Jude

Every morning before school, he went next door to take Pookie for a walk. The world was quiet then. A different kind of quiet from the fortress, where it felt like you were hiding out, keeping the world away. This quiet was more like being in the world. Being part of it in a good way. Like you belonged. Pook would sniff the grass and he’d look at the trees, their leaves drifting down. Soon they’d be bare and you’d be able to see how their branches reached for the sky. He liked that.

Mom left real early because it was thirty miles to her new job. Plus the car sometimes stalled out and it took a while to get it going again. So Jude was in charge of dropping off Spider, who nowadays had a fit if you didn’t call him Silas, though guess who was still going to call him Spider no matter how mad it made him? When they got to her house, Gladys was always ready. Now that it was chilly she wore a fur jacket with big sparkly buttons. Faux fur, she told him, like that was an important fact to know. Half a block from school they split up because school was still a messed-up place and Jude wasn’t about to get punked. Gladys said she hoped he’d overcome that inhibition at some point.

That girl.

Mom still said no way under the sun she’d have a dog in her house.

But with her first paycheck, she bought ten pounds of fancy dog food and brought it over to Mr. Peters. And when Jude went to say good night to Pook, if he stayed longer than he was supposed to, sometimes long enough to watch some TV (it turned out Mr. Peters was a fan of WrestleMania) with Pookie’s head on his knee, Mom didn’t seem to notice.

Even though she noticed everything.