Chapter 30. Ford
The text arrives while I'm sorting Angel's laundry, and Jude's name lights up the screen.
He went home, and I miss him terribly. Especially because I removed him from weekday choir when I found out how little he was sleeping to make it. Just to be with me. With his night shift, it was impossible, so he's only singing at Sunday services now.
But I can't keep going like this, seeing him so rarely during the week. We'll have to change this situation soon, because that boy has become my oxygen.
After what he did for me and Angel when Angel was sick…
it might look simple from the outside. He drove us to the emergency room.
But it was so much more than that. He was able to help me in the one situation where I wasn't capable of being in control.
The trauma, the grief… they took over me.
And he was there. Something in me changed permanently that night.
Jude: So my parents want us to come to Sunday barbecue. Like. This Sunday. As in tomorrow. After service.
The math is simple. I'm fifty-three. Jude's parents are…
what, late fifties? Early sixties? I'm closer to their generation than to their son's.
I am, in fact, the kind of man that parents warn their children about at exactly the age I'll be sitting across from them at a picnic table.
The older man. The one with resources and authority and all the leverage that differential implies.
It doesn't matter that Jude sought me out, that he chose this.
What matters is how it looks from the outside.
But I don't care. I'd do anything to prove to anyone that I deserve that boy. That he's the love of my life and that he is mine.
I type: I'd be honored. What should I bring?
His response is immediate: a string of emojis I'm too old to decode, followed by: just yourself and that pretty face daddy, and then a winking face that I refuse to acknowledge has an effect on me. It has an effect on me. My neck warms. I set the phone down and return to the laundry.
First, we attend Sunday's service, and he's devastatingly beautiful. He's wearing a baby blue button-down with linen pants, and I feel my mouth water looking at him. I'm wearing a tailored cream suit. If it feels like too much, I have the excuse of church.
In the car, the suburbs unspool around us with their mailboxes and trimmed hedges and basketball hoops. I can picture Jude growing up here.
"What exactly did you tell them about me?" I ask.
"That you're a fifty-three-year-old silver fox who runs a choir and has a baby and makes me feel like a human person for the first time in years.
" Jude is angled sideways in the passenger seat, one knee drawn up, his white sneaker on the upholstery.
A transgression I've stopped correcting because some battles aren't worth fighting and this is one of them.
"Did you mention the age difference?"
"I said, 'Mom, Dad, I'm seeing a man who's older than me and he's wonderful and he has a daughter and I'm happy.' They're just happy I'm dating someone who owns actual furniture, Daddy. The bar was underground."
I exhale. I shouldn't be this nervous.
The house appears. A modest two-story with blue siding and white trim. Window boxes spill red geraniums. A basketball hoop hangs over the garage. I feel ready.
"Let's go, baby boy," I tell him, and turn off the engine.
?
Jude's mother is small. She barely reaches my shoulder.
Her eyes are Jude's eyes. Her hair is brown, gathered in a loose knot that's coming undone at the temples, and she's wearing an apron over a floral blouse, and she smells like vanilla extract and charcoal smoke, and before I can extend my hand or offer the bottle of Burgundy I brought, she's hugging me.
So that's where he gets it.
"So you're the one," she says, and her voice carries the same cadence as Jude's humor, the same bright irreverence, except in her it's been aged into wisdom. "We've heard everything. Come in, come in. Erwin, they're here."
Jude's father appears from the hallway. Tall and lean, wearing glasses, his hair black with some silver. He shakes my hand, the careful grip of an English professor, which is exactly what he is.
"Welcome, welcome," he says, all smiles, and I see it's the same one as Jude's.
"Thank you, sir," I tell him, smiling back.
His eyebrow lifts. His son inherited that motion, that same skeptical elevation, except on the father's face it looks professorial rather than bratty. "Oh, no, please. Erwin or Er is fine. We don't do formality here. Jude would never forgive us."
Jude laughs, loud, and hugs his dad.
The house is lived in, which is the biggest compliment I can think of.
Books everywhere: shelved, stacked, spread face-down on armrests with their spines cracked.
A piano against the far wall with yellowed keys and sheet music piled on top.
Framed photographs everywhere. Jude has siblings, a brother and a sister, and they're in the pictures with him at every age.
Sometimes he talks about growing up with them, although I suspect he holds back because of what happened to my own sister.
The pictures show a little blond boy I immediately recognize, with gaping teeth, smiling broadly at the camera, the same smile he still carries, holding a fish with his dad.
An older teenager who squints at the camera as if it's wasting his time, but who still has that bratty air I see every day.
"Sit, sit," Jude's mother, Clarice, commands, as we all go outside to the yard, where the grill is already going and the air smells like barbecue.
I sip the lemonade she pressed into my hand. It's homemade, tart, with real seeds floating near the bottom. I answer questions about the choir.
Erwin handles the grill like a man who has done this every Sunday for thirty years.
"Jude tells me you sing," he says, flipping a rack of ribs. “He says you have a beautiful voice.”
"Mhm, I direct a choir. But he sings much better than I do.”
Clarice laughs. “Baby, remember how I used to make you sing to my friends? I bet you’re thanking me now for forcing you to attend all those singing lessons.
He wanted to quit when he was fourteen,” she tells me.
“I told him: ‘over my dead body!’ Might not have been the most appropriate thing for a mom to say,” she delivers.
We all laugh. It’s so clear that’s why Jude is the way he is.
“I thanked you already, mom!” he exclaims. He’s sitting by my side, next to their pool, eating corn. "Mom, you don't put sugar in the corn. That's a crime. It’s not a freaking candy!"
"I've been making corn since before you were born."
"And it's been wrong this entire time! Corn should be savory," he says. Clarice squints.
"Jude Cole Piaf, if you insult my corn one more time…"
"What? You'll ground me? I'm twenty-eight!"
"I'll tell Ford."
Silence. Then, we all erupt in laughter again.
The corn really is very good.
We eat at a wooden picnic table in the yard.
Jude sits beside me, his thigh pressed against mine under the table.
The sun is low and warm. Clarice asks about Angel.
I show her pictures on my phone, and she gasps at each one as if she's seeing a different baby, not the same child at slightly different angles.
"She's gorgeous," Clarice says. "You have to bring her next time. I insist."
"There's a next time?" I ask, before I can stop myself.
Clarice gives me a look that's pure Jude, amused, warm, slightly offended. "Of course there's a next time. What kind of question is that? Wait! Unless you hated my corn, like some ungrateful little brats I know.”
Jude rolls his eyes. “Mom! I know they’re called sweet corn but I’m traumatized by candy corn and how it’s in everything in Halloween. You should respect that!”
I laugh. I’ve been laughing so much and the only time I do that is when I’m with Jude.
After dessert, Jude and his father disappear inside.
I hear the piano. First Erwin playing something classical, then Jude taking over with something I don't recognize, jazzy and improvised, and then Erwin joining back in, and they play together, badly, laughing at their own mistakes, and the sound drifts out through the open windows into the yard where Clarice and I sit in lawn chairs.
"He's different now," she says. Not looking at me.
Looking at the geraniums in the window boxes.
"The last year was… we were worried. Very worried.
He stopped calling. He stopped eating, from what Noa told us.
He wouldn't come to Sunday dinner. Every time I called, he said he was fine, and every time, I knew he was lying. "
I listen. I don't interrupt.
"Then about four months ago, the calls started again. He started showing up. He ate seconds. He laughed at his father's terrible jokes." She turns to me. "I didn't ask what changed. I didn't want to jinx it. But I knew something had."
"Clarice…"
"I'm just saying thank you. Whatever you've done, whatever this is… thank you. All I ever want is to see him smile. All I want is to see him safe and happy. You’re a father yourself, I’m sure you understand."
“I do,” I say and I feel tears threatening to warm my eyes. I cough before I let it show, but I’m certain she sees it anyway.
Inside, the piano erupts into something that sounds like a duel, Jude playing louder, Erwin matching him, both of them laughing. Something crashes, a book off the piano top, probably, and Jude yells "that doesn't count!"
Clarice shakes her head fondly. I look at the yard, the geraniums, the basketball hoop, the picnic table still covered in the remnants of dinner, and I realize I don't feel like a guest. I feel like someone who's supposed to be here.
"Thank you for having me," I say to Clarice.
She waves a hand dismissively. "Next Sunday. Bring Angel. And bring that wine again. Erwin drank the whole bottle and won't admit it. I wanted seconds!"
?
On the drive home, Jude falls asleep. He’s so beautiful.
The car turns onto my street. The house appears. I pull into the driveway. Turn off the engine. The silence descends, completely. I don't move immediately. I sit in the dark car in my own driveway and look at him. I lift my hand and brush his cheek. He stirs.
"Jude." I say, softly.
His eyes open, gradually, and he smiles when he sees me, as if he’s remembering I’m there.
"Mm… Daddy…." His voice is gravel and sleep. "Are we home?"
Home. Not your house. Not your place. Home.
"We're home," I say.