Page 70 of His Holy Chaos

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."