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you go to a show when you were ten?”
    “Not by myself.”
    “Who took you, then?”
    She watched her smoke rise white in the air, and then her breath, fainter. “Your dad,” she said. “I sat on his shoulders.”
    J ude’s desire for girls was indiscriminate, feverish, and complete; he wanted them all equally, and he wanted them not at all. Blondes or brunettes, big ones or small ones—they were cold, fragile, impenetrable creatures, all desirable as they were undesirable, all perfumed and pretty. To get one, he would have to get near one. He’d attempted this at a barn party in Hinesburg, kissing the girl unkindly and without asking, kind of pressing her up against a wall, and the whole drunk drive home in the backseat of the Kramaro, he’d felt so bad that he hadn’t said a word about it to anyone, not even Teddy.
    Eliza was different and not different. She was a girl, a painted doll. Her hair, bobbed to her elfin ears, was thick and black, her heavy bangs straight as a blade. Her eyes, too, were black, Egyptian, or was it an effect of the makeup shadowing her lids, the stiletto lashes, the feline inflection of the black, what was it called, eyeliner? Her lips were red, her skin translucent as wax paper. Her coat was white and puffy and slick, with cinched cuffs and a hood that looked like it was made of feathers, and she wore tights and a kilt. She could not have been much more than five feet; he could have opened up his own coat and smuggled her inside.
    The fact that she possessed knowledge about his father, for instance that he still sold pot and that he still owned his 1968 Dodge camper van, was what was disconcerting. It was as thrilling and as freakish as if she had revealed to him that she was his flesh-and-blood sister, come all the way from Manhattan to find him.
    “Here’s the thing,” she said, getting down to business. In an effort to offer her the Vermont experience, they’d taken her to Ben & Jerry’s, the only place on Ash Street that was open on New Year’s Eve. Her treat—Jude and Teddy were still broke. It occurred to Jude to be embarrassed, but she insisted on paying, peeled a starched twenty out of a wallet that looked like lizard skin. They sat in a booth, Eliza on one side, Jude and Teddy on the other. She said, “I think your dad wants to be part of your lives.”
    Jude licked his cone. New York Super Fudge Chunk.
    “Lives?” Teddy said.
    “Jude’s and Prudence’s. Sorry.”
    “He said that?” Teddy asked.
    “Not like, those exact words. But I sense it.”
    “My dad’s a prick,” said Jude. “He doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
    “How do you know, though?” Eliza asked. There was a gap between her two front teeth, just wide enough to slide his napkin through.
    “Because I haven’t seen him in seven years?”
    But that was the thing, Eliza said. Les felt that Jude and Prudence wouldn’t want anything to do with him . He’d been gone so long that he felt he was better off leaving them alone. “I think he feels bad about everything. I can tell he does.”
    “What’s ‘everything’?”
    “You know, deserting you. Not being there for you.”
    “Where’s ‘there’?”
    “Jude, okay, listen.” Eliza stabbed her spoon into her cup of Cherry Garcia. Jude did not want to listen. Whatever she had to say wouldn’t be true, not because he knew his father better than she did but because his father no longer existed. He was a voice on the phone, that was all.
    “You should have seen him at Christmas. He got drunk—which I’ve never seen him that drunk—and he was crying, Jude. It was after he talked to you on the phone. He was standing out on the balcony, and he was alone, just crying .”
    “You were there? When I talked to my dad?”
    “Isn’t it sad?”
    Jude said it was sad that he’d sent her to be his messenger.
    “Oh, he didn’t. He wouldn’t do that. He just thinks I’m here to, you know, meet you guys.”
    “Why are you here?”
    Eliza