Lullabies for Little Criminals

Baby gets the news that she’ll be going back to live with Jules soon. She feels simultaneously excited to see him again but also sad to leave everyone she has grown close to. Jules picks her up and confides that he already has a new place for them, and Baby is hurt because she thought he had been in the hospital the entire time. He says that he thought about her the whole time and that he’s going to stop doing drugs to focus on her.

Baby tries to readjust to life with Jules. Being back with him makes her clingier than ever before. She thinks, “You get very religious about the idea of parents in a foster home. They seem as fragile as a glass horse on a shelf” (52). However, since being back, Jules has been acting stranger than ever. He’s still using heroin and is demonstrating strange behaviors, like stealing shoes from the Salvation Army and buying a cheap gun illegally.

Jules gets a tattoo of a swallow on his chest, and he walks around the street with his jacket open and no shirt on to show it off.