When I’d gone down on him, he’d pulled off at the next exit, parking the car behind a shuttered gas station. He didn’t let me finish him. Instead, we ended up fucking in the passenger seat.
God. Now my face was flaming just remembering it. How on earth did people move on? The times I’d had with Jude were just too hot to fade from my memory. When I was a hundred and five, I’d still be able to recall losing my virginity to him. I could be blind and deaf and shriveled up like a raisin, and get wet and horny just remembering the way he whispered in my ear after sliding into me for the first time. “Now you’re really mine.”
I should never have gotten in this car.
“You always take walks in the pouring rain?” he asked suddenly.
“No.”
“Just… felt the urge?”
I sighed. “No, Jude. I just didn’t want to be at home tonight. So I left.”
To his credit, he didn’t ask again. But I’d squashed the conversation, and now he was probably regretting ever picking me up. “How are you doing, anyway?” I managed to ask.
He gave the steering wheel a funny smile. “It’s Thursday night.”
“You mentioned that.”
“So I’m doing really well.”
“You’re not making a whole lot of sense.”
He rolled his shoulders. “Well, you know that cliché that says to take life one day at a time? I can’t even do that. It’s more like a one-minute-at-a-time kind of thing. So I don’t have the luxury of making a lot of sense. Sorry.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing.
After a while, he turned on the old car’s radio, and we listened to a story on Vermont Public Radio about a Windsor County farmer who’d just won an award for her sheep’s milk cheese.
It ended and the weather report came on, so I shut the radio off. “Never once have I heard you listen to public radio.”
“Well, it’s pretty useful in prison,” he said. “Radios are allowed but not computers. It was the only way to keep up with the outside world. And also it reminded me that I was still in Vermont. Otherwise, that place was like being on the moon.”
That shut me up fast. I’d never doubted that Jude deserved punishment for what he did. But three years in prison wasn’t something that I ever wanted to experience. Public radio seemed like a pretty healthy coping mechanism.
“What was it like?” I whispered, before I could think better of it.
“Gross,” he said right away. “Everything was dirty all the time. The toilet. The beds. The people. Nobody there had any hope.”
“Except for you?” I asked, making myself sound even more naive than I’d already proven to be.
“Not even me,” he said firmly. “Especially not me.”
He left the highway in Randolph and then began to steer the car up a hill. “My friends have a dairy farm and an orchard. You might know them from church. The Shipleys?”
“Sure I know the Shipleys. I went to Sunday school with May and Griffin. But how do you know them?”
“I worked here until about three weeks ago. Lived in the bunkhouse.”
“Oh.” So that’s where Jude had gone after he was released from prison. He’d been in Vermont all this time? How odd to think that I’d seen Mrs. Shipley at church on Sundays, usually with one of her daughters. “Mr. Shipley died a couple of years ago. Right around the time…” I didn’t finish the sentence. Right around the time Gavin died.
“Yeah,” Jude said. “I never met him. Must have been a good guy, though. All the rest of ’em are.”
“He was. Who runs the dairy farm now?”
“Griffin. He’s expanding, actually. More cider, less dairy. His cider just won some kind of award.”
“Wow. Griffin’s only… twenty six?”
“Something like that.”
I wanted to ask more. I was dying to know how Jude had gotten that job in the first place. But now the car was bumping along a dirt road, and we were turning onto a long driveway. Ahead of us I could see a big old farmhouse with lights burning in every window.
Jude pulled up behind a beat-up old truck and killed his engine. Then he reached into the back seat for the pumpkin cake (flashing his abs again!) and got out of the car.
I climbed out too, feeling a bit like Alice when she’s gone down the rabbit hole. The Jude I knew didn’t bring cake to somebody’s family supper. He didn’t do farm work, either. Wordlessly, I followed him up a couple of steps and into the Shipleys’ kitchen door. There were an improbable number of people in the steamy kitchen, and several of them greeted him the moment he entered.
“Jude’s here!” one of the Shipley sisters called. It was the teenaged one—Daphne. “Oh, hey. Sophie, right?” There was curiosity in her eyes.
“Right,” I said, feeling like an intruder.
“Hey, what’s in the box?” her brother Dylan asked. He darted across the room and took the cake from Jude’s hands. “Sure smells good!”
“It’s…” he got out. But then something small crashed into his knees, and he looked down.
“Ow!” came from the floor.