Page 390 - A Little Life: A Novel

was Joey. “And this is Joey,” Brother Luke would say, and he would rise
from the bed and wait, his head bent, as the client inspected him.
He cherished his lessons, because they were the one time Brother Luke

didn’t touch him, and in those hours, the brother was who he remembered,
the person he had trusted and followed. But then the lessons would end for
the day, and every evening would conclude the same as the evening before.
He grew more and more silent. “Where’s my smiley boy?” the brother
would ask him, and he would try to smile back at him. “It’s okay to enjoy
it,” the brother would say, sometimes, and he would nod, and the brother
would smile at him and rub his back. “You like it, don’t you?” he would

ask, and wink, and he would nod at him, mutely. “I can tell,” Luke would
say, still smiling, proud of him. “You were made for this, Jude.” Some of
the clients would say that to him as well—You were born for this—and as
much as he hated it, he also knew that they were right. He was born for this.
He had been born, and left, and found, and used as he had been intended to
be used.

In later years, he would try to remember when exactly it was that he must
have realized that the cabin was never going to be built, that the life he had
dreamed of would never be his. When he had begun, he had kept track of
the number of clients he had seen, thinking that when he reached a certain
number—forty? fifty?—he would surely be done, he would surely be
allowed to stop. But then the number grew larger and larger, until one day
he had looked at it and realized how large it was and had started crying, so

scared and sick of what he had done that he had stopped counting. So was it
when he reached that number? Or was it when they left Texas altogether,
Luke promising him that the forests were better in Washington State
anyway, and they drove west, through New Mexico and Arizona, and then
north, stopping for weeks in little towns, staying in little motels that were
the twins of that very first motel they had ever stayed in, and that no matter

where they stopped, there were always men, and on the nights there weren’t
men, there was Brother Luke, who seemed to crave him the way he himself
had never craved anything? Was it when he realized that he hated his weeks
off even more than the normal weeks, because the return to his regular life
was so much more terrible than if he had never had a vacation at all? Was it
when he began noticing the inconsistencies in Brother Luke’s stories: how
sometimes it wasn’t his son but a nephew, who hadn’t died but had in fact

moved away, and Brother Luke never saw him again; or how sometimes, he