The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  “What is E. & J. Gallo?”

  Addie set down the salt container she’d been holding. “You’re more than just a fan,” she said, coming to stand beside him. “You’re really good.”

  Nine of the twelve chapters in this book of the Bible set in Babylon revolve around dreams and visions.

  “What is Isaiah?” Addie guessed.

  Jack shook his head. “What is Daniel?”

  In the original Hebrew of his Lamentations, each verse in three chapters begins with a new letter, from aleph on.

  “Who is Jeremiah?”

  “You know a lot about the Bible,” Addie said. “Are you a priest or something?”

  He had to laugh out loud at that. “No.”

  “Some kind of professor?”

  Jack blotted his mouth with a napkin. “I’m a dishwasher.”

  “What were you yesterday, then?”

  A prisoner, thought Jack, but he looked into his lap and said, “Just another guy doing something he didn’t really like doing.”

  She smiled, content to let it go. “Lucky for me.” Addie took the mop that Jack had brought from the kitchen and she began to swish it over the linoleum.

  “I’ll do it.”

  “You go ahead and eat,” Addie said. “I don’t mind.”

  It was these small kindnesses that would break him. Jack could feel the fissures beginning even now, the hard shell he’d promised to keep in place so that no one, ever, would get close enough to hurt him again. But here was Addie, taking him on faith, doing his work to boot—even though, according to Delilah, fate had screwed her over, too.

  He wanted to tell her he understood, but after almost a year of near silence, words did not come easily for him. So very slowly, he took a handful of French fries and set them on Chloe’s untouched plate. After a moment, he added his pickle. When he finished, he found Addie staring at him, her hands balanced on top of the mop, her body poised for flight.

  She believed he was mocking her; it was right there in the deepest part of her eyes, bruised and tender. Her fingers wrung the wooden handle.

  “I . . . I owed her, from this afternoon,” he said.

  “Who?” The word was less than a whisper.

  Jack’s eyes never left hers. “Chloe.”

  Addie didn’t respond. Instead, she picked up the mop and began to swab with a vengeance. She cleaned until the floor gleamed, until the lights of the ceiling bounced off the thin residue of Pine-Sol, until it hurt Jack to watch her acting fearless and indifferent because she reminded him so much of himself.

  By the time Addie pulled the door shut and locked it behind her, it was snowing outside. Fist-size flakes, the kind that hooked together in midair like trick skydivers. Inwardly, she groaned. It meant getting up early tomorrow to shovel the walkways.

  Jack stood a distance away, the lapels of his sports jacket pulled up to shield his neck from the cold. Addie was a firm believer that someone’s past deserved to stay in the past—she herself was surely a poster child for keeping secrets. She didn’t know what kind of man walked around in a New Hampshire winter without a coat; she’d never met someone who was bright enough to know the answers to every Jeopardy! question but willing to work for minimum wage in a menial job. If Jack wanted to lie low, she could offer him that.

  And she wouldn’t think about his unprecedented reaction to Chloe.

  “Well,” she said, “See you tomorrow morning.”

  Jack didn’t seem to hear. His back was turned, his arms stretched out in front of him. Addie realized, with some shock, that he was catching snowflakes on his tongue.

  When was the last time she’d thought of snow as anything but a hindrance?

  She opened the door of her car, turned the ignition and carefully pulled the car away. In retrospect, she did not know what made her look back into the rearview mirror. If not for the yellow eye of the streetlight in front of the diner, she might never have seen him sitting on the bare curb with his head bowed.

  With a curse, she took a hard left, curving around the green to the front of the diner again. “Do you need a ride?”

  “No. Thanks, though.”

  Addie’s fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “You haven’t got a place to stay, have you?” Before he could protest, she got out of the car. “It so happens I know of a room for rent. The bad news is you’re going to have a roommate whose disposition isn’t always very sunny. The good news is if you get hungry in the middle of the night, there’s a hell of a kitchen you can raid.” As Addie spoke, she unlocked the door of the diner again and stepped over the threshold. She found Jack holding back, haloed by the falling snow. “Look. My father could use the company. You’d actually be doing me a favor.”

  Jack didn’t move a muscle. “Why?”

  “Why? Well, because when he spends too much time alone he gets . . . upset.”

  “No. Why are you doing this for me?”

  Addie met his suspicion head-on. She was doing this because she knew what it was like to hit rock bottom and to need someone to give you a leg up. She was doing this because she understood how a world jammed with phones and e-mail and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone. But she also knew if she said either of these things, Jack’s pride would have him halfway down the street before she could take another breath.

  So Addie didn’t answer. Instead, she started across the checkerboard floor of the diner.

  Tonight, one of the Jeopardy! categories had been Greek mythology. This hero was given permission to bring his love Eurydice back from the underworld but lost her by turning back too quickly to see if she was following.

  Addie wouldn’t be like Orpheus. She kept walking with her eyes fixed ahead until she heard the faint jingle of bells on the door, proof that Jack had come in from the cold.

  September 1999

  North Haverhill,

  New Hampshire

  Aldo LeGrande had a four-by-four-inch tattoo of a skull on his forehead, which was enough to make Jack take the bunk farthest away from him. He didn’t react when Jack set his things down, just continued to write in a purple composition notebook whose cover had been hand-decorated with scribbled swastikas and cobras.

  Jack began to set belongings in a small tub that sat at the foot of the bed. “Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Aldo said. “Mountain uses that to piss in in the middle of the night.”

  Jack let the warning slide off his back. He had spent a month at Grafton County. Every new inmate started out in maximum security and was then allowed to petition for a move to medium security after two weeks of good behavior. Two weeks after that, the inmate could move to minimum security. Each time Jack had moved pods, he’d had to face some kind of test from the inmates already living there. In maximum, he’d been spat at. In medium, he’d been jabbed in the kidneys and gut in corners too dark for the security cameras to see.

  “Mountain will get over it,” Jack said tightly. He stacked his books from the prison library last and then shoved the plastic container under the lower bunk.

  “Like to read?” Aldo asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How come?”

  Jack glanced over his shoulder. “I’m a teacher.”

  Aldo grinned. “Yeah, well, I work for the state paving roads, but you don’t see me painting a dotted yellow line down the middle of the floor.”

  “It’s a little different,” Jack said. “I like knowing things.”

  “Can’t learn the world from a book, Teach.”

  But Jack knew the world did not make sense, anyway. He’d had four weeks to ruminate on that very topic. Why would someone like himself even bother listening to someone like Aldo LeGrande?

  “You keep your ass tight and prissy like that,” Aldo said, “and you’re gonna be candy for the other boys.”

  Jack tried not to feel his heart race at the other man’s words. It was what every man thought about when he conjured an image of jail. Would it be irony or biblical justice to be convicted of sexual