Crossroads

“And Clem? It’s not like he even wanted my money.”

Her father sighed and looked at her mother.

“Your younger brother is very seriously mentally ill,” her mother said. “At some point, in the course of his illness, he emptied Clem’s account as well.”

Becky stared at her. She was the victim, and her mother didn’t even have the guts to look at her.

“Emptied,” she said. “Don’t you mean stole?”

“I know it’s hard for you to understand,” her mother said, her eyes on the floor, “but Perry was too disturbed to know what he was doing.”

“How do you steal without knowing what you’re doing?”

Her father gave her a look of warning. “Our family has a very pressing need for money. I know it’s hard for you, but you’re part of this family. If the situation were reversed—”

“You mean, if I were a thief and a drug addict?”

“If you had a serious illness—and, make no mistake, Perry has a very serious illness—then, yes, I think your brothers would make any sacrifice we asked of them.”

“But it’s not even for his treatment. It’s just for the Navajos.”

“The loss of the farm equipment was devastating. It’s not the Navajos’ fault that your brother destroyed it.”

“Right. And it’s not his fault either, because he’s so seriously ill. Apparently it’s my fault.”

“Obviously,” her father said, “it’s not your fault, and I know how unfair it must seem to you. But we’re only asking for a loan, not a gift. Your mother will be looking for work, and I will be looking for a better-paid position. By this time next year, we might be able to repay some of what we’ve borrowed. We’ll also be more eligible for college financial aid.”

“It’s only for a little while, honey,” her mother said. “We’re only asking to borrow what Shirley gave you.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, Shirley gave me thirteen thousand dollars.”

“You’ll still have your own savings. If you want to start college in the fall, you can go to U of I for a year or two. Then you can transfer anywhere you like.”

Becky had received her acceptance letter from Beloit three days earlier. The idea of being a transfer student there, missing the freshman experience, entering a class whose social order had long since coalesced, seemed worse to her than not going at all. Of the thirteen thousand dollars she’d inherited, she’d given away nine with the assurance that the remaining four were hers alone to spend; that she still had special things coming to her. But her parents had disapproved of the inheritance from the start. They’d disapproved of Shirley, and now they’d gotten what they’d wanted all along, which was for Becky to have nothing. It was as if they were in league with God Himself, who, knowing everything, knew that beneath her Christian charity was a tough little core of selfishness. Her cheeks burned with hatred of her parents for exposing it.

“Fine,” she said. “You can have all of it. It’s fifty-two hundred dollars—take all of it.”

“Honey,” her mother said. “We don’t want to take your own savings.”

“Why not? It’s not like they’re enough to do me any good.”

“That’s not true. You can still go to U of I.”

“As long as I don’t go to Europe. Right?”

Her mother, knowing what Europe meant to her, might at least have expressed some sympathy. Instead, she deferred to her husband.

“Unfortunately, yes,” he said. “If you go to U of I, you’ll need money for room and board. I know you were looking forward to Europe, but we think it’s better if you postpone that plan.”

“The two of you. That’s what the two of you together have decided.”

“This is hard for all of us,” her mother said. “We’re all having to give up things we might have wanted.”

There was nothing more to say. When Becky returned to her bedroom, she didn’t even feel like crying. A bitterness had entered her soul, and there it stayed. She could forgive the injury of being dispossessed, because Jesus promised a reward to those who gave away everything and followed him, but the insult of it only grew deeper: her parents cared more about her amoral brother, more about each other, more even about the blessed Navajos, than they did about her. When, at dinner, on the day she’d transferred four thousand dollars, her father raised thanks to the Lord for the gift of family and the gift of his daughter, Rebecca, her bitterness was so intense she couldn’t taste her food. Although her mother was courteous enough to thank her directly, she failed to say, as she’d said so often in the past, that she was proud of her. She knew very well what she’d taken from her daughter, the injustice she’d been party to; it would have been obscene to speak of pride. Only in Tanner was there relief from the bitterness. He was too kindhearted to join Becky in hating her family, but he understood her as no one else did, understood both the goodness and the selfishness in her. She’d surrendered the last of her inheritance, she’d lost Beloit and the future it stood for, she was looking at a year of full-time waitressing or a shitty high-rise dorm room in Champaign, and Tanner had understood why she had to go to Europe.

Like all of Edoardo’s guests (it was evidently a requirement), the German couple, Renata and Volker, were notably good-looking. Volker, who resembled a blond Charles Manson, had lived in Morocco and traveled as far east as India, exploring non-Western ways of being. Renata had amazing blue eyes and a style that Becky envied. Nowhere in America were there pants and tops like Renata’s, cut simply and practically without being masculine, their fabrics faded but durable, or leather sandals so elegant and obviously comfortable. Becky had grown very sick of her own sneakers and Dr. Scholl’s.

The night before they left for Tuscany, Tanner stayed up late with Edoardo and the Germans while she retired to the stifling ballroom. Worse than the smell of rot were the voices coming through the window, young men yelling in Italian perhaps the very same vulgarities they yelled at her in English. Even the fainter sound of Tanner in the kitchen, singing “Cross Road Blues,” was oppressive to her in her condition. Stopping her ears with her fingers, she lay sweating on her sleeping bag and focused her entire will on bleeding.

It was like trying to will a heat wave to break. She awoke to an even hotter day, a sensation of menstrual operations firmly shut down, which was to say an absence of encouraging sensations. Her body had always performed its duties without being asked, and the flip side of this, now, was its perfect indifference to her entreaties. After she and Tanner had helped themselves to stale cornetti from the kitchen, they gathered their luggage and found the Germans in a room darker than theirs, perceptibly less hot. They were rolling up air mattresses, another thing to envy.

Down on the steaming street, around the corner from Edoardo’s building, Volker led them to a large, low-slung Mercedes, parked halfway up on the sidewalk, and opened the trunk.

“This is your car?” Becky said.

Volker extended a hand for her backpack. “What did you expect?”

“I don’t know, a van or something. I thought you guys were more— I don’t know. Poor.”

“We love Edoardo,” Renata said. “He brings together such interesting people—like you.”

“You don’t mind that there’s no furniture?”

“We visit with him three times now,” Volker said. “He is a really great guy.”

“I wonder why he doesn’t have any furniture.”

“Because he’s Edoardo!”

The back seat of the Mercedes was so roomy that she could stretch out her legs and Tanner could open his guitar case. He immediately began to play, because playing was what he did, day and night. Becky was so used to the sound of his Guild that she only paid attention when other people were listening, as Renata was doing now, from the front seat, her body angled toward him, her blue eyes more fervent than Becky cared to see. Where the harassment she’d endured in Rome was strictly about her as a sex object, Tanner’s fascination to women seemed more romantic, and she’d come to resent that other women felt free to imagine romance with her boyfriend. It occurred to her that Renata had invited Tanner to Tuscany because she was very into him.

Hanging on a string from the car’s rearview mirror, lurching and spinning with Volker’s brakings for rude Italian drivers, was a painted plastic Buddha. Along the narrow streets were tiny trattorias, inviting but unaffordable, and bars with colorful bottles doubled by the mirrors behind them, and long, unpainted walls gouged by trucks and plastered with posters for a circus, for an automobile show, for FOLKAROMA, 29–31 Agosto. Wider avenues offered glimpses of churches and ruins and monuments, pastel in the haze, that Becky might have visited with Shirley, or with her mother, but hadn’t with Tanner, because theirs was not that kind of trip.

There ensued an uglier Rome, more sprawling than the pretty Rome. They passed scooters in buzzing packs of twenty, apartment blocks bedecked with drying laundry, pyramids of car tires, gas station after gas station. Tanner was improvising and the Germans speaking German, Renata consulting a map, while Becky monitored her condition. For four and a half years, her period had arrived as reliably as the thunderstorms that ended a sweltering Midwestern day. Now she felt nothing in her belly, no change at all, an ominous stasis. Even before the last of ugly Rome fell away and they reached the autostrada, a dread had taken root in her.

Volker’s acceleration pressed her back into her leather seat. He was driving so fast that the trucks they passed looked stationary. She saw the speedometer needle trembling at two hundred kilometers an hour, climbing higher. The sky was white hot and the windows were down, the roar of air so loud that she could hear only Tanner’s high notes. He was still immersed in his music, Renata gazing at him again, Volker serene at the wheel. The Buddha’s string tightened and tilted as he braked for a car going only recklessly fast, not insanely fast.

Stiff with dread, barely able to raise her arm, Becky touched Tanner’s shoulder. He smiled and nodded in time with his strumming. She was too frightened to move again or speak. Beyond the dangling plastic Buddha, another nearly stationary car rushed up to meet them. Volker flashed his headlights, the Buddha smiled, and her dread branched out in all directions. What did she know about Volker, except that he looked like Charles Manson? Did he believe in Buddhist reincarnation? Was he trying to crash them to a higher plane, beyond the whiteness of the sky? And the weirdness of Edoardo, his thing for pretty houseguests, the vacancy of his apartment—was everyone perverted? Was this why Volker and Renata stayed there? Did they pay Edoardo to cruise the streets and find fresh meat? Was the farmhouse in Tuscany just a lure for unsuspecting Americans? She’d placed herself and Tanner in the hands of people she knew absolutely nothing about. She wanted to ask Volker to slow down, but her jaw was locked, her chest muscles petrified. The Mercedes was flying at airplane speed, meteor speed. It telescoped the passing trees and road signs, smashed them together in a blur of violence. Was this how she would die? She could see her death as clearly as if it had already happened. It filled her with sadness, but at least she’d had a chance to live in the world, at least she’d experienced real love and beheld the light of God. The unborn soul in her had never even seen the light.

Dear God, she prayed, if this is the final test, I accept the test. If my time has come, I’ll die rejoicing in you. But please let it be your will that I live. If it’s your will that I live, I promise I will always serve you. If it’s your will that I be pregnant, I promise I will never harm my baby. I will love her and cherish her and teach her to love you, I promise, I promise, I promise, if you would only let me live. Please, God. Let me live.

Clem met Felipe Cuéllar at a construction site where the work consisted of shoveling sand, under a sand-colored Lima sky, and pushing it up narrow planks in a wheelbarrow. For a month, they shared a corrugated metal lean-to near the water treatment plant, shared food and beer, awakened to the smell of each other’s farts. Like other young men from the highlands, Felipe had come to the city in the winter to earn some cash. When it was time for him to go home, in November, Clem offered to join him and work for his family in exchange for food and shelter. The nonweather of Lima, the identically beige-skied days, was oppressing him, and throughout his months in Peru he’d seen the Andes in the east, the sun reflected on their heights, without getting any closer. He knew so little of farming, it didn’t occur to him that planting season coincided with the arrival of the rains.

He’d thought he knew what labor was. He’d carried tons of tar paper up six flights of stairs, a hundred-pound roll at a time, at a building site in Guayaquil, he’d stood in raw sewage outside Chiclayo and shoveled for ten hours, he’d raked hot asphalt under midday sun, but not until he was slipping and crawling in the mud of the Andes, in freezing fog and pelting hail, pulling out stones with cracked and swollen fingers, hacking at the earth with a dull-bladed implement, the altitude sharp-bladed in his brain, the blood from broken capillaries in his throat, did he put to rest the question of his strength.

When he’d left New Orleans, a year and a half earlier, his only plan had been to have no plan. With a few hundred dollars and the Spanish he’d taught himself while waiting for a passport, he’d crossed the Mexican border at Matamoros and headed farther south, intending to be gone for two years, the same term he would have served in the army. When he’d exhausted his money, on a boat passage to Guayaquil, he’d become an itinerant day laborer, motiveless in every respect except the need to work. If he saw a bus packed with other workers, he squeezed onto it without caring where it was going, not because he wished to understand the underprivileged but simply because, if he didn’t work, he didn’t eat.

Neither having nor seeking a larger motive, he’d been surprised to find one in the highlands. The fundamental equation of human existence—soil + water + plants + labor = food—was the most applied of sciences, nothing philosophical about it, but the Andean farmers’ way with their seedlings and their tubers, their wresting of sustenance from the harshest margins of arability, was a fulfillment of the plant physiology and genetics, the physical and atmospheric chemistry, the nitrogen cycles, the molecular jujitsu of chlorophyll, that he’d studied in school without appreciating their existential crux; and it had given him a plan. He would stay on through the potato harvest, complete his two-year term, and return to Illinois to study the impure science of agronomy.

The Cuéllars lived in a hamlet an hour’s walk from the town of Tres Fuentes. Once a week, after the crops had been planted, Clem descended on a boggy track through the puna, past pockets of hardwood forest whose recession upslope made the gathering of firewood arduous, to a post office conceivably colonial in age. Unlike the Cuéllars, whose first language was Quechua, the postal clerk spoke perfect Spanish. He was Clem’s sole connection to the world beyond the highlands, his fútbol-themed calendar the only marker of that world’s chronology. Every week, Clem returned to find another line of days x-ed out.

One afternoon, when x’s had consumed half of February, the clerk had a small package for him. He took it outside and sat down on the rim of a dry, ruined fountain. The air was scented with the smoke of kitchen fires, the sun hidden by a ceiling of pale cloud through which he could feel its warmth. In the package were three pairs of wool socks and a letter from his mother.

There were two kinds of letters, the ones you eagerly tore open and the ones you had to force yourself to read, and his mother’s were of the latter kind. Others she’d sent him, in Guayaquil and Lima, had made him angry, especially at Becky. If Becky hadn’t been so bent on her religious do-goodery, Perry couldn’t have pissed away six thousand dollars and she could have gone to college, instead of getting herself pregnant and married, at nineteen, to an affable lightweight. But there was nothing he could do from South America, and his anger had passed in the daily struggle for bread, the dysentery he was prone to, the repeated theft of his spare clothes, the bother of acquiring new ones without resorting, himself, to stealing. Experience had taught him to live with nothing of value except his passport, and so it was with the news of Perry’s collapse and Becky’s disastrous choices, his mother’s sorrows: it was better to travel light.

January 26, 1974

Dear Clem,

Your father and I were blessed to receive your letter from Tres Fuentes and learn that you are safe and well there. Even if you’re working hard, it must be a relief to be in the beautiful High Andes after all your time in cities, and I’m so glad to have an address where I know a letter is sure to reach you. (You didn’t mention the second letter I sent to the post office in Lima—I assume you didn’t get it?) It must be difficult to summarize so many interesting experiences in a short letter home, so many thoughts and impressions, and I understand you can’t write every week, but please know that every word you write to us is precious.

We enjoyed your thoughts about agricultural science but of course I’m especially curious about the people you’re with. It warms my heart to hear of the interest you’ve taken in Felipe’s family and your willingness to share in their hardships, and I think your father is more than a little envious. If our lives had gone a different way, he would have liked to be a missionary—he has such deep empathy for people whose existence is a struggle. We miss you more and more with every day that passes, but it’s a comfort to know that you’re developing that empathy yourself. I can’t imagine a better reward for your two years of “service.”

The big news here is that your father has accepted a new position, and we’re moving to—Indiana! The town is Hadleysburg, about an hour outside Indianapolis, and the U.C.C. there has a very engaged congregation. The interim pastor is leaving at the end of June, and we’ll relocate as soon as Judson finishes the school year. Hadleysburg is attractive for many reasons. The cost of living is lower, your father will finally have his own church again, and his pastoral duties will be lighter, so he can do other work for pay. Perry’s second stint at Cedar Hill was a terrible financial blow, and we haven’t been able to repay the money we borrowed from your sister, let alone the money of yours that was lost. Your father had talked about going back to Lesser Hebron (!) and petitioning the brethren for reacceptance in their community, because he wants a simpler life, but financially that’s no longer an option and Hadleysburg is plenty simple for me. Judson can go to a regular school and I can have a glass of wine without being excommunicated, but it’s a small and close-knit community, with fewer temptations for Perry. He swears he doesn’t have more drugs hidden away, but after his relapse I don’t know that I can ever trust him, and I won’t be sorry to leave this house—all I can see is places where he might have hidden drugs.

Perry is polite to us and seems to appreciate our help, but he has no energy and very little “affect.” He says the electroshock harmed his powers of recall, and he hates the side effects of his new medication. Even if he could finish high school (he hasn’t completed a course in almost two years), I don’t yet see how he could go away to college. For the moment, I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done but watch over him and pray that he gets better on his new medication. Dear Clem, I know your feelings about the efficacy of prayer, but if you could ever find it in your heart to say a little prayer for your brother, even if you don’t think it will change anything, it would mean a lot to your mother, and to your father too.

Judson remains a joy. He’s starring in the sixth-grade “musical” and reading at tenth-grade level. He feels for Perry and he understands how burdened your father and I are, but he never seems to brood about it. When Perry had his calamity, I worried it would take away Judson’s childhood and he would lose that innocent capacity to enjoy things. I can’t tell you what a blessing it is, when I’m having a bad day (I won’t bore you with that), to see him playing outside with the Erickson girls or watching the news with your father (he’s tape-recording all the Watergate news for a social-studies report) or just eating his dinner with so much gusto. Perry says the medication makes everything taste the same to him, and if there’s something Judson is especially enjoying, Perry passes his plate and lets him take more of it. Since he came back from Cedar Hill, the only real glimmers I’ve seen of his old self are when he’s with Judson. David Goya stopped by twice at Christmas (he’s a sophomore at Rice now), and Larry Cottrell, God bless him, comes over every week (his mother left the church, but he’s still in Crossroads), but Perry doesn’t seem to care much either way. The fear that he’ll try to harm himself again is with me night and day, and I’m afraid it always will be.

We continue to see your sister and Tanner in church. They sit at the back in case Gracie starts crying and Becky needs to step out. I make an effort to talk to her after the service, but it’s like talking to a locked door—she will not take her eyes off Gracie. I think I told you they have their own apartment now, above the record store, and I offered to come by with some things, some old linens and baby blankets and toys, because I know money is tight. Becky didn’t get her back up, she just smiled and said no thank you, they didn’t need anything. Everything is done with a smile—declining my invitations to dinner, excusing herself from the holidays, refusing to let me hold her baby (and then I turn around and see a parishioner holding her). Lord knows, she has reason to be angry with me, but her coldness just breaks my heart. Tanner is as nice as ever but gets nervous when Becky sees us talking to him—she pretends to be immersed in Gracie, but she’s obviously watching him. She says she’s very happy, and maybe she is. I imagine she’ll be even happier when we leave for Indiana.

There’s a search committee for the new associate minister, and we hear that Ambrose is at the top of the list. I think, if he takes the job, it will help your father close the door on New Prospect. He’s been so changed since the calamity, so chastened and humbled, I honestly think he could have wished Rick all the best, if only Rick hadn’t officiated at Becky’s wedding. (It was her choice, but, really, what was Rick thinking?) My hope is that having his own church, with no Rick in the picture, will give your father a fresh start, because he still has so much to give. I’m enclosing a sermon he wrote about coal mining on the Navajo reservation, after Keith Durochie died. It was so good, I sent it in to “The Other Side,” and now your father is a published author. He wasn’t happy I submitted it without telling him, but I don’t think he’ll mind me sending it to you.

Dear Clem, you mustn’t think your father doesn’t write to you because he isn’t thinking of you. He thinks about you all the time, and you should see the way he talks about you—the way he shakes his head with admiration. I’ve begged him to write and let you know how proud he is, but he’s convinced that he let you down as a father, and he’s afraid a letter would be unwelcome. I don’t want to burden you with a second request, but, if you’re ever inclined, you might let him know that you’d be happy for a word from him.

It’s cold and late here, and I want to put this in the mail in the morning. Your father just went upstairs to bed and asked me to send you his love. You needn’t worry about us—God never asks for more than we can give. Just know that nothing in the world could bring us more joy than to see you again. Please take very, very good care in the mountains.

All my love,

Mom

P.S. Now that I have a good safe address for you, I’m sending a very belated little Christmas present and the last of the money from your savings account, which might help with your trip home. (Do you know when that will be?)

Maybe it was the twenty-dollar bills in the envelope, the impending return they represented, or maybe the image of his father broken and remorseful, his weakness merely pitiable, not embarrassing, but the letter didn’t anger Clem. It made him very anxious. The feeling was like something from a dream, a dreamer’s panicked sense of needing to be somewhere else, of being late for an important exam, of having forgotten he had a train to catch. How absurd that he’d thought he needed to prove himself stronger than his father. He’d been fighting a battle long since won, in an irrelevant sector of the dreamworld.

Whatever else Becky was, happy or unhappy, she’d always been straightforward—sincere to the point of naïveté. It was hard to imagine a person so clearhearted giving phony smiles to her mother, a person so naturally guileless calculating how to stab her parents without leaving prints on the knife. Ever since he’d learned of her marriage to the lightweight, Clem had done his best not to think about her; a baby was a baby, and there was nothing to be done. He’d been disappointed in her, but he’d lacked the empathy to imagine her own disappointment. How miserable she must have become, to be cruel to a person as harmless as their mother. And this, yes, was the source of his anxiety, this was the thing he was late for, this was the vital matter he’d forgotten: he loved Becky.

He went back to the postal clerk and parted with some coins. Standing at the end of the counter, with a pen borrowed from the clerk, he covered an aerogram with tiny handwriting. He apologized to Becky for having criticized her, he described his daily life in the hamlet, and then he paused. He was in the same position as his father, afraid that an avowal of love would be unwelcome. It might seem inflated to Becky after such a long silence, and so he went at it sideways. Using terms in which he hoped love would be implicit—she was a person of strength, clear of heart, a shining star—he asked her to consider the trouble their parents were in, consider her many advantages, and try to be a little kinder. Without rereading the letter, he wrote his parents’ address and PLEASE FORWARD on the aerogram and gave it to the clerk. Then he put on a pair of new socks (much needed) and walked back up the valley.

It was generous of his mother to suppose he’d developed greater empathy in South America. Empathy was a luxury a day laborer couldn’t afford. When a truck pulled up at dawn and fifty men fought for space on it, empathizing with the man trying to yank you off the tailgate could result in having nothing to eat that day. If Clem had developed anything in Tres Fuentes, it was simply admiration for the men who tilled the unforgiving puna, the women who rose at the night’s coldest hour to boil their mote and their mate. He didn’t have to empathize with Felipe Cuéllar. It was enough to know that he was durable and trustworthy.

Having taken action against the anxiety, Clem returned to his elemental existence. He woke and worked, drank chicha and slept in a shed with the Cuéllars’ donkey. The month of March brought finer weather, dense nitrogen-fixing growth on the bean slopes, alpacas fattening themselves with ceaseless chewing. Lacking the finer skills of farming, he earned his keep by rebuilding a pen for the hamlet’s livestock, repairing stone walls, and gathering firewood. The donkey was old and tolerant, and he did it the favor of leading it up to the forest, rather than riding it. He was amazed that hardwoods could survive at all at such an altitude, far higher than a temperate tree line, and he felt bad about hacking at them with a machete. They had small, silvery leaves, twigs encrusted with lichen, branches hairy with epiphytes and tortured in their angles, as though they’d been thwarted at every turn by the harshness of their environment. He suspected they grew too slowly to keep up with the demand for firewood, but the hamlet had no other source of fuel. He tried to cut judiciously, taking only dead limbs, but every branch seemed half dead and half alive. Even as the bark peeled away, exposing xylem to the weather, it managed to convey nutrients to an outpost or two of fresh leaves. Each tree, indeed, was like a miniature of the highlands. The branches resembled the ancient, gnarled pathways that led to the patches of arable land, leaf-green, that were scattered among stony fields and bogs of tannic standing water. The half-dead trees recalled the human settlements as well: for every dwelling in good repair were several in a state of ruin, some no more than heaps of rock, possibly dating from the Incas; the birds he flushed from the trees were like the ponchos of the women of the hamlet, gold and blue, black and crimson. When he’d cut as much wood as he and the donkey could carry on their backs, they made their way down a slope already cleared of trees. He noticed that its soil was badly eroded, less water-retentive, than the loam in the forest, but the nights here were frigid and the almuerzo waiting for him at the Cuéllars’, a thick soup he never tired of, could not have been cooked without firewood.

In hindsight, he wished he’d come to the Andes a year earlier, instead of wasting his time in cities. And yet maybe it was for the best. Maybe he’d needed to serve a term of hard labor, to work off the shame of his mistake with the draft board, to punish himself for the pain he’d pointlessly inflicted on Sharon and his parents, in order to earn his reward in the highlands. The labor here was even harder, but he felt restored to a self he’d misplaced for so long that he’d forgotten it, restored to a world of earth and plants and animals, restored to his curiosity and his ambition to do something with it. The excitement of returning to school and pursuing a career in science propelled him through his days and kept him awake at night. It was a very long time since he’d wanted something larger than his next meal.

The afternoon he got Becky’s letter in Tres Fuentes, the page of the postal clerk’s calendar was gravid with x’s. It was the twenty-seventh of March. Clem went out to the dry fountain and tore open the envelope eagerly.

Dear Clem,

Thank you for your apology, thank you for bringing me “up to speed” on your travels (it all sounds very interesting), but please don’t tell me what to do. You made a choice not to be here, and it’s pretty late in the day to suddenly play the peacemaker. You were off on your adventure, you don’t know what M & D did to me, you don’t know how obsessed they are with Perry (I know he’s sick but he’s unbelievably selfish and deceitful and has cost them well over ten thousand dollars, no end in sight), you have no idea how unbearable they are, you haven’t had your stomach turned. I’ve forgiven their financial debt to me, I don’t want or expect anything from them, and whatever Mom tells you, I’m always friendly to them. I don’t wish them ill, I just don’t enjoy being around them. The Bible doesn’t tell us to like our neighbor, because a person can’t control who she likes. I do struggle with honoring one’s parents, but in fairness they don’t give me much to work with. Dad is more grotesquely insecure than ever, the whole church knows about his affair with a church member (did Mom happen to mention he nearly got fired for that?), he’s grown a goatee that looks like pubic hair, and Mom acts like he’s God’s special gift to the world. Try honoring that. I’m perfectly cordial to them, but no, I don’t invite them over and no, I don’t go there for holidays, because A, I’m part of Tanner’s family too, and B, I want Grace to grow up in a house of peace and harmony and I’m afraid of what would happen if I spent more than fifteen minutes with them. I’m married to a wonderful, talented, generous man and I have the most beautiful baby, I’m really overwhelmed with what God has given me, I wake up every morning with a song in my heart, and I would ask you not to blame me for trying to keep it that way. Some people are lucky enough to like their parents, but I’m not one of them.

I owe you an apology in turn for saying hateful things when you couldn’t go to Vietnam. It was wrong, and I apologize, but there was something weird about the way we used to be together and maybe we needed to grow apart and become our own people with separate identities. I used to love talking to you about everything under the sun, and I do sometimes miss having a brother to look up to and tell things to. If you ever come home, maybe we can give it a try again. The second you meet Gracie, you’ll understand why I’m so crazy about her, and I want you to get to know Tanner as he really is. You never gave him a chance, but if you care about me you should care about the person in my life who’s best to me, best for me, best everything. I don’t mean to make rules, but if you want to be in my life again I guess there are some rules. Number one is respect my feelings about M & D. That one is nonnegotiable. But also, when you see the situation with Perry and what the two of them are like these days, you might understand better why I feel the way I do. I’m sorry they’re unhappy, but I can’t make it better, even if I wanted to, because I don’t matter to them enough. They made their choices, you made yours, I made mine. At least one of us is happy with her choices.

Love, Becky

The letter was like a match struck in the dark. In the light of it, he saw his old bedroom at the parsonage. It was there that Becky had come to him late at night, offered up stories, and, more than once, in her straightforwardness, fallen asleep on his bed. Why hadn’t he woken her up? Told her to sleep in her own room? It was because she’d meant too much to him. To know that she preferred his room, preferred him to anyone else in the family, was worth the discomfort of sleeping on the floor. And if she’d been embarrassed to wake up and see him on the rug, had apologized for appropriating his bed, or if it had happened only once, it wouldn’t have been weird. But when she’d done it again, and again—let him sleep on the floor without embarrassment or apology—the terms of their arrangement had been clear: he would do anything for her, and she would let him. To anyone else, it might have looked like she was being selfish. Only he understood the love in her consenting to be so loved.

Then he’d gone to college and met Sharon, who’d wanted nothing more than to be so loved, and in his wretched honesty he’d admitted that he didn’t love her to the degree he knew his heart was capable of. In the light of the match the letter had struck, he saw that his heart had still belonged to Becky; that this was the real reason he hadn’t stayed with Sharon. But while he’d been sleeping with Sharon the terms had changed, Becky no longer needed him, and in trying to hold on to her, trying to recall her to their arrangement, trying to interfere with her decisions, he’d lost her love entirely. She’d been so angry with him, her hatred so unbearable, that he’d boarded a bus for Mexico without a plan. In the light of the match, he saw that he’d tried to displace one pain with another, the pain of losing her with the pain of hard labor, and this was the terrible thing about her letter: nothing had changed.

Striding along the track to the hamlet, the incendiary letter in his pocket, he overtook Felipe Cuéllar, who was carrying a stout-handled hoe on his shoulder. Felipe was slight of build and a head shorter than Clem, but there was no physical task he couldn’t perform with less effort. Following him up the track, keeping clear of the hoe, Clem asked him when the potatoes would be harvested.

When they’re ready, Felipe said.

Yes, Clem said, but how soon?

Always in May. It’s very hard work.

Not harder than planting in the rain.

Yes, harder. You’ll see.

They walked in silence for a while. Clouds were building behind the mountain at the upper end of the valley, Amazonian moisture, but lately the rains hadn’t come down as far west as the hamlet. The track through the puna was drying out.

I have a question, Clem said. If I had to leave now—soon—could I come here again? I meant to stay through the harvest, but I think I need to see my family.

Felipe stopped on the path and swung around with the hoe. He was frowning.

Did you get bad news? Is someone sick?

Yes. Well—yes.

Then go right away, Felipe said. Nothing is more important than family.

His last ride, from Bloomington to Aurora, early on the Saturday morning before Easter, was a twice-divorced fertilizer salesman, named Morton, who drove a sleek Buick Riviera and wanted to talk about God. Morton had pulled over on a ramp outside the truck stop where Clem had casually lifted and eaten the leavings from a table in the restaurant, taken a shower, and caught a few hours of sleep behind the parking lot. The money his mother had sent had got him by plane to Panama City and by bus to Mexico, but from there he’d had to hitchhike, mostly with long-haul truckers. When Morton learned that he hadn’t had a proper meal in five days, he took an exit for a Stuckey’s and bought him a stack of pancakes with fried eggs and bacon. Morton had the sunken face, the stained skin, the reassembled-looking body, of a man with hard drinking in his past. It seemed to give him pleasure to watch Clem eat.

“You know why I stopped for you?” he said. “When I saw you with your thumb out—the reason I stopped was I thought you might be an angel.”

Clem had wondered about that. He was the antithesis of a hippie, but in his hooded Peruvian sweater, his beard and long hair, he looked like one. He’d been surprised when the Riviera pulled over.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Morton said, “but they exist. Angels. They look like ordinary people, but after they’re gone you realize they were angels of the Lord.”

Clem was still getting used to speaking English, the remarkable fact that he could do it. “I’m pretty sure I’m not an angel.”

“But that’s the way God works. That’s how He takes care of us—by having us care for each other. When you refuse a stranger in need, you might be refusing an angel. You know the day I got the message? It was the twenty-seventh of June, four years ago. I was a mess, my second wife had just left me, I’d lost my job at the high school, and my car broke down in a thunderstorm. Not far from here, actually. It was a county road, rain coming down in sheets, and the alternator shorted out. I was as low as I ever was in my life. I sat there in the car feeling sorry for myself, soaking wet, and right behind me, in the mirror, I see this figure walking towards me. You’ll think I’m making this up, but he’s a young man about your age, dressed in white. I roll down the window, and he asks me what the problem is. He’s as wet as I am, but he looks under the hood and tells me to try the ignition. And damned if the car doesn’t start right up. I let it run for a second and then I get out to thank him, maybe give him some money, and he’s gone. We’re in the middle of the cornfields, flat as can be, and, poof—he’s nowhere. Gone. And just like that, the rain stops, and you’ll think I’m making this up, but there’s writing all across the sky, and I can see that it’s numbers. Numbers horizon to horizon. I realize there’s a number for every day of my life—the angel is showing me my entire life, past and future. And then, for a split second, the numbers line up in perfect formation, and I see it. I see eternal life in Jesus Christ. I hadn’t set foot in a church in years, but I got down on my knees, right there on the road, and poured out my heart to Jesus. That was the day my new life started.”

There was no denying Morton’s Christian kindness, no arguing with flapjacks and syrup and whipped butter, and he’d told his story with impressive conviction, but the story couldn’t begin to withstand objective scrutiny. In Peru, Clem had worked alongside men with all manner of superstitions. There was a crucifix in the Cuéllars’ hut, and he’d seen Felipe cross himself outside the church and the cemetery in Tres Fuentes. But those had been simple working folk. Morton was an educated American, by his own account the top seller in his territory, the owner of a Buick built on scientifically verified principles. Stranger yet, the other adults in Clem’s own family, his mother and his father and now Becky, modern people of high intelligence, spoke of God as though the word referred to something real. Being the nonbeliever among believers was even lonelier than being the gringo in Tres Fuentes. A gringo was different only on the surface and could look for common ground. Science and delusion had no ground in common.

Morton would have taken him all the way to New Prospect if he hadn’t been collecting his daughter in Aurora at ten o’clock. He dropped Clem at the train station and gave him a five-dollar bill. Leaning across to the glove compartment, he produced a card densely printed with devotional matter.

“You’ve been incredibly generous,” Clem said, taking the card. On the front side was a halftone Jesus, on the obverse a halftone Paradise.

“I hope you have a blessed Easter with your family.”

Alone on the train platform, Clem dropped the card in a trash can. While he was at it, he ditched his filthy knit shoulder bag and the filthy clothes in it, keeping only his passport. Today was the day his own new life was starting. An inbound train was waiting with open doors.

That he recognized New Prospect and had a claim to it, knew every building and street name, seemed as remarkable as his command of English. He could have called his parents from the road, to let them know he was coming, but the discomforts of hitchhiking were best survived by not looking ahead, and his parents weren’t the reason he’d left Tres Fuentes anyway.

The air on Pirsig Avenue was heavy with spring, its smell unlike anything in Peru. In the window of Aeolian Records were sun-damaged jazz and symphonic albums, seemingly untouched since he’d last been in town. Inside the store, under the owner’s untrusting eye, two long-haired boys were flipping through the Rock bins. Clem went around to the alley behind the store. At the bottom of the stairs to the second-floor apartment, he hesitated. He remembered similarly hesitating on the landing below Sharon’s room in the hippie house.

Tacked to the apartment door, at the top of the stairs, was a file card on which someone, surely Becky, had written Tanner and Becky Evans ornately, in cursive, and drawn little flowers to either side. Eyes filling, Clem knocked on the door. He couldn’t remember Becky ever playing house as a girl. In Indiana, where he’d had her all to himself, she’d followed him wherever he went. He’d taught her to throw a baseball, taught her to watch it into the glove (his glove, their only glove) when he threw it back. She’d chased him with a dried-out piece of dog crap, screaming, “Petrified poo! Petrified poo!” And the gleeful savagery of the tortures she’d devised for a toy rabbit that had fallen out of favor, the giggling wickedness with which she’d enumerated its transgressions: since when had that girl wanted to play house?

He knocked again. Nobody home.

Overcome, all at once, by the miles he’d traveled, he returned to the street. He’d wanted to see Becky before he saw his parents, to make clear that she was the reason he’d come home, but all he could think of now was his bed at the parsonage. The day was warm, the sun near the zenith. A nap on a real bed would be delicious. Already half asleep, he bent his steps homeward past the bookstore, the drugstore, the insurance broker.

He was jolted awake when he came to Treble Clef. Behind the front window, Tanner Evans was showing an electric guitar to a middle-aged customer, someone’s mother. Clem stopped on the sidewalk uncertainly. Tanner glanced at him and returned his attention to the woman. Then he looked again, eyes widening, and came running out of the store. “What the hell?”

“I’m back,” Clem said.

“I’m thinking, do I know this person?”

Tanner, for his part, seemed perfectly unchanged. Perhaps would always be unchanged. He spread his arms, as he’d done so readily in Crossroads, and Clem stepped in for the embrace.

“This is fantastic,” Tanner said. “Becky will be so happy.”

“Really?”

Tanner’s face clouded to the extent his native sunniness allowed. “I mean—yeah. Definitely. She missed you.”

“Congratulations on everything. Marriage, fatherhood. Congratulations.”

“Thanks, it’s been amazing.”

“I want to hear about it, but—where is she?”

“Probably at Scofield, with Gracie. Jeannie Cross is in town.”

After a second hug, from the man who was now his brother-in-law, Clem headed up toward Scofield Park. The trees of New Prospect were a hundred percent alive, gripped jealously by their unblemished bark, and every house looked like a palace. The wet, emerald grass that a man was removing from a lawn-mower bag, discarding as waste, would have been the sweetest meal for an alpaca. Clem stopped to take off his sweater and knot it above his hips, and the man looked up from his mower suspiciously. Maybe he sensed the comparisons Clem was making, the implicit critique, or maybe he just hated hippies.

Becky wasn’t among the mothers at the Scofield playground, and she wasn’t at the picnic tables. Farther back in the park was a ball field with a backstop. Fully grown young men, several of them shirtless, were playing softball. The guy at the plate, connecting with a pitch and sending it high over the head of the left fielder, was a detestable jock Clem recognized from high school, Kent Carducci. He pumped his fist and gave a brute roar as he rounded first base.

The girls—where there were boys like this, there had to be girls—were grouped along the first-base line, around a set of aluminum bleachers. Becky was seated on the lowest bleacher with Jeannie Cross. Taller than the others, her old aura intact, she might have been a queen holding court. Lesser girls sat cross-legged on the grass below her, one of them holding up the arms of a little child who’d achieved a standing position.

Jeannie Cross spotted Clem first. She grabbed Becky’s shoulder, and now Becky saw him, too. For a moment, her expression was uncomprehending. Then she ran up behind the first-base line to meet him. He spread his arms, but she stopped short of hugging distance. She was wearing a corduroy jacket that had once been his. Her smile was perhaps more incredulous than joyful.

“What are you doing here?”

“Came to see you.”

“Wow.”

“Is it okay if I give you a hug?”

She didn’t seem to remember the joke, but she stepped up and put one arm around him, briefly, and pulled back. “Everybody’s home for Easter,” she said. “I guess you are, too.”

“I wasn’t thinking about Easter. I only came to see you.”

Kent Carducci shouted something abusive on the ball field.

“So come and meet Gracie,” Becky said. She ran ahead of Clem and scooped up the little child. “Gracie, I want you to meet your uncle Clem.”

The child hid her face in Becky’s neck. Clem probably looked to her like a hairy monster. He realized that, until this moment, he hadn’t quite believed that his sister had procreated. The child was perfectly formed, her hair fine and thin on top, thicker on the sides: a new little person, ex nihilo, with a mother scarcely past childhood herself. He could almost remember Becky as a one-year-old. His eyes filled again.

“Here, you can hold her,” Becky said. “She won’t break.”

Watched by Becky’s friends, he took Gracie in his arms. She was radiantly warm in her cotton sweater, squirming with vital energy, reaching back for her mother. He didn’t think he’d held a baby since Judson had outgrown being portable. He gently bounced his niece, trying to postpone the inevitable crying, but Becky’s gaze and smile were fixed on her, as if to remind her of where she’d rather be. She let out a wail, and Becky took her back.

The physics of their reunion were nothing like what he’d imagined: a ball field populated with guys whose muscles had been developed by athletics, not hard labor, eight flavors of pretty girl arrayed by the bleachers, some of them from Crossroads (Carol Pinella, Sally Perkins’s younger sister), others from the cheerleading squad, most of them home from college, at least one of them still local, and none of them remotely capable of imagining the world in which he’d lived for two years. His shirt stank, his dungarees were stained with Andean mud, and his affinities were with the Cuéllars’ hamlet. New Prospect was still New Prospect, and Becky was evidently still at the social center of it, while he, who’d always been far from the center, had moved radically much farther. He would have liked to talk to Jeannie Cross, who was more sensationally desirable than ever, but his alienation was so extreme that he could only stand behind the backstop, watching people he disliked play softball, and wait for Becky to find a moment for him.

Gracie had fallen asleep in the flimsy stroller that Becky wheeled over to the backstop. “Somebody needs her diaper changed,” she said. “Do you want to walk home with us?”

“What do you think I want?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re the reason I’m here. I came back as soon as I got your letter.”

“Yeah, okay.”

She pushed the stroller toward the nearest pavement, and he followed her. “I’m glad to see you’re still wearing that jacket.”

“That’s right,” she said, “it was yours. I’ve had it so long, I forgot.”

Reaching the pavement, she crouched and inspected her baby.

“She’s beautiful,” he offered.

“Thank you. I love her like you wouldn’t believe.”

She was right in front of him, the person he loved best, still matching his mental image of her, but his own sudden apparition was apparently unremarkable to her. As she proceeded out of the park with the stroller, peering down at her baby, he feared that he’d made another bad mistake; that he should have stayed in Tres Fuentes for the potato harvest.

“Becky,” he said finally.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry I tried to tell you what to do.”

“It’s okay. I forgive you.”

“I don’t want to interfere in your life. I’m just asking for a chance to be a part of it again.”

She didn’t seem to hear him, didn’t speak again until they were crossing Highland Street. He could see the taller of the parsonage oak trees in the distance. He didn’t feel especially forgiven.

“Have you been home yet?” she said.

“No. I wanted to see you first.”

She acknowledged this tribute with a nod. “Mom showed up at my door the other day. She didn’t call, she just showed up. She wanted us to come to dinner tomorrow. She tried to lay a guilt trip on me, how it’s Dad’s last Easter in New Prospect.”

“Well. She’s right about that.”

“I already invited Tanner’s parents to our place. It’s Gracie’s first Easter. I bought a ham.”

Clem could feel that he was being tested—being dared to point out that, unlike his parents, a one-year-old couldn’t tell Easter Sunday from Guy Fawkes Day.

“So, uh. Why not invite Mom and Dad?”

“Because that means bringing Perry, which doesn’t sound like a holiday to me. He uses up all the air in the room, even when he’s just sitting there. If you start talking about something that isn’t him, he’ll make some remark about how shitty he feels, or something completely random, whatever it takes to get the attention back on him, and they fall for it every time.”

“He’s sick, Becky.”

“Yeah, obviously. I get why they have to take care of him. But it isn’t fair to Tanner’s parents to have his sickness be their whole evening.”

“Mom and Dad have to live with it every night of the week.”

“I know. I’m sure it’s really hard for them. But he’s their son, not mine, and I already made my contribution as a sibling. I think I’m entitled to not deal with it on a holiday.”

Clem suppressed an impulse to say more. Obeying her first rule, respecting her feelings about their parents, was going to be a struggle. At least there was no rule against being kind to them himself.

As if she’d sensed his thought, she stopped on the sidewalk and turned to him.

“So,” she said. “Will you have dinner with us?”

“Tonight?”

“No, tomorrow. Easter. I’m inviting you.”

His heart leaped at the invitation; it couldn’t help itself. But it had leaped into a trap. He’d been away for so long, it would be cruel to leave his parents alone on Easter, and Becky knew it.

“I don’t know,” he said.

She looked away with an expression of not caring. All he’d asked for was a chance with her, and she was offering him that chance. Whether she genuinely wanted him in her life or was simply testing his loyalties, he couldn’t yet tell. But it was clear that, in his absence, far from having diminished herself, as he’d supposed, she’d become a dominating force. She had the grandchild, she had the absolutely loyal husband, she had her charisma and her popularity, and she needed nothing from him or their parents. The terms were hers to set.

“Let me think about it,” he said, although he already knew what he would do.