Lullabies for Little Criminals

Jules is out of rehab, and Baby is going back to live with him. She’s excited to see him, but she’s also sad to leave the comfortable life she has had with Felix and Mary. When she has to say goodbye to Mary, “[the] desire to touch her was overwhelming. I wanted to put my hand in her pockets and mash my face up against her belly and all sorts of other weird stuff” (90).

Jules seems different now that he’s out of rehab and sober: he looks older, and “[he’d] given up wearing dentures for his missing front tooth. His hair was matted and impossible to comb, as if he had been lying in bed for six years” (91). He also looks skinner and crazier than ever before. Worst of all, he treats Baby differently. He constantly yells at her for no reason, “acting as if we were enemies and were at war” (92).

Jules’s paranoid and violent behavior stops Baby from having many friends, since everyone in the neighborhood thinks he’s crazy and they all know he’s her dad. She tries to befriend a girl at school named Lauren, but one day, Lauren comes over for dinner, and