Chapter 8

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

Jude nodded. “It seems like a good way to spend a Saturday.”

“Wouldn’t you rather go to a baseball game?” I suggested. “Or watch more online cooking classes?” Those had been a benefit to everyone. He’d made some really delicious food and he always left a carefully wrapped plate in the refrigerator for me to eat when I got home.

“I’m not much of a baseball guy,” he said. “Do I turn here?”

I nodded. We had taken his car because he wasn’t worried about transporting the supplies, and he also always carried a load of tools with him. There were many things to fix. “If you didn’t play baseball, what sports did you do in school?”

“I was more of the kid who marveled at the athletic people because I knew I’d never be that way myself,” he said. “I did ride my bike for miles, which was out of necessity to get around. In middle and high school, I had an after-school job at a pizzeria instead of playing sports or being in a club, and I worked there on weekends, too.” He followed the direction of my pointed finger and made a left onto Spring Street. “That was how I started to learn woodworking. The owner of the restaurant had a big shop behind his house and he was a very nice guy. I’d go there all the time and build crap with him. He taught me a lot.”

“Do you still see him?”

“Up until he passed away, I saw him every few weeks. I’d stop in to eat and he’d say I was his success story.” He shook his head. “Anyway, no baseball today, and I’ll cook more later. For now, I’m happy to go to your friend Eddie’s house and see what I can do.”

There was plenty.

“And you shouldn’t be up on a ladder trying to paint,” he continued.

“There’s nothing wrong with my balance. I’m fine.”

“You almost fell on the stairs when you came home after you got hurt,” he reminded me, and just like every time he mentioned it, he winced. He couldn’t stop himself. “What if I hadn’t been there?”

I didn’t want to consider that question because I liked that he was there, not only when I had a black eye but all the time. “I’m fine now. It happened a few days ago,” I reminded him back, although it was true that I still looked ghastly. When I’d gone into work at Midtown General for the first time since the kick, they’d freaked out and I’d had to tell the story a hundred times. It had done a lot to advance Operation Fake Friend, though, because I’d garnered a lot of sympathy and heard many stories from other people who’d also been hurt on the job. If I had been a different person, I might have said that we bonded over it.

“Still, no going on a ladder. Got it?” The words sounded like an order but when he looked over at me, he smiled.

“Ok, I won’t,” I agreed. I would listen to him if it made him happy, and actually, I wasn’t really excited about climbing to high places. Eddie’s porch really needed a makeover and Cal, ZZ Top from the Woodshop, had another friend who hoarded a lot of leftover paint. Jude and I had gone to his garage and picked out several gallons and now we were heading together to work on the project.

“This is…not the nicest neighborhood I’ve ever visited,” he pointed out as we got closer. “This is where you’re going by yourself?”

“It’s fine. No, it really is,” I assured him when he glanced over again but frowned instead of smiling. “I’m always careful.”

“How long have you been coming here?”

I didn’t have to think to answer. “Seven years and four months.”

“You know that it’s exactly four—”

“There’s his house,” I stated. “You can pull into the driveway because he doesn’t have a car anymore. Right there.”

I’d called earlier this morning and mentioned that I would be bringing a friend to help me, and Eddie had snorted. “Who’s spending time with you?” he’d demanded, but then he’d asked me a bunch more questions and I knew how curious he was. That was why I wasn’t surprised when the door to the house opened as we walked up onto the porch, before I even needed to pound on it as I usually did.

“Hi,” I started to greet him, and I took off my sunglasses.

Horror filled his face. “Not again!” he burst out, and it was almost a shout. No, it was like a cry, or a wail.

“Eddie, I’m fine,” I said quickly. When I’d called to tell him about a guest coming today, I hadn’t mentioned my black eye or swollen face because I hadn’t wanted to worry him, but I should have given him a warning. “I had an accident at work.”

“What kind of accident leaves you looking like you took a fucking crowbar to the face?”

“It was a foot,” Jude said. “A foot with a boot on, that’s my guess.” He held out his hand. “Hi there.”

Eddie shook with him and they introduced themselves, but his eyes were still on me. “Who did that?”

“A patient who was in a bad mood,” I briefly explained. “Can we come in, or do you want us to stand out on your porch…what is that on the floor behind you?”

It was a box, that was what it was, and it seemed innocent enough. But we had been down this road before. He was bored and lonely and he’d always been a spender, so he bought himself things that we couldn’t afford.

“Stay the hell out of my business!” he barked to me, and wheeled himself away.

“I’ll get to work,” Jude suggested, and I went off to fight the battle of the impulse purchases. After a while, both Eddie and I returned to the porch, where there was already progress.

“I’m going to do the railings, the columns, the ceiling, and the door,” Jude told us and then asked Eddie, “What do you think of this paint?”

“How much did it cost?”

“It was free,” Jude said.

“That’s my favorite color,” Eddie announced, and they both laughed. They talked for a while, kind of getting to know each other, while I picked up trash and sticks from the yard. I had a huge supply of gloves to wear for the job. I listened to them, surprised at the amount of information that Eddie was sharing. He talked about growing up in this house with his mom and two brothers, all gone now, and he talked about some of his former jobs. There had been a lot of them. He talked about his favorite cars and his love of baseball.

“How about a family?” Jude asked.

“No, no wife, kids. Never wanted them,” he said. “You?”

“Nope. Don’t have them.”

Eddie had loaded the roller with paint and passed it over when Jude held out his hand. They got into a rhythm and I listened to them chat and laugh sometimes. His neighbor came out on her porch across the street and she waved, which I did back. Eddie ignored her.

I worked along the side of the house and when I came around to the front again, they’d moved to a new topic.

“How did you two become friends?” I heard Jude ask, and I rushed up the steps.

“We got to know each other in the hospital,” Eddie answered, his eyes on me.

“Yep, that’s how she picked me up, too.”

“What?” I exploded. “I certainly did not pick you up!”

“Well, I don’t know what you’d call it,” Jude said. “I threw up on you in the ER, and then I moved in. So…”

“You two live together?” Eddie asked.

“We’re housemates,” I said quickly. No one needed to get the impression that I was pushing for something else. Eddie would never have left it alone and Jude would have run screaming toward the sunset. “He rents a bedroom in my house.”

“You have a renter?”

“Yep, me,” my tenant agreed. “I’ve been doing some projects there, too, but no painting yet.” Then he started to talk about all the work that I needed to get done. Again, this long list didn’t appear to daunt him in the least.

“Your place is as bad as mine?” Eddie asked me. He seemed surprised. “Why the hell do you live like that?

“It’s not so bad!” I protested. “I mean, neither of us have bad houses.”

Eddie and I stared at each other and then, after a moment, he swore at me and went inside. I followed and worked in there, cleaning, helping him bathe, and then doing his meal prep. By the time we came back out, the facade had been…well, maybe transformed was too big a word, but it looked a heck of a lot better.

Jude himself looked tired, but also very pleased. “Not bad,” he complimented. “This is a nice old place.”

“You did a really good job with it. Thank you for helping him. And me.”

“I’m glad to help you,” he said. “And I’m glad that his house doesn’t look abandoned anymore. I’ll come back the next time you have a weekend day free, and see what else I can do.” Unsurprisingly, he’d also created a list of projects for Eddie’s house and after we had said goodbye and were back in the car, he shared it with me.

“It all costs money,” he said after he named the last item, and I nodded. I was thinking that it all cost too much but I was trying to calculate how I could swing some of it, especially the new roof that I was sure had to be installed sooner rather than later. I wasn’t paying as much attention to where Jude’s thoughts might have been going and it startled me when he asked, “Do you help him out with that, too?”

“What?”

“Do you give him money? It’s not really my business, and you don’t have to say.”

As he did when he didn’t want to give me the whole truth about something, I also considered my answer before I spoke. “I do give him money. He can’t work anymore and he used to have a lot of debt. It took a while to get out from under it and set things right.”

“Why is it your responsibility? I’m not trying to be a smartass but I’m wondering.”

“I owe him,” I said. “Can we leave it at that?”

“Yep.”

I turned to look at him. “Really?”

“I’m not one to pry,” he told me.

“You’re not one to get mad too often, you’re not one to pry. What do you do wrong?”

“I’ve gotten some post-it notes that clued me in on a few issues,” he answered. “I think I was storing butter wrong, for one thing. Also, my razor—”

“I won’t do that anymore,” I said, and felt very embarrassed. “I know people think that I’m being bossy. I just don’t understand why the post-its are a problem because if you’re doing something that isn’t correct, don’t you want to know?”

“Do you?” Jude asked. “Do you want to know?”

“Are you saying that I’m doing something wrong?” I swallowed. “What?”

“Scrambled eggs need a pinch of salt. You don’t put one in, even after I suggested it, and you’re wrong about that.”

I relaxed into the passenger seat. “Oh. You know I don’t like adding salt since so many things are overprocessed and saturated with it.”

“Yep, you’ve mentioned that to me. Also, your way of folding fitted sheets doesn’t work.”

“It does so!”

“No, you’ve shown me ten times and it doesn’t. Or maybe you can do it because you have small hands, but I’m just too…”

“Manly?” I suggested.

“I was going to say inept, but I’ll take manly. Another thing is your family.”

I tensed again. “What do you mean?”

“Do you know how much you talk about your sisters?”

“What?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t.”

“You do,” Jude assured me. “You talk about them a lot. It’s pretty clear to me that you miss them.”

“Not all of them.”

“Yep, all of them. Explain to me why you’re fighting.”

It took the rest of the drive home and a lot more time sitting on the front steps to go through our issues, because some of them went back for years. Brenna and I had started arguing when she was old enough to talk, and Grace? She hadn’t listened since the day she was born. To anyone, not just me. I explained all the things that they had done wrong.

“Who do you miss the most?” he asked me.

I started to argue. “I don’t…” My eyes stung, and I stopped. “I miss Sophie,” I told him. “She’s next to me in age and we were really close. We’re different and we’ve always fought, but we’ve never gone for so long before without being friends. When I saw her at the wedding, I realized how much I miss her.”

“And you’re mad at her because she won’t come out of her house, and she’s mad at you because…why exactly?”

“Because she says I use honesty to bludgeon her. She doesn’t like to hear the truth,” I defended myself.

“Sometimes that’s hard,” he concurred. “It was hard when you told me that I had ruined my life. I know that it’s true, but the fact that you were correct didn’t make it any easier to hear. I deserve it, though, for fucking up so bad. Does your sister?”

“Deserve what? Does she deserve to be unhappy? No, and neither do you,” I answered. “I wasn’t trying to make anyone feel that way. But someone had to tell Sophie to get the heck out of her house and start acting like a human again! She’s ruining her life and I love her too much to just sit there and watch it happen. Addie goes over and cleans and JuJu takes her to dinner, Brenna fights with her about dumb stuff and Grace…I don’t know what she does about anything. So who’s solving the problem? No one. I had to say something.”

“But it didn’t work. It didn’t,” he echoed when I turned wrathfully on the concrete step to glare at him. “She’s still doing the same thing, since you said two of your sisters are still over there helping her, but now you also don’t get to see or talk to her.”

“Is this some kind of intervention? Are you going twelve step on me? That’s what it feels like,” I told him. “I don’t like it.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to hear the truth. Someone might say I was using it to bludgeon.”

“You don’t think you pry? I think you do,” I announced. “You definitely think you know everything, and it’s annoying. You don’t have sisters and you didn’t grow up like we did. They depended on me for advice and they depended on my opinions. I’m not going to just turn myself off and start agreeing with every poor decision they make. That’s nonsensical.”

It was utterly stupid, in fact, and I didn’t want to talk about it anymore so I went inside and blinked because the house felt like a cave after being in the pretty sunshine for so long. It was worse in the tiny laundry room that was behind the kitchen, but I stayed in there because I decided to clean it from top to bottom while I waited for a load of clothes to be done. Then I cleaned the kitchen, and then the upstairs bathroom, and then there were all the rags to wash. It took me a while and the anger I’d been feeling gradually burned away. I wasn’t actually angry at Jude, anyway. I wasn’t actually even angry, I was…something else. No, I was fine.

As I walked between the rooms to do the cleaning, I did happen to look outside and I spotted him with the kids from across the street. They were on their lawn and playing baseball, a sport he’d claimed not to like, but there he was standing next to Michael and giving him tips on how to hold the bat and then he pitched for Tamara, throwing meatballs so that she could hit them easily. When I put the final load into the dryer, I went out onto the steps.

“You guys should come into the back yard over here,” I said, and the three of them stared over at me.

The boy looked fairly wary. “Why?” he asked, and I was glad to hear him doing his older sibling duty of being careful.

“There’s a shed that has grapevines on it,” I told them. “When the fruit is ripe, you can pick it. You’ll have to take the grapes home to wash, first,” I cautioned, but that part got lost as the two kids immediately ran across the street without looking.

“Is it like a clubhouse?” Michael asked as they headed through the weedy side yard.

“I wouldn’t call it that,” I answered as I followed them. “Right now, it’s just a shed.”

“Does it do cool things? Does it fly off to other lands and times? Because my teacher read to us at school and I heard that can happen,” Tamara informed me, and I said I didn’t think so but we could check. My sister Sophie had also read every one of the books in that series.

I needed to go into the little building first to check it for safety while they examined the grapevines, but…

“What’s up?” Jude asked. At least he was still talking to me. “Is the floor rotten?” He stood behind me at the door of the shed and looked over my shoulder. “Nope, there’s no floor at all.”

“There might be bats,” I suggested, “so we should be careful. So far this year, there have been three confirmed cases in Michigan of chiropteran rabies.” They had been reported a few counties away from Detroit but a little caution never hurt anyone and it might have prevented a series of a four vaccine injections.

“I don’t see any,” he said, and stepped closer. “Go on in.”

I didn’t. “There may be spiders.”

“There are definitely spiders,” he agreed, and signaled to the webs in the corners. “Did you just shiver?”

He was near enough to feel it, because I could also feel his shirt brushing against my back. It was one of his old ones but it looked different because now it fit. All his clothes were fitting him better than they had when I’d seen him outside of the emergency department, when we’d gone to get pancakes and he’d been so thin. I leaned slightly, even closer to his body. “I don’t like them. I don’t like spiders,” I explained.

“Hm,” he mused. “You can deal with parasites like lice, but not spiders? Ok, we can—” But at that moment, he stumbled into me, and I fell into the room.

“Can I see?” Tamara asked as she barreled past us. “Oh, I love it! Do you live here, Nicola?”

“No,” I said as I quickly reversed out of there. “Jude, check for rusty nails before she goes too much farther.”

He stuck his head out through the door a moment later. “Would you care if we made some alterations?”

“No, go ahead.” I got one of the beach chairs that semi-permanently leaned against my fence and had a seat, and I listened as they talked together. Even in the absence of special magic that could make the building fly, all three of them were highly interested in the shed and had a lot of ideas about how it could be very cool.

But in a few minutes, Michael came out as well. I’d heard him sneezing in there and he rubbed his nose on his shoulder as he emerged. He didn’t go home, because he probably didn’t want to leave his sister. Good choice. But to my surprise, he went and fetched the other beach chair and set it up next to mine. “Hi,” he said.

“Hello.”

We sat quietly and eavesdropped on the chatter inside the shed. Tamara’s ideas seemed to be getting a lot grander as time passed, and it sounded like Jude was trying to temper her expectations. “No, there’s definitely not room for a horse to live in here, and I don’t know if livestock is allowed in the city,” I heard him say, and then she mentioned something about a unicorn.

“How’d you hurt your eye?”

I had kind of forgotten about it, but when Michael spoke, I put my hand up to the side of my head. “I got kicked in the face.”

“By mistake?”

“No, it was on purpose. I work at a hospital and a patient there got upset, and he kicked me. He got taken to jail.”

“You can’t kick people in the face. There’s going to be a consequence,” the kid stated. “Do you know about Isaac Newton?”

“Uh, some,” I hedged.

“We learned about him last week. He said that if something happens, there’s going to be a reaction. Like if you kick someone in the face, you go to jail.”

I wasn’t sure that crime and punishment had been Newton’s field of study, but I agreed that it was true. You shouldn’t kick people like that.

“Jude said you’re a nurse,” he mentioned next. “That might be a good job.”

“I like it,” I said. I was surprised to hear the words come from my mouth and it also surprised me to realize how true they were. “I think it is a good job.”

“My mom hates her jobs. She’s works at a store selling pop, but she’s not allowed to drink any, and she’s a waitress at a place where she has to wear dumb shoes that hurt her feet.”

“Hm,” I said, making the same noise as when Jude had heard that I was afraid of spiders. No, I wasn’t exactly afraid, but I definitely didn’t like them. “She’s gone a lot.”

“Yeah. You are, too. Jude says you work all the time. You got bills to pay?”

I almost laughed but kept it together. “I sure do. Your mom must, too.”

“Yeah. You got kids? I never saw any around here, but sometimes they don’t live with their moms.”

“Sometimes that’s true, but I don’t have any.”

“You want some?”

“Are you trying to give away your sister?” I asked him, and he actually considered before he answered.

“Nah, my mom would be sad. I don’t mind Tamara too much except when she’s a pain in my butt.”

“I had five little sisters and one brother,” I mentioned, and now he looked extremely pained and also nauseated. “It was ok, but I had to take care of them like you take care of Tamara,” I explained. “Sometimes I wanted to do my own thing, but there were always kids that needed me.”

“Yeah,” he said for the third time, but now it was a sigh. “I can’t play baseball, not for a team, because I got Tamara. She’s a real ding-a-ling so I can’t leave her alone, even when I want to.”

“I know what you mean, because we all got sick of each other, too. My sister Sophie put our other sister Brenna in the trash can and pulled it to the curb because she was so tired of her. She wanted the garbagemen to take her away. It didn’t work,” I added, in case I was giving him any ideas.

“That’s pretty funny. Did she get all dirty?”

“She smelled really bad. I had to hose her off and give her a bath but you’re right, it was pretty funny.” Now I did smile, remembering it. Addie had laughed her head off, rolling around on the yard, and I had, too. “I think I’m lucky now to have all my sisters. I’m really lucky.”

“Does your eye hurt?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“Because you’re crying,” he pointed out.

“No, I’m not,” I told him, and he seemed poised to argue but then we heard someone call his name.

“That’s my mom,” he explained just before bellowing back, “Mom!” It was loud enough that they probably heard him in Cleveland and sure enough, Shannon did, too. She soon walked into my back yard to join us.

“Oh,” she said when she saw me, and slowed slightly. Then she smiled at her son. “Hi, baby. How was your day?”

“Boring.”

“Mama!” Tamara bolted through the door of the shed, about as dirty as my sister Brenna had been after I’d fished her out of the garbage can. But her mom opened her arms and laughed at the smudges all over her face and the leaves stuck in her hair. Tamara talked a mile a minute about how she and Jude planned to turn my shed into a horse barn, and how maybe one big horse wouldn’t fit but she thought that two little ones might.

“Are you guys allowed to be back here?” Shannon asked, and she looked at me, waiting for the answer.

“I invited them,” I said, and got up. When I turned my head, she saw the damage to my face and her eyes widened.

“Mikey, take your sister home,” she said. “Tam, get in the shower before we have dinner. Go,” she ordered. “I’ll be right there.” They scampered off. Then she turned to me and I saw her bite her lip.

“I really did invite them,” I told her, but she stepped close and lowered her voice.

“Did Jude do that to you?” she whispered.

“What? No!” I shook my head, my mouth hanging open. “No, this happened at work when a drunk patient assaulted me. No, Jude wouldn’t do something like this.”

“Ok,” Shannon said, and stepped back. “I didn’t think so. He doesn’t seem like the type.”

“No, he’s not. I see a lot of that, and I’m pretty good at spotting jerks.”

“Yeah? Maybe I could introduce you to my boyfriends before we get too serious. The last one…” She shook her head too.

“Thanks for asking,” I told her.

“Yeah, sure. I better go and make sure Tamara’s getting that shit off herself. She doesn’t always use soap.”

Grace had been opposed to clean-up, too. “They can come over and play if Jude’s home or if I’m around. But I wouldn’t want them here alone, in case something happened.”

“I don’t neglect them,” she said, suddenly frowning. “I know they’re by themselves sometimes but they’re smart. They’re careful.”

“I was alone with my little siblings most of the time,” I shared. “I was careful and smart like Michael and Tamara, but I wasn’t prepared for everything. Looking back, I think it’s a little bit of a miracle that nothing too terrible happened.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do. Are you going to watch them for me?”

“I work, too,” I said. “If I had kids, I don’t know what I would do, either.” We looked at each other and then she shrugged.

“I’m going to make them dinner, because I’m a good mother,” she told me. She walked away quickly just as Jude emerged from the shed.

“No way even one small horse would fit in there,” he commented. “Was that Shannon?”

“She had to go make dinner.”

“We should do that,” he said. “Your turn. You’re better at it, anyway.”

“Tamara had to take a shower before they ate because the shed is so dirty.”

He laughed. “Is that a hint? Ok, my four minutes start when I get in, not when the water goes on. It takes a while for it to get warm enough so that I don’t freeze my…toes off.”

“That isn’t cold enough for you to lose your…toes.”

“Maybe I could play with the water heater, though, so we’re a little more comfortable.”

“Maybe that’s a good idea. I had another idea,” I said. “Maybe I’ll text my sister Sophie and ask if she wants to come over to eat. It would be good for her to get out of the house.”

“I’d like to meet her. Ok, the ice bath awaits,” he announced, and we went inside.

I sat at the kitchen table as the water started upstairs. “I was remembering how you put the Brat into the garbage can,” I wrote to Sophie, and waited. The text went through but I didn’t know if she would bother to read it.

“She had it coming,” my screen suddenly told me, and I smiled.

“She always does,” I typed. “I’m making pasta with spinach tonight. Want to eat here?”

There was a long pause and I stared hard at my phone, willing another bubble of words to appear.

“Ok.”

Ok. I took a long breath in. “See you soon,” I wrote to my sister. My eyes were burning so I stood up to go get a tissue.