Page 388 - A Little Life: A Novel

more until we can get the cabin?” he asked, but Luke just shook his head,
sadly. “I won’t know for a while,” he said. “But you’re doing such a good
job, Jude. You’re so good at it. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” But he knew

there was something shameful about it. No one had ever told him there was,
but he knew anyway. He knew what he was doing was wrong.
And then, after a few months—and many motels; they moved every ten
days or so, all around east Texas, and with every move, Luke took him to
the forest, which really was beautiful, and to the clearing where they’d have
their cabin—things changed again. He was lying in his bed one night (a
night during a week in which there had been no clients. “A little vacation,”

Luke had said, smiling. “Everyone needs a break, especially someone who
works as hard as you do”) when Luke asked, “Jude, do you love me?”
He hesitated. Four months ago, he would’ve said yes immediately,
proudly and unthinkingly. But now—did he love Brother Luke? He often
wondered about this. He wanted to. The brother had never hurt him, or hit
him, or said anything mean to him. He took care of him. He was always

waiting just behind the wall to make sure nothing bad happened to him. The
week before, a client had tried to make him do something Brother Luke said
he never had to do if he didn’t want to, and he had been struggling and
trying to cry out, but there had been a pillow over his face and he knew his
noises were muffled. He was frantic, almost sobbing, when suddenly the
pillow had been lifted from his face, and the man’s weight from his body,
and Brother Luke was telling the man to get out of the room, in a tone he

had never before heard from the brother but which had frightened and
impressed him.
And yet something else told him that he shouldn’t love Brother Luke,
that the brother had done something to him that was wrong. But he hadn’t.
He had volunteered for this, after all; it was for the cabin in the woods,
where he would have his own sleeping loft, that he was doing this. And so

he told the brother he did.
He was momentarily happy when he saw the smile on the brother’s face,
as if he had presented him with the cabin itself. “Oh, Jude,” he said, “that is
the greatest gift I could ever get. Do you know how much I love you? I love
you more than I love my own self. I think of you like my own son,” and he
had smiled back, then, because sometimes, he had privately thought of
Luke as his father, and he as Luke’s son. “Your dad said you’re nine, but

you look older,” one of the clients had said to him, suspiciously, before they