Before You Go Read Online Free PDF Page B

watch too much TV.”
    “Who doesn’t?” Corey grinned. “Check out that sweet swimming pool behind Ansari’s house, all lit up with floodlights.” Corey whistled. “Man, that water is calling my name. We should grab Vinnie and the guys, sneak out, and go pool-hopping some night. I wonder how many we could do. What do you think, Jude, if we swam our way across town? Hopping from pool to pool. That would be a trip.”
    Jude fell into a brooding silence. He had a history with swimming pools.
    Six summers before, Jude’s sister Lily drowned in their built-in pool. She was only four years old. There was talk of moving after that, just getting the hell away, but for some reason his parents stayed. Maybe they were frozen in place, stuck there. So they hired an excavation company to fill in the pool. That whole week, Jude watched the men work. They tore at the pool with jackhammers, drilling holes in the bottom, breaking down the sides of the walls. After just one day, it looked like somebody’d bombed the place. The men next appeared with a backhoe, hauling out chunks of concrete. Then came the loads of dirt fill, with a layer of black topsoil for the new garden. Transfixed at an upstairs window, Jude watched the men toil. He felt as if a part of him was interred in that wild torrent of dirt and rubble. And so he buried Lily a second time, and from his window whispered good-bye, lips pressed to the pane.
    The next spring his parents labored to transform the scarred earth into a memorial garden. They scratched the dirt and planted shrubs and flowers, a Chinese maple, installed a bench and gravel pathways, but his mother soon lost heart in the project. Over the winter the snow came and most everything died, never to bloom quite the same again. It was supposed to be a garden of tranquility, but in the end the backyard grew into a ramshackle mess of scraggly annuals, a crumbling rock wall, a litter box for neighborhood cats, and weeds, weeds, weeds.
    That’s the way it was, Jude figured. Everything eventually turned to shit.
    Corey read the sullenness in Jude’s face and kicked himself for his mistake. Even now, even after all those years. A darkness had descended over Jude. Like that, fast as a finger snap. He was wrapped in it, as if a heavy cloak had fallen around his shoulders.
    “What about a movie?” Corey suggested.
    “Not tonight,” Jude answered.
    “Tomorrow night then,” Corey persisted. “We’ll call the boys. Hang.”
    “Okay,” Jude relented. “Tomorrow.”

 
    SEVEN
    Jude was back on the grill Sunday, working shoulder to shoulder with the self-proclaimed grillmaster Billy Motchsweller. Jude’s glance kept returning to the girl in the middle booth, Becka. She was nice-looking, no doubt about that. Not the sexpot type, not someone who’d cause traffic accidents by walking down the street, but there was something about her that set Becka apart.
    “You know her?” Jude asked Billy.
    Billy looked up, eyed Becka appraisingly. “Not bad. I’d tap that. She’s what we call new talent around here. You like her?”
    “Just asking,” Jude said.
    Billy nodded. “I got a girlfriend at home, man. Four weeks now. I’m faithful, not a player. I come here, do my job, keep my head down, smoke a little weed, and try not to stand around panting like a dog after all these babes in string bikinis that are just ridonkulous. I try, I really try. But some days it’s hard. ” He made an obscene gesture. “You know what I’m saying?”
    Jude knew what Billy was saying. He would have to be as dumb as a garbage truck to not know what Billy was saying; so he made the required response, laughed knowingly. “ Har-har-har .” Guy talk, just a couple of working stiffs shooting the breeze, pointing and grunting and laughing it out. The kind of conversation most guys felt they were supposed to have as part of the brotherhood of boys: leering, crude, funny, sex-obsessed. It was common ground, like sports talk—“ What