. “She was,” he said. “She really was. It made Molly mad, not actually angry but she’d say, ‘Is there any of me in this kid?’ Her personality was like her mother’s, though, really spunky and goofy. She was such a funny little girl.”

“We don’t have to talk about this anymore.”

“No, it’s ok,” he told me. “I’ve been thinking about her a lot, because her birthday is coming up. She didn’t make it to five.”

“Oh,” I said. Oh. I’d heard a lot of sad stories in the hospitals, but this was the worst. By far, it was the worst.

“When your mom brought out that cake tonight, you all were upset and I understood that, but I was also thinking that your brother is such a lucky guy. What a fortunate man he is to get to be a dad,” Jude said.

“You’re right. I’ll try to think of it that way, too.” I would try not to worry about the baby, because Patrick might come through, he might have had it in himself. I would hope.

“I didn’t understand how lucky I was,” he continued. “When Molly told me that she was pregnant, I remember feeling like I’d been hit with a hammer. No, it was like she’d dropped a concrete block on my chest. I had no idea how I was going to be a father and it really took seeing my baby for the first time for me to understand. The love you have…I mean, I would have done anything. I would have gladly died in her place, but for so long, I didn’t even consider that I could ever lose her. You know, I was her dad, that was me for the rest of my life. It was the most important thing about me and I didn’t think it would end.”

“It didn’t,” I told him. “You still are, just like she’s still your daughter. It’s not like love goes away.”

“No, it hasn’t.”

“I was thinking that you were a good father,” I said. “I bet you were.”

“I hope I was,” he answered, and I nodded. I was sure. “Maybe I was like your mom because at first, I didn’t understand the amount of work. I learned,” he continued. “She didn’t sleep for about the first six months of her life and Molly and I were both walking around like the undead. I mostly used hand tools because I was afraid of the damage I would do if I fell asleep while I was working.”

“It’s a bad idea to use deadly instruments when you’re exhausted,” I agreed, and he looked hard at me for a moment. “I’m better about it now,” I said. “You were right that I needed more sleep.”

“She got better about sleeping, too. But the whole time that I was walking around in a permanent daze, I didn’t even mind because I loved her so much. I didn’t even know I had so much emotion in me.”

He still did. His words brimmed with it.

“I remember her first smile and when we first heard her laugh. It was because I had put a teddy bear over my face, so then I had to do it ten thousand more times so she would keep laughing, this funny little chuckle. Damn, she kept us on our toes. She had so much energy that I would run for miles to train so I could keep up with her.”

I smiled. Juliet had been like that, too.

“And then we started noticing that she wasn’t as energetic, that she seemed tired all the time. Molly brought her to the pediatrician and I remember her calling me from the lobby of the medical building while I was on the way home from my shop. My hands started shaking so hard that I couldn’t drive. We brought her to so many doctors. I sold all my equipment to pay for treatments, and I sold my house for one last try, one last shot at a cure or just a little more time. We were hoping…” He stopped, sighing.

“I’m sorry.”

“Everybody was. We tried to keep things happy, so she wouldn’t be sad or scared. It was bad enough being in all the hospitals, them having to poke her and hurt her. They were all so good about it but I couldn’t stand it.” He rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “She wasn’t laughing anymore and before, that had been who she was. She liked to hide in the house, just stand there totally quiet and still. I lost my mind one day because I couldn’t find her and then she sat down on her butt on the floor because she was laughing so hard.”

Addie had been happy like that, too. “That’s a very, very tricky move. She was smart.”

“As a whip,” he agreed. “I couldn’t wait to see what she would do next. Fuck.” He rubbed his eyes again. “Fuck.”

We sat quietly in the car.

“She taught herself to read,” he said suddenly.

Sophie had done that. “Really?”

“Yeah, just little words at first, because she knew them from the books we’d read together. I guess I was pointing at them as I went along the pages, and then one day she saw a road sign and said, ‘Dog.’ Out of the blue. She was barely three,” he told me. “She had a push bike and she used to go like hell on that thing. It was another reason that I was keeping up with running, so that I could keep up with that bike.”

He continued to talk about his daughter, telling me all kinds of memories. Some of them were funny and some were so sad that it was difficult to listen. I did, though, holding his hand as we sat in that parking lot. After a long time, he put his head back against the seat and I said that I would drive us home, so we switched places.

Shannon’s house was dark, even the kids’ rooms at the front on the second floor, and I briefly wondered where they all were. We hadn’t had the closest of ties since she’d gotten so mad at me for insulting her boyfriend, and she’d been even more distant since the day that she’d claimed to have lost her phone and arrived home so late.

But now wasn’t the time to bother with her. Jude and I walked slowly inside together, and just like he’d done when I was tired or hurt, I accompanied him up the stairs, staying right at his side in case he needed me.

“I know it’s early, but I’m so tired,” he said when we reached his bedroom door.

“Emotion makes me exhausted.” That was one of the reasons that I tried hard not to feel it, since I didn’t have time for that.

“I guess it does to me, too.” He walked into his room and stretched.

I still stood there, and I was very concerned. Emotion didn’t just make people tired, it also made them do stupid things. For example, my sister Sophie had tried to run away to the Caribbean for love and had ruined her life. It could be that all this sadness would make Jude want to drink again. That seemed to me like a strong possibility.

“Do you want to call your sponsor?” I suggested.

He looked over, a little surprised. “No, I don’t think I need to right now.”

“Oh, ok.”

“Are you worried?”

I shook my head, of course I wasn’t.

“Do you want to stay in here for a while? So you know that everything’s ok?” he asked.

That was Jude. He’d told me the worst story in the world and he’d lived it, too, but he was concerned about how I was doing. I blinked a lot and also nodded.

He lay down on his bed fully clothed, but it was just a t-shirt and his shorts. They were his nicest ones, I noticed, and he’d worn them particularly for my parents. I sat down on the edge of the mattress but then got right back up. I went to the bathroom and returned with a washcloth that I’d run under cold water.

“Here,” I said, and rested it on his eyes. “That might help.”

“You probably know a lot of tricks to help people who are coming apart at the seams.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “but it doesn’t appear that you’re coming apart. If you are, you should tell me,” I added quickly, but he shook his head and pressed the washcloth more firmly to his face.

“I don’t think I am. That was hard, but it was good to talk about her. Her mom and I used to but we don’t, not anymore. The last time I heard from Molly was a few months ago when she told me that she got married and they’re expecting.”

That filthy witch. “How dare she,” I seethed, and he removed the washcloth to look at me.

“Molly wasn’t trying to be mean,” he explained. “She knew that I worried a lot about her and she wanted me to know that she’s doing ok. I said that I was, too.”

“You’re doing very, very well.” Despite the fact that I’d dragged him into even more turmoil with the problems in my life, he really was. “I’m very proud of you.”

“You are?”

I nodded. “It feels just like when Grace finally graduated from high school, or when Brenna got her job. I know that I didn’t have anything to do with it, but I still feel proud.”

“Thank you. And you did have something to do with it,” he said.

“I guess everybody at the hospital on the night that you came in had an effect,” I agreed.

“Yeah, but you’re Nicola.” He took my hand. “You’re you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that Grace didn’t graduate from high school on her own and Brenna didn’t get her job without help. Nobody did anything without somebody standing behind them, making sure that they had lunch in their backpacks so they wouldn’t be hungry during the day and making sure that their hair was brushed and they had their homework done. You gave me a place to live and a plan to guide me. I know you’ve been watching to make sure that I’m following through with it,” he told me. “You’ve been checking the groceries that I buy, I caught you timing my runs, and you ask about how much sleep I’m getting. I think you may be recording that in a journal.”

I was.

“You vetted all the people who have put in furniture orders to make sure that I’ll get paid. You do a lot. You made your siblings’ lives better and you make my life better.”

“You don’t think it’s controlling?” I ventured. Some people might have.

“I think it’s caring. You can let go a little, though. I’m ok.”

He was, and I would try.

“I’m glad that you came and ate your short stack of pancakes with me last winter,” Jude told me.

“I am, too.” I brushed back his hair, which was long enough now that I’d trimmed it a few times. Men’s barbery was a talent I’d developed while working on my brother’s head and also my dad’s. “I’ll stay here while you go to sleep, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind at all.”

Good. I planned to stay with him for as long as he’d let me. I would stay forever, if that was ok. I put his hand against my cheek, and he smiled.

“Nicola,” he said. It wasn’t long before he slept.