Crossroads

ADVENT

The sky broken by the bare oaks and elms of New Prospect was full of moist promise, a pair of frontal systems grayly colluding to deliver a white Christmas, when Russ Hildebrandt made his morning rounds among the homes of bedridden and senile parishioners in his Plymouth Fury wagon. A certain person, Mrs. Frances Cottrell, a member of the church, had volunteered to help him bring toys and canned goods to the Community of God that afternoon, and though he knew that only as her pastor did he have a right to rejoice in her act of free will, he couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas present than four hours alone with her.

After Russ’s humiliation, three years earlier, the church’s senior minister, Dwight Haefle, had upped the associate minister’s share of pastoral visitations. What exactly Dwight was doing with the time Russ saved him, besides taking more frequent vacations and working on his long-awaited volume of lyric poetry, wasn’t clear to Russ. But he appreciated his coquettish reception by Mrs. O’Dwyer, an amputee confined by severe edema to a hospital bed in what had been her dining room. He appreciated the routine of being of service, especially to those who, unlike him, couldn’t remember one thing from three years ago. At the nursing home in Hinsdale, where the mingling smells of holiday pine wreaths and geriatric feces reminded him of Arizona high-country latrines, he handed old Jim Devereaux the new church membership face-book they’d been using as a prompt for conversation and asked if Jim remembered the Pattison family. To a pastor feeling reckless with Advent spirit, Jim was an ideal confidant, a wishing well in which a penny dropped would never hit bottom and resound.

“Pattison,” Jim said.

“They had a daughter, Frances.” Russ leaned over his parishioner’s wheelchair and paged to the Cs. “She goes by her married name now—Frances Cottrell.”

He never spoke her name at home, even when it would have been natural to, for fear of what his wife might hear in his voice. Jim bent closer to the picture of Frances and her two children. “Oh … Frannie? I remember Frannie Pattison. What ever happened to her?”

“She’s back in New Prospect. She lost her husband a year and a half ago—terrible thing. He was a test pilot for General Dynamics.”

“Where is she now?”

“She’s back in New Prospect.”

“Oh, huh. Frannie Pattison. Where is she now?”

“She came back home. She’s Mrs. Frances Cottrell now.” Russ pointed at her picture and said it again. “Frances Cottrell.”

She was meeting him in the First Reformed parking lot at two thirty. Like a boy who couldn’t wait for Christmas, he got there at 12:45 and ate his sack lunch in the car. On his bad days, of which there’d been many in the past three years, he resorted to an elaborate detour—into the church through its function hall, up a stairwell and down a corridor lined with stacks of banished Pilgrim Hymnals, across a storage room for off-kilter music stands and a crèche ensemble last displayed eleven Advents ago, a jumble of wooden sheep and one meek steer, graying with dust, with whom he felt a sad fraternity, then down a narrow staircase where only God could see and judge him, into the sanctuary via the “secret” door in the paneling behind the altar, and finally out through the sanctuary’s side entrance—to avoid passing the office of Rick Ambrose, the director of youth programming. The teenagers who massed in the hallway outside it were too young to have personally witnessed Russ’s humiliation, but they surely knew the story of it, and he couldn’t look at Ambrose without betraying his failure to follow their Savior’s example and forgive him.

Today, however, was a very good day, and the halls of First Reformed were still empty. He went directly to his office, rolled paper into his typewriter, and considered his unwritten sermon for the Sunday after Christmas, when Dwight Haefle would be vacationing again. He slouched in his chair and combed his eyebrows with his fingernails, pinched the bridge of his nose, touching a face whose angular contours he’d learned too late were attractive to many women, not just his wife, and imagined a sermon about his Christmas mission to the South Side. He preached too often about Vietnam, too often about the Navajos. To boldly speak, from the pulpit, the words Frances Cottrell and I had the privilege—to pronounce her name while she sat listening from the fourth row of pews and the congregation’s eyes, perhaps enviously, connected her with him—was a pleasure, alas, foreclosed by his wife, who read his sermons in advance and would also be sitting in a pew, and who didn’t know that Frances was joining him today.

On his office walls were posters of Charlie Parker and his sax, Dylan Thomas and his fag; a smaller picture of Paul Robeson framed alongside a handbill for Robeson’s appearance at the Judson Church in 1952; Russ’s diploma from the Biblical Seminary in New York; and a blown-up photo of him and two Navajo friends in Arizona, in 1946. Ten years ago, when he’d assumed the associate ministry in New Prospect, these artfully chosen assertions of identity had resonated with the teenagers whose development in Christ had been part of his brief. But to the kids who now thronged the church’s hallways in their bell-bottoms and bib overalls, their bandannas, they signified only obsolescence. The office of Rick Ambrose, him of the stringy black hair and the glistening black Fu Manchu, had a kindergarten feel to it, the walls and shelves bedecked with the crudely painted effusions of his young disciples, the special meaningful rocks and bleached bones and wildflower necklaces they’d given him, the silk-screened posters for fundraising concerts with no discernible relation to any religion Russ recognized. After his humiliation, he’d hidden in his office and ached amid the fading totems of a youth that no one but his wife found interesting anymore. And Marion didn’t count, because it was Marion who’d impelled him to New York, Marion who’d turned him on to Parker and Thomas and Robeson, Marion who’d thrilled to his stories of the Navajos and urged him to heed his calling to the ministry. Marion was inseparable from an identity that had proved to be humiliating. It had taken Frances Cottrell to redeem it.

“My God, is this you?” she’d said on her first visit to his office, the previous summer, as she studied the photo from the Navajo reservation. “You look like a young Charlton Heston.”

She’d come to Russ for grief counseling, another part of his brief and not his favorite, since his own most grievous loss to date was of his boyhood dog, Skipper. He’d been relieved to hear that Frances’s worst complaint, a year after her husband’s fiery death in Texas, was a sense of emptiness. At his suggestion that she join one of the First Reformed women’s circles, she flicked her hand. “I’m not going to coffee with the ladies,” she said. “I know I’ve got a boy starting high school, but I’m only thirty-six.” Indeed, she was sagless, pouchless, flabless, lineless, an apparition of vitality in a snug paisley sleeveless dress, her hair naturally blond and boyishly short, her hands boyishly small and square. It was obvious to Russ that she’d be remarried soon enough—that the emptiness she felt was probably little more than the absence of a husband—but he remembered his anger when his mother had asked him, too soon after Skipper’s passing, whether he might like another dog.

There was, he told Frances, one particular women’s circle, different from the others, guided by Russ himself, that worked with members of First Reformed’s inner-city partner church, the Community of God. “The ladies don’t coffee,” he said. “We paint houses, clear brush, haul trash. Take the elderly to their appointments, help kids with their homework. We do it every other Tuesday, all day. And, let me tell you, I look forward to those Tuesdays. It’s one of the paradoxes of our faith—the more you give to the less fortunate, the fuller you feel in Christ.”

“You say his name so easily,” Frances said. “I’ve been going to Sunday service for three months, and I’m still waiting to feel something.”

“Not even my own sermons have moved you.”

She colored a little, fetchingly. “That’s not what I meant. You’ve got a beautiful voice. It’s just…”

“Honestly, you’re more likely to feel something on a Tuesday than a Sunday. I’d rather be on the South Side myself than giving sermons.”

“It’s a Negro church?”

“A Black church, yes. Kitty Reynolds is our ringleader.”

“I like Kitty. I had her for senior English.”

Russ liked Kitty, too, although he sensed that she was skeptical of him, as a male of the species; Marion had invited him to consider that Kitty, never married, was likely a lesbian. She dressed like a lumberjack for their biweekly trips to the South Side, and she’d quickly asserted possession of Frances, insisting that she ride both ways with her, rather than in Russ’s station wagon. Mindful of her skepticism, he’d ceded the field to Kitty and waited for a day when she might be indisposed.

On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, when a flu-like cold was going around, only three ladies, all widows, had shown up in the First Reformed parking lot. Frances, wearing a plaid wool hunting cap like the one Russ had worn as a boy, hopped into the front seat of his Fury and left the hat on, perhaps owing to the leak in the Fury’s heating system that fogged the windshield if he didn’t keep a window down. Or did she know how gut-punchingly, faith-testingly, androgynously adorable she looked to him in that hat? The two older widows might have known it, because all the way in to the city, past Midway and across on Fifty-fifth Street, they pestered Russ from the back seat with seemingly pointed questions about his wife and his four children.

The Community of God was a small, unsteepled church of yellow brick, originally built by Germans, with a tar-roofed community center attached to one side. Its congregation, mostly female, was led by a middle-aged pastor, Theo Crenshaw, who did the circle the favor of accepting its suburban charity without thanks. Every second Tuesday, Theo simply presented Russ and Kitty with a prioritized to-do list; they came not to minister but to serve. Kitty had marched with Russ for civil rights, but Russ had had to counsel other women in the circle, explaining that just because they struggled to understand “urban” English it didn’t mean they had to speak loudly and slowly to make themselves understood. For the women who got it, and learned to overcome their fear of walking on the 6700 block of South Morgan Street, the circle had been a powerful experience. On the women who didn’t get it—some of whom had joined the circle for competitive reasons, not wanting to be left out—he’d been obliged to inflict the same humiliation he’d suffered at the hands of Rick Ambrose and ask them not to come again.

Because Kitty had kept her glued to her side, Frances hadn’t been tested yet. When they arrived on Morgan Street, she left the car reluctantly and waited to be asked before helping Russ and the other widows carry toolboxes and bags of cast-off winter clothes into the community center. Her hesitancy set off a flurry of misgivings in Russ—that he’d mistaken style for substance, a hat for an adventurous spirit—but they were melted by a gust of compassion when Theo Crenshaw, ignoring Frances, directed the two older widows to catalogue a shipment of secondhand books for the Sunday school. The two men were going to install a new water heater in the basement.

“And Frances,” Russ said.

She was hovering by the street door. Theo sized her up coolly. “There’s a whole lot of books.”

“Why don’t you help Theo and me,” Russ said.

The eagerness of her nod confirmed his compassionate instinct, dispelling the suspicion that what he really wanted was to show off how strong he was, how skilled with tools. In the basement, he stripped down to his undershirt and applied a bear hug to the nasty, asbestos-clad old heater and lifted it off its seat. At forty-seven, he was no longer a tall sapling; he’d broadened in the chest and shoulders like an oak tree. But there wasn’t much for Frances to do but watch, and when the intake pipe snapped off flush with the wall, necessitating work with a stone chisel and a pipe die, he was slow to notice that she’d left the basement.

What Russ most liked about Theo was his reticence, which spared Russ from the vanity of imagining that the two of them could be interracial buddies. Theo knew the essential facts about Russ—that he didn’t shy from hard work, that he’d never lived far from poverty, that he believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ—and he neither asked nor welcomed more open-ended questions. About, for example, the retarded neighborhood boy Ronnie, who wandered in and out of the church in all seasons, sometimes stopping to do a peculiar swaying dance with his eyes closed, or to cadge a quarter from a First Reformed lady, Theo would only say, “Best leave that boy alone.” When Russ had tried to engage with Ronnie anyway, asking him where he lived, who his mother was, Ronnie had responded, “Can I have a quarter?” and Theo had said to Russ, more sharply, “Best just leave him be.”

It was an instruction Frances hadn’t received. Upstairs, at lunchtime, they found her and Ronnie on the floor of the community room with a box of crayons. Ronnie was wearing a cast-off parka recognizably from New Prospect, swaying on his knees while Frances drew an orange sun on a sheet of newsprint. Theo stopped dead, began to say something, and shook his head. Frances offered Ronnie her crayon and looked up at Russ happily. She’d found her own way to serve and to give of herself, and he was happy for her, too.

Theo, following him into the sanctuary, was not. “You need to speak to her. Tell her Ronnie is off-limits.”

“I really don’t see the harm.”

“Isn’t a matter of harm.”

Theo went home to his wife for a hot meal, and Russ, not wanting to discourage Frances’s act of charity, took his sack lunch up to the Sunday-school room, where the older widows had undertaken a wholesale reorganization. When you were sick in the body, you surrendered it to the touch of strangers, and when you were sick with poverty you surrendered your environment. Without asking permission, the widows had sorted all of the children’s books and created bright, enticing labels for them. When you were poor, it could be hard to see what needed doing until someone showed you by doing it. Not asking permission hadn’t come naturally to Russ, but it was the counterpart of not expecting to be thanked. Venturing into a back yard of bramble and shoulder-high ragweed, he didn’t ask the old lady who owned it which bushes and which pieces of rusting junk weren’t worth saving, and when the job was done, more often than not, the old lady didn’t thank him. She said, “Now doesn’t that look better.”

He was chatting with the two widows when they heard a door bang downstairs, a woman’s voice rising in anger. He leaped to his feet and ran down to the community room. Frances, clutching a sheet of newsprint, was shrinking from a young woman he’d never seen before. She was emaciated, filthy-haired. Even halfway across the room, he could smell the liquor on her.

“This my son, you understand me? My son.”

Ronnie was still on his knees with the crayons, swaying.

“Whoa, whoa,” Russ said.

The young woman wheeled around. “You the husband?”

“No, I’m the pastor.”

“Well, you tell whatever she is to stay away from my boy.” She addressed herself again to Frances. “Stay away from my boy, bitch! What you got there anyway?”

Russ stepped between the women. “Miss. Please.”

“What you got there?”

“It’s a drawing,” Frances said. “A nice drawing. Ronnie made it. Didn’t you, Ronnie?”

The drawing in question was a random red scrawl. Ronnie’s mother reached and snatched it from Frances’s hand. “This ain’t your property.”

“No,” Frances said. “I think he made it for you.”

“She still talking to me? Is that what I’m hearing?”

“I think we all need to calm down here,” Russ said.

“She need to get her white ass outta my face and not be messing with my boy.”

“I’m sorry,” Frances said. “He’s so sweet, I was only—”

“Why is she still talking to me?” The mother ripped the drawing into quarters and yanked Ronnie to his feet. “I told you to keep away from these folk. Didn’t I tell you that?”

“Dunno,” Ronnie said.

She slapped him. “You don’t know?”

“Miss,” Russ said, “if you hit the boy again, there’s going to be trouble.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She was heading toward the street door. “Come on, Ronnie. We done here.”

After they were gone, and Frances had broken down in sobs and he’d embraced her, feeling her fear expend itself in shudders, but also noticing how neatly her narrow form fit in his arms, her delicate head in his hand, he was close to tears himself. They should have asked permission. He should have kept a more protective eye on her. He should have insisted that she help the older ladies with the books.

“I don’t know if I’m cut out for this,” she said.

“It was just bad luck. I’ve never seen her before.”

“But I’m afraid of them. And she knew it. And you’re not, and she respected you.”

“It gets easier if you keep showing up.”

She shook her head, not believing him.

When Theo Crenshaw returned from his lunch, Russ was too ashamed to mention the incident. He’d had no plan for him and Frances, no specific fantasy, nothing more than a wish to be near her, and now, in his vanity and error, he’d blown his chance to see her twice a month. He was bad enough to desire a woman who wasn’t his wife, but he was also bad at being bad. How hideously passive a tactic it had been to bring her down to the basement. To imagine that watching him work could make her want him, the way watching her do anything made him want her, was to be the kind of man her kind of woman wouldn’t want. Watching him had bored her, and he deserved the blame for what had followed.

In his Fury, on the slow drive back to New Prospect, she was silent until one of the older widows asked her how her son, Larry, the tenth grader, was liking Crossroads. It was news to Russ that her son had joined the church’s youth group.

“Rick Ambrose must be some kind of genius,” Frances said. “I don’t think there were thirty kids in that group when I was growing up.”

“Were you in it?” the older widow asked.

“Nope. Not enough cute boys. Not any, actually.”

Coming from Frances, the word genius was like acid on Russ’s brain. He should have borne it stoically, but on his bad days he was unable not to do things he would later regret. It was almost as if he did them because he would later regret them. Writhing with retrospective shame, abasing himself in solitude, was how he found his way back to God’s mercy.

“Do you know,” he said, “why the group is named Crossroads? It’s because Rick Ambrose thought kids could relate to the name of a rock song.”

This was a scabrous half-truth. Russ himself had originally proposed the name.

“And so I asked him—I had to ask—if he knew the original Robert Johnson song. And he gives me a blank look. Because to him, you know, music history started with the Beatles. Believe me, I’ve heard the Cream version of ‘Crossroads.’ I know exactly what it is. It’s a bunch of guys from England ripping off an authentic Black American blues master and acting like it’s their music.”

Frances, in her hunting cap, had her eyes on the truck ahead of them. The older widows were holding their breath while their associate minister trashed the director of youth programming.

“I happen to have the original recording of Johnson singing ‘Cross Road Blues,’” he bragged, repellently. “Back when I lived in Greenwich Village—you know, I used to live there, in New York City—I’d find old 78s in junk stores. During the Depression, the record companies went out in the field and made amazing authentic recordings—Lead Belly, Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson. I was working with an afterschool program in Harlem, and I’d come home every night and play those records, and it was like being carried straight into the South in the twenties. There was so much pain in those old voices. It helped me understand the pain I was dealing with in Harlem. Because that’s what the blues are really about. That’s what went missing when the white bands started aping the style. I can’t hear any pain at all in the new music.”

An embarrassed silence fell. The last daylight of November was dying in crayon colors beneath the clouds on the suburban horizon. Russ now had more than enough to be ashamed of later, more than enough to be sure that he deserved to suffer. The sense of rightness at the bottom of his worst days, the feeling of homecoming in his humiliations, was how he knew that God existed. Already, as he drove toward the dying light, he had a foretaste of their reunion.

In the First Reformed parking lot, Frances lingered in the car after the others had taken their leave. “Why did she hate me?” she said.

“Ronnie’s mother?”

“No one’s ever spoken to me like that.”

“I’m very sorry that happened to you,” he said. “But this is what I meant about pain. Imagine being so poor that your kids are the only thing you have, the only people who care about you and need you. What if you saw some other woman treating them better than you were able to treat them? Can you imagine how that might feel?”

“It would make me try to treat them better myself.”

“Yes, but that’s because you’re not poor. When you’re poor, things just happen to you. You feel like you can’t control anything. You’re completely at God’s mercy. That’s why Jesus tells us that the poor are blessed—because having nothing brings you closer to God.”

“That woman didn’t strike me as being especially close to God.”

“Actually, Frances, you have no way of knowing. She was obviously angry and troubled—”

“And stinking drunk.”

“And stinking drunk at noon. But if we learn nothing else from these Tuesdays, it should be that you and I are not in a position to judge the poor. We can only try to serve them.”

“So you’re saying it was my fault.”

“Not at all. You were listening to something generous in your heart. That’s never a fault.”

He was hearing something generous in his own heart: he could still be a good pastor to her.

“I know it’s hard to see when you’re upset,” he said gently, “but what you experienced today is what people in that neighborhood experience on a daily basis. Abusive words, racial prejudice. And I know you’re no stranger to pain yourself—I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through. If you decide you’ve had enough pain and you’d rather not work with us right now, I won’t think less of you. But you have an opportunity, if you’re up for it, to turn your pain into compassion. When Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, what is he really saying to us? That the person who’s abusing us is hopelessly evil and we just have to put up with it? Or is he reminding us that the person is a person like us, a person who feels the same kind of pain that we do? I know it can be hard to see, but that perspective is always available, and I think it’s one we all should strive for.”

Frances considered his words for a moment. “You’re right,” she said. “I do have a hard time seeing it that way.”

And that had seemed to be the end of it. When he phoned her the next day, as any good pastor would have done, she said her daughter had a fever and she couldn’t talk right then. He didn’t see her at services the following two Sundays, and she skipped the circle’s next trip to the South Side. He thought of calling her again, if only to resupply himself with shame, but the purity of the hurt of losing her was of a piece with the season’s dark afternoons and long nights. He would have lost her sooner or later—at the latest when one of them died, very probably much sooner than that—and his need to reconnect with God was so pressing that he seized on the hurt almost greedily.

But then, four days ago, she’d called him. She’d had a wretched cold, she said, but she couldn’t stop thinking about his words in the car. She didn’t think she had the strength to be like him, but she felt like she’d turned a corner, and Kitty Reynolds had mentioned a Christmas delivery to the South Side. Could she come along with them for that?

Russ would have been content to rejoice merely as her pastor, her enabler, if Frances hadn’t then asked if he might loan her some of his blues recordings.

“Our turntable plays 78s,” she said. “I’m thinking, if I’m going to do this, I should try to understand their culture better.”

He winced at the phrase their culture, but even he was not so bad at being bad as not to know what sharing music signified. He went up to the unheatable third floor of his hulking church-provided house and spent a good hour on his knees, selecting and reselecting 78s, trying to guess which ten of them together were likeliest to inspire feelings like the ones he already had for her. His connection with God had vanished, but this wasn’t a worry for now. The worry was Kitty Reynolds. It was imperative that he have Frances all to himself, but Kitty was sharp and he was bad at lying. Any ruse he tried, like telling her to meet him at three and then departing with Frances at two thirty, was bound to raise Kitty’s suspicions. He saw that he had no choice but to level with her, sort of, and say that Frances had suffered a small trauma in the city, and that he needed to be alone with her when she bravely revisited the scene of it.

“It sounds to me,” Kitty had said when he called her, “like you fell down on the job.”

“You’re right. I did. And now I need to try and regain her trust. It’s encouraging that she wants to go back, but it’s still very delicate.”

“And she’s a cute one, and it’s Christmastime. If it were anyone but you, Russ, I might be worried about your motives.”

He’d wondered about Kitty’s implication—whether she considered him uniquely good and trustworthy, or uniquely unsexed and unmanly and unthreatening. Either way, the effect had been to make his impending date with Frances feel more thrillingly illicit. In anticipation of it, he’d smuggled out of his house and into the church his final selection of blues records and a grimy old coat, a sheepskin thing from Arizona, that he hoped might lend him a bit of an edge. In Arizona, he’d had an edge, and, fairly or not, he believed that what had dulled it was his marriage. When Marion, after his humiliation, had loyally undertaken to hate Rick Ambrose, calling him that charlatan, Russ had snapped at her—lashed out—and declared that Rick was many things but not a charlatan, the simple fact was that he, Russ, had lost his edge and couldn’t relate to young people anymore. He flagellated himself and resented Marion for interfering with the pleasure of it. His subsequent daily shame, whether of walking past Ambrose’s office or taking a craven detour to avoid it, had connected him to the sufferings of Christ. It was a torment that nourished him in his faith, whereas the too-gentle touch of Marion’s hand on his arm, when she tried to comfort him, was a torment without spiritual upside.

From his office, as the hour finally approached two thirty, the page in his typewriter still blank, he could hear the afterschool influx of Crossroads teenagers buzzing around the honeypot of Ambrose, the pounding of running footsteps, the shouting of swear words that Mr. Fuck-Piss-Shit encouraged by using them incessantly himself. More than a hundred and twenty kids now belonged to Crossroads, among them two of Russ’s own children; and it was a measure of how focused he’d been on Frances, how mad with anticipation of their date, that only now, as he stood up from his desk and pulled on the sheepskin coat, did he consider that he and she might run into his son Perry.

Bad criminals overlook obvious things. Relations with his daughter, Becky, had been strained ever since she’d joined Crossroads, gratuitously, in October, but at least she was aware of how deeply she’d wounded him by joining, and he rarely saw her at the church after school. Perry, however, knew nothing of tact. Perry, whose IQ had been measured at 160, saw too much and smirked too much at what he saw. Perry was fully capable of chatting up Frances, his manner seemingly forthright and respectful but somehow neither, and he would definitely notice the sheepskin coat.

Russ could have used the detour to the parking lot, but the man who resorted to it wasn’t the man he meant to be today. He squared his shoulders, deliberately forgot to take the blues recordings, so that he and Frances would have a reason to return to his office after dark, and stepped into a dense bank of smoke from the cigarettes of a dozen kids camped out in the hallway. There was no immediate sign of Perry. One chubby, apple-cheeked girl was splayed out happily on the laps of three boys on the saggy old divan that someone, over Russ’s quiet objections to Dwight Haefle (the hallway was a fire escape route), had dragged in for kids waiting their turn to be confronted by Ambrose, with brutal but loving honesty, in the privacy of his office.

Russ moved forward with his eyes on the floor, stepping around blue-jeaned shins and sneakered feet. But as he approached his adversary’s office he could see, peripherally, that its door was halfway open; and then he heard her voice.

He stopped without having wanted to.

“It’s so great,” he heard Frances gush. “A year ago, I practically had to put a gun to his head to get him to church.”

Of Ambrose, through the doorway, only ragged denim cuffs and beat-up work boots were visible. But the chair Frances was sitting in faced the hallway. She saw Russ, waved to him, and said, “See you outside?”

God only knew what expression was on his face. He walked on, blindly overshot the main entrance, and found himself outside the function hall. He was taking on dark water through large holes in his hull. The stupidity of never once imagining that she could go to Ambrose. The clairvoyant certainty that Ambrose would take her away from him. The guilt of having hardened his heart against the wife he’d vowed to cherish. The vanity of believing that his sheepskin coat made him look like anything but a fatuous, obsolete, repellent clown. He wanted to tear off the coat and retrieve his regular wool one, but he was too much of a coward to walk back up the hallway, and he was afraid that if he took the detour and saw the dusty crèche steer, in the state he was in, he might cry.

Oh God, he prayed from within the loathsomeness of his coat. Please help me.

If God answered his prayer, it was by reminding him that the way to endure misery was to humble himself, think of the poor, and be of service. He went to the church secretary’s office and ferried cartons of toys and canned goods to the parking lot. Each passing minute deepened the late-dawning badness of the day. Why was she with Ambrose? What could they be discussing that was taking so long? The toys all appeared to be new or indestructible enough to pass as new, but Russ was able to survive further minutes by rooting through the food cartons, culling the lazy or thoughtless donations (cocktail onions, water chestnuts) and taking comfort in the weight of jumbo cans of pork and beans, of Chef Boyardee, of pear halves in syrup: the thought of how welcome each would be to a person who was genuinely hungry and not merely, like him, starved in spirit.

It was 2:52 when Frances came bounding up to him, like a boy, full of bounce. She was wearing the hunting cap and, today, a matching wool jacket. “Where’s Kitty?” she said brightly.

“Kitty was afraid she wouldn’t fit, with all the boxes.”

“She’s not coming?”

Unable to look Frances in the eye, he couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or, worse yet, suspicious. He shook his head.

“That’s silly,” she said. “I could have sat on her lap.”

“Do you mind?”

“Mind? It’s a privilege! I’m feeling very special today. I’ve turned a corner.”

She made an airy little ballet move, expressive of turning a corner. He wondered if her feeling had preceded or been caused by her visit with Ambrose.

“Good, then,” he said, slamming the Fury’s rear door. “We should probably get going.”

It was a subtle reference to her lateness, the only one he intended to permit himself, and she didn’t pick up on it. “Is there anything I need to bring?”

“No. Just yourself.”

“The one thing I never leave home without! Let me just make sure I locked my car.”

He watched her bounce over to her own, newer car. Her spirits seemed higher than his not only at this moment but possibly in his entire life. Certainly higher than he’d ever seen Marion’s.

“Ha!” Frances exulted from across the lot. “Locked!”

He gave her two thumbs up. He never gave anyone two thumbs up. It felt so strange he wasn’t sure he’d done it right. He looked around to see if anyone else, Perry in particular, had witnessed it. There was no one in sight but a pair of teenagers carrying guitar cases toward the church, not looking in his direction, perhaps intentionally. One was a boy he’d known since he was a second grader in Sunday school.

What would it be like to live with a person capable of joy?

As he was getting into the Fury, a single, floppy snowflake, the first of the multitude the sky had promised all day, came to rest on his forearm and dissolved in itself. Frances, climbing in from the other side, said, “That’s a great old coat. Where’d you get it?”

Resolved: that the soul is independent of the body and immutable. First affirmative speaker: Perry Hildebrandt, New Prospect Township High School.

Ahem.

Tempting though it may be, let’s not make the mistake of misreading the experience, familiar to any pothead worthy of the name, of being in one place, doing one thing—say, struggling to tear open a bag of marshmallows in Ansel Roder’s kitchen—and then, the very next instant, finding one’s bodily self performing an entirely different task in a wholly different setting. Such spatio-temporal elisions or (in common but misleading parlance) “blackouts” need not suggest a division of soul and body; any decent mechanistic theory of mind can account for them. Let’s begin, instead, by considering a question that may at first glance seem trivial or unanswerable or even nonsensical: Why am I me and not someone else? Let’s peer into the dizzying depths of this question …

It was curious the way time slowed, almost stopped, when he was feeling well: wonderful (but also not, because of the sleepless night it augured) the number of laps his mind could run in the seconds it took him to climb one staircase. The pulsing nowness of it all, body and soul in sync, his skin registering each degree of falling temperature as he approached the third floor of the Crappier Parsonage, his nose the mustiness of the cold air flowing down toward the door at the bottom of the stairs, which he’d left open in case his mother came home unexpectedly; his ears the assurance that she hadn’t, his retinas the slightly less gloomy December light in windows nearer to the sky, less shaded by trees, his soul the almost déjà vu familiarity of climbing these stairs alone.

He had once (only once) asked the higher powers if one of the third-floor rooms could be his, or really not so much asked as rationally pointed out the third floor’s suitability for the third child he ineluctably was, and when the answer had come down from on maternal high—no, sweetie, it’s too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer, and Judson likes sharing a room with you—he’d accepted it without protest or renewed entreaty, because, by his own rational assessment, he was the one child in the family with no rightful claim to a room of his own, being neither the oldest nor the youngest nor the prettiest, and he was used to operating at a level of rationality inaccessible to others.

Nevertheless, in his mind, the third floor belonged to him. Many a lungful of depleted smoke had been puffed out the storage-room window, many an ash smudged into the polleny dust on the outer sill, and the Reverend Father’s home office, which he now brazenly entered, had no secrets from him. He had read, partly out of curiosity, partly to gauge just how miserable a worm he could be, the entirety of his mother’s premarital correspondence with his father, except for two letters that his father himself had never opened. Searching, with little optimism, for Playboys, he’d exhumed his father’s stacks of The Other Side and The Witness, the fruit of minds so woody that not a drop of sweetness could be pressed from them, along with a year’s worth of Psychology Todays, in one of which he’d dwelled on the words clitoris and clitoral orgasm, sadly not illustrated. (Ansel Roder’s father stored his collection of Playboys in hinged archival cardboard boxes, labeled by calendar year, which was impressive but discouraged pilferage.) The Reverend’s jazz and blues recordings were so much mute plastic and moldering sleeve, and the old coats in the slope-ceilinged closet weren’t covetable, cut as they were for a man much bigger than Perry, who could feel, literally in his bones, that he would end up as the physical runt of the Hildebrandt litter, his growth spurt, the year before, having resembled the bottle rocket that goes off at a faltering angle and dies with a dull pop. The closet interested him only in December, when the floor of it filled up with presents.

A noteworthy fact, possibly bearing on the question of the soul’s immutability, was that a person named Perry Hildebrandt had existed on earth for nine Christmases, his consciousness alive and functioning on five of them, before it occurred to him that the presents that appeared under the tree on Christmas Eve must have been in the house, not yet wrapped, for some days or even weeks before their appearance. His blindness had had nothing to do with Santa Claus. Of Santa the Hildebrandts had always said, Bah, humbug. And yet somehow, long past the age of understanding that presents don’t just buy and wrap themselves, he’d accepted their sudden annual appearance as, if not a miraculous provision, then a phenomenon like his bladder filling with urine, part of the normal course of things. How had he not grasped at nine a truth so obvious to him at ten? The epistemological disjunction was absolute. His nine-year-old self seemed to him a total stranger, and not in a good way. It was a figure of vague menace to the older Perry, who couldn’t escape the suspicion that, although the cherubic face in photos from 1965 was identifiably his own, the two Perrys did not have the same soul. That somehow there had been a switcheroo. In which case, where had his current soul come from? And where had the other one gone?

He opened the closet door and dropped to his knees. The nakedness of the presents on the floor was a sad premonition of their naked future, after the brief, false glory of being wrapped. A shirt, a velour pullover, socks. An argyle sweater, further socks. A ribboned box from Marshall Field’s—pretty tony! Gentle shaking indicated a lightweight garment within, doubtless for Becky. Reaching in deeper, he uncrimped the paper bags of books and records. Among the latter was the Yes album he’d mentioned to his mother in a sideways conversation of the sort that gave them pleasure. (Transmitting a Christmas list without referring to Christmas was a very elementary game, and yet the Reverend Father couldn’t have managed it without winking, and Becky would have spoiled it altogether: “Are you trying to tell me what you want for Christmas?” Only his mother and his little brother had proper ludic faculties.) In hindsight, it was a pity he’d hinted at the Yes record before he formed his new resolution. Yes paired outstandingly with reefer, but he feared that its music might forfeit a certain luster if listened to with head unaltered.

At the back of the closet were heavier items, a small yellow Samsonite suitcase (for Becky, certainly), what appeared to be a secondhand microscope (had to be Clem), a portable cassette player/recorder (hinted at but by no means counted on!), and, oh dear, an electric NFL Football game. Poor Judson. He was still young enough that he needed to be given a game, but Perry had already played this particular game at Roder’s and nearly passed out laughing at its shittiness. The sheet-metal playing field vibrated electrically, with a sound like a Norelco shaver’s, beneath two teams of tiny plastic gridders with oblongs of plastic turf glued to their feet, the quarterbacks eternally frozen in he-man forward-passing posture, the halfbacks carrying a “ball” that was more like a pellet of pocket lint and frequently fumbling it, or becoming so disoriented in the buzzy scrum that they speeded toward their own end zone and scored a safety for their opponent. Nothing was more hilarious to the stupidly stoned than stupidly stoned-looking behavior; but Judson, of course, would not be playing it while stoned.

On the plus side: no sign of a camera. Perry had been fairly sure that only he knew what his little brother most wanted, because Judson was a superior human being, to whom it wouldn’t occur to engage in avaricious hinting with their mother, and the paternal style was so anti-materialistic that Christmas lists were never solicited. Still, there was such a thing as bad luck, intuitive guesses, and so he had to ransack the closet—a small infraction, smaller yet in the context of a greater good.

Because this was his new resolution: to be good.

Or, failing that, at least less bad.

Although his motives for so resolving suggested that the badness was underlying and perhaps intractable.

For example: the reluctance he now felt, as he stood up and headed back down the drafty staircase, to liquidate the asset. The liquidation was a sentence he’d passed on himself, a punitive fine he’d levied at the peak of his resolution, but now he wondered if it was really necessary. He had in his billfold the twenty-dollar bill his mother had slipped him for Christmas shopping, plus eleven dollars he’d managed not to spend on poisoning his central nervous system. The camera that he and Judson had admired in the window of New Prospect Photo cost $24.99, not including sales tax and rolls of film. Even if he could find a cheap used frame for his gouache portrait of his mother and bought paperbacks for everyone else—and his irritation at having to buy anything for Becky or Clem or the Reverend was already an ominous violation of his resolution—he was facing a shortfall.

And there was a cheaper way. Judson would also have liked to get the game of Risk, a new one of which cost less than half the camera, and to play it with Perry in their bedroom, which Perry would gladly have done as a further gift to Judson, being fond of the game himself. But along with every other game involving war or killing, any toy that shot projectiles or could be imagined to shoot them, any representations of soldiers, warplanes, tanks, etc.—in short, every thing a normal boy like Judson most wanted—Risk was forbidden in the house, owing to the Reverend’s violent pacifism. Perry did have an arsenal of rational arguments at his disposal: Wasn’t the object of all games a kind of warlike vanquishment? How come the virtual slaughter in chess and checkers didn’t run afoul of the ban? Was it truly obligatory to view the pleasing enameled lozenges of Risk as “armies,” rather than as abstract markers in a game of topological strategy and dice-rolling? If only it were possible to argue with his father without flushing and choking up with tears of anger and hating himself for being smarter, but also less good, than the old man! A fine gift to Judson a fight would be on Christmas morning.

Concluding, reluctantly, that there was no saving the asset, he shut the stairway door behind him and found Judson where he’d left him, in their bedroom, reading a book beneath the homemade reading light that Perry had rigged up for him above his captain’s bed. Judson’s corner of their room recalled the cabin of the Spray, the globe-circling vessel of his hero Joshua Slocum—everything in its place, clothes folded and stowed beneath the bed, fifty-cent paperbacks ordered alphabetically by title, Dinky cars parked on a little shelf at parallel diagonals, alarm clock tightly wound—outside which raged the sea of Perry, for whom folding clothes was an irrational waste of time and ordering his possessions a superfluity, since he remembered exactly where he’d left them. The asset was under his bed, in the padlocked plywood strongbox that he’d built as his final project in eighth-grade shop class.

“Hey, kiddo, sorry to bother you,” he said from the doorway. “But I need you to go somewhere else.”

Judson’s book was The Incredible Journey. He frowned elaborately. “First you tell me I have to stay here and then you tell me I have to leave.”

“Just for a minute. Unusual commands must be obeyed at Christmas time.”

Judson, not budging, said, “What do you feel like doing today?”

A sideways question.

“Right now,” Perry said, “I feel like doing something you need to leave the room for.”

“Later, though.”

“I have to go downtown. Why don’t you go over to Kevin’s? Or Brett’s.”

“They’re both sick. How long will you be gone?”

“Possibly until dinnertime.”

“I have a new idea for how to set the game up. Can I do it while you’re gone and we can play it after dinner?”

“I don’t know, Jay. Maybe.”

A bruise of disappointment in Judson’s face returned Perry to his resolution.

“I mean, yes,” he said. “But the game’s not coming out before then, you understand?”

Judson nodded and hopped off the bed with his book. “Promise?”

Perry promised and locked the door behind him. Ever since he’d manufactured a copy of Stratego, rather cunningly, out of shirt cardboard, his brother had been mad to play it with him. Because it was nominally a game of bombs and killing, it carried the risk of confiscation by the higher powers, and Judson had needed no telling to keep it a secret. There were many worse little brothers in New Prospect. Not only was Judson Perry’s best evidence of the reality of love, he was such an appealing and well-regulated youngster, nearly as smart as Perry and much better able to sleep at night, that Perry sometimes wished that he, Perry, were his little brother.

But what did that even mean? If the soul was merely a psychic artifact created by the body, it was tautologically self-evident why Perry’s soul was in Perry and not in Judson. And yet it didn’t feel self-evident. The reason he wondered if the soul might be independent and immutable was his persistent sense of how odd it was, how seemingly random, that his soul had landed where it had. Try as he might, altered or sober, he could never quite solve—or even properly articulate—the mystery of his happening to be Perry. It wasn’t at all clear to him what Becky, for example, had done to deserve being Becky, or when exactly (in an earlier incarnation?) she’d earned that privilege. She just found herself being Becky, around whom the heavens revolved; and this, too, confounded him.

A delicious faint skunk smell wafted off the asset when he opened the strongbox. The asset consisted of three ounces of weed, in double Baggies, and twenty-one Quaaludes, the remnant of a wholesale buy that, like every previous buy, had cost him nearly unendurable anxiety and shame. He stared at it in frank disbelief that he was going to part with it for nothing in return but the putative joy of Christmas giving. So very cruel, his resolution. He thought he might love being high a little less than he loved his brother, but he wasn’t sure that when his mind was racing and one night in bed felt like a month of nights he didn’t love two Quaaludes better. Aye, that was the question: whether to shove the whole fucking asset in the pocket of his parka and be done with it, or to sleep tonight. The weed alone would fetch him thirty dollars, more cash than he needed. Why not hold back a few ’ludes? For that matter, why not hold back all of them?

Eleven days earlier, in an eerie correlative of the cosmic lottery in which his soul had drawn the name Perry, he’d plucked the name Becky H from a pile of folded slips on the linoleum floor of the function hall at First Reformed. (What were the chances? About one in fifty-five—a hundred million times greater than the chances of being Perry, but still rather low.) As soon as he’d seen his sister’s name, he’d sidled back toward the pile, hoping to trade in his slip for a different one, but a Crossroads adviser was standing there to guard against this sort of cheating. Ordinarily, when it came time to choose partners for a “dyad” exercise, Rick Ambrose directed everyone to pick a person they didn’t know well or hadn’t shared with recently. The previous Sunday, however, one of the inner-circle twelfth graders, Ike Isner, had stood up and complained to the group that people were choosing too many “safe” partners and avoiding risky ones. In good Stalinist show-trial fashion, with a display of strong emotion, Isner confessed that he was guilty of this himself. The group immediately drenched him with approval for his courageous honesty. Someone then proposed a lottery system, against which another inner-circler argued that they ought to take personal responsibility for their choices, rather than relying on a mechanical system, but the proposal carried a group vote by a wide margin—Perry, as was his habit, waiting to see which way the wind was blowing before raising his hand in favor.

Becky had been one of the few people voting against. Seeing her name on the slip now, he wondered if she’d foreseen this very eventuality; had been, in this rare instance, sharper than he was. All across the church function hall, people were running up to their partners. Becky was looking around innocently to see who hers would be. As Perry approached her, he saw the situation dawn on her. Her expression matched his own. It said Oh, shit.

“All right, listen up,” Ambrose barked. “In this exercise, I want each of us to tell our partner something we really admire about them. First one of us, then the other. And then I want each of us to tell our partner something they’re doing that’s a barrier to getting to know them better. I’m talking about barriers, not character assassination. Everyone got it? Are we all clear on what comes first?”

The group was big enough that Perry and Becky had easily avoided each other since the night, six weeks earlier, when she’d shocked the world by joining Crossroads. He personally had been shocked because Becky was rather too obviously the Reverend Father’s favorite child and she knew very well how much their father hated Rick Ambrose; Perry’s own defection to Crossroads had merely deepened an existing chill between him and the Reverend, whereas Becky’s was a brutal betrayal. More universally shocking was the sheer sight of her face on a Sunday night at First Reformed. Perry had been there. He’d seen the heads turning, he’d heard the murmurs of astonishment. It was as if a Cleopatra had shown up at one of Jesus’s rallies in Galilee, a diademed queen sitting down among the freaks and the lepers and trying to blend in; because Becky, too, came from a different world—the social royalty of New Prospect Township High.

Perry as a boy hadn’t been a student of his sister’s doings. Along with Clem, with whom she was tight, she’d constituted a generic Older Siblings unit, notable mainly for always being more advanced than Perry, better with scissors, better at hopscotch, better (much better) at control of emotion and mood. Only when he started junior high did he become aware of Becky as a distinct individual, about whom the larger world had strong opinions. She was the captain of the Lifton Central cheerleading squad and could have won any other popularity contest she cared to enter. Whichever lunch table she sat down at filled up instantly with the prettiest girls, the cocksurest boys. Strangely, she herself was held to be very pretty. To Perry, the tall and bony girl with whom he impatiently shared a bathroom, and whose face twisted into something haglike when he corrected her on a point of fact or grammar, was more like vaguely disgusting, but the group of older Lifton Central boys he’d quickly fallen in with, Ansel Roder among them, assured him that he was mistaken. He was never able to agree with them, though he did eventually concede that his sister had something—an aura of singularity, a force at once attractive and unapproachable (no one had ever dared claim to be her boyfriend), a kind of expensiveness that had nothing to do with money (it was said that she wasn’t stuck up like the other cheerleaders, as if she didn’t even notice the attention she effortlessly commanded)—because he himself, Perry, the negligible sibling satellite, reflected a glow of his own from her preeminence.

In New Prospect the words Becky Hildebrandt were magical in the strict sense, their mere utterance sufficing to ensure massive attendance at a party or to induce self-reported boners in shop class (Perry regrettably within earshot for that one). As the sharer of half of her name, he’d found himself immediately noticed at Lifton Central, at least by the set of eighth- and ninth-grade boys whose parents’ high incomes and large homes accorded them a certain elevated status. He started as their runty mascot but soon proved himself their equal or better. No one could hold a pipe hit longer in his lungs, no one could drink more shots without slurring his speech, no one knew more words in the English language. Even his hair, being flax-colored and having natural wave and body, looked better than his friends’ at shoulder length. Roder had gotten so tired of brushing his lank, dull hair from his eyes that he’d finally cut it off; he was the biggest freak of them all and looked like G.I. Joe now.

It had seemed appropriate to Perry that his friends should all be older than he was. Becky might have provided the initial entrée to them, and they might never have forgotten whose brother he was, but in his own way he was singular, too. This became especially evident in ninth grade, when the last of his friends had gone on to high school. Surrounded by contemporaries of paltrier intelligence, and having no one to get him high at lunch hour, he felt like an astronaut who’d moonwalked too long and missed the flight home. This was when his sleeping troubles started. During a period of weeks between January and March, now blessedly largely lost to memory, he experienced his first nights of being 100% awake until dawn, other dawns when he felt physically incapable of raising his eyelids, a number of mornings when he crept back into the Crappier Parsonage and up the third-floor stairs and slept under an old throw rug until dinnertime, many incidents of falling asleep in his uniformly profitless classes, an excruciating conference with his principal and his parents at which he also briefly fell asleep, intermittent intense phobia of his mother, and level-voiced lectures from his father. Was it not impressive that he’d nonetheless maintained straight As that quarter? He had his sleepless nights to thank for that. There was also the psychic respite of seeing his friends after school and on weekends, but these get-togethers were shadowed, during the dark months, by his sense of wanting—of needing—larger quantities of whatever was being smoked or swallowed than the others seemed to need. To a man, his friends all could have afforded to buy more drugs. Only he, whose craving for relief didn’t peak until he was alone at home and facing another night on the rack, had a churchmouse for a father.

Right around the time he determined that he had no choice but to start dealing drugs, three of his best friends had joined Crossroads. For Bobby Jett it was a matter of a girl he was chasing, for Keith Stratton the allure of nine undersupervised days on the Crossroads spring trip to Arizona, and for David Goya, whose mother belonged to First Reformed, a not terribly punishing punishment for multiple curfew violations. Under Rick Ambrose, Crossroads had begun to undermine traditional social categories. Seemingly unlikely candidates for Christian fellowship drifted in, gave it a try. Among the ones who stuck with it, to Perry’s surprise, were all three of his friends. They still partied of a weekend, but their center of conversational gravity had shifted. Referring warmly to the Arizona trip, or more archly to the sensitivity training they did on Sunday nights, or more lubriciously to certain choice girls on the Crossroads roster, they made Perry feel excluded from a thing that sounded fun.

After a harrowing spring, followed by a summer of inhaling lawn-mower exhaust and getting wasted and rereading Tolkien, he proposed to Ansel Roder that the two of them check out Crossroads. Roder refused emphatically (“I’m not into cults”), and so Perry, on his first Sunday night in tenth grade, walked by himself into the vault-ceilinged third-floor room that Crossroads had appropriated in his father’s church. The air was blue with tobacco smoke, the walls and the ceiling vaults covered with hand-painted quotations from e. e. cummings, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, even Jesus, and with more inscrutable, unattributed lines, such as Why guess? Get the facts. DEATH KILLS. Before Perry knew it, he was being hugged by David Goya, physical contact with whom he’d heretofore naturally avoided. In the ensuing minutes, he was touched by—squeezed by, pulled into the exciting breasts of—twenty times more female bodies than he’d touched like that in his entire life. Very pleasant! After greetings and administrative business, the group marched downstairs, a hundred strong, to the church’s function hall, where the touching, male and female, in various formats, continued for another two hours. The only uncomfortable moment came when Perry, introducing himself to the group, alluded to his dad’s being the associate minister “here.” He glanced at Rick Ambrose and was pierced by a pair of burning dark eyes, slightly narrowed in puzzlement or suspicion, as if to ask, Does your dad know you’re here?

The Reverend did not know it. Since Perry seemed unable to argue with him without crying, he habitually concealed as much as he could for as long as he could. The following Sunday, to forestall any questions, he told his mother that he was having dinner at Roder’s, and he did stop in there, for a while, to consume freezer pizza and apparently quite a volume of gin and grape soda in front of the color TV in the Roders’ comfortably appointed cellar. Though he was noted for holding his liquor well, things started happening so fast when he arrived at Crossroads that he couldn’t remember them all later. It was possible he’d stumbled or lurched. He found himself confronted by two older advisers, alumni of the group, and informed that he was drunk. Rick Ambrose came wading through the crowd and led him out into a hallway.

“I don’t care if you want to be drunk,” Ambrose said, “but you’re not doing it here.”

“Okay.”

“Why are you even here? Why did you come?”

“I don’t know. My friends…”

“Are they drunk?”

Fear of punishment was killing Perry’s buzz. He shook his head.

“You’re damn right they’re not,” Ambrose said. “I ought to just send you home.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you really? Do you want to talk about that? Do you want to be part of this group?”

Perry hadn’t decided yet. But it was undeniably pleasant to have the full attention of the mustachioed leader about whom his irreverent friends spoke admiringly; to be in frank conversation, for once, with an adult. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

Ambrose took him back into the smoke-filled room and interrupted regular programming for one of the plenary Confrontations that were at the heart of Crossroads praxis. The issues at hand were alcohol use, respect for one’s peers, and self-respect. Kids Perry barely knew addressed him as if they knew him very well. David Goya told him that he was an amazing person but that he, David, sometimes worried that he, Perry, used drugs and liquor to avoid his real emotions. Keith Stratton and Bobby Jett piped up in the same key. The thing went on and on and on. Although in some respects Perry had never experienced anything more horrible, he was also thrilled by the quantity and intensity of attention he was getting, as a sophomore and a newcomer, just for having drunk some gin. When he broke down in tears, weeping with shame, authentically, the group responded in a kind of ecstasy of supportiveness, advisers praising him for his courage, girls crawling over to hug him and stroke his hair. It was a crash course in the fundamental economy of Crossroads: public display of emotion purchased overwhelming approval. To be affirmed and fondled by a roomful of peers, most of them older, many of them cute, was exceedingly pleasant. Perry wanted more of this drug.

When the group headed down to the function hall for activities, Rick Ambrose held him back and collared him in a headlock evidently meant to be affectionate. “Well done,” Ambrose said, releasing him.

“Frankly, I’d assumed I’d be severely punished.”

“You didn’t think that was severe? They really let you have it.”

“I do feel a bit put through the ringer.”

“One thing, though.” Ambrose lowered his voice. “I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but there were some hard feelings when your father left the group. I feel bad about it, and I really don’t know what to do. But if you want to be here, I need to know your dad’s okay with it. I need to know you’re here for your own sake, not because of something going on with you and him.”

“He doesn’t even know. I wasn’t even thinking of him.”

“Well, you need to fix that. He needs to know. Are we clear?”

Perry’s conversation with the Reverend, later that night, was thankfully short. His father made a trembling steeple of his fingers and regarded them sadly. “I’d be lying,” he said, “if I told you that your mother and I aren’t worried about you. I think you need some kind of purpose in your life. If this is what you want it to be, I won’t stop you.” Perry’s analysis was that he was actually of such small concern to his father that his joining the enemy camp didn’t even merit anger.

By the time Becky joined Crossroads, he’d already mastered the game of it. The object was to move closer to the center of the group, to become an inner-circler, by following the rules exemplified by Ambrose and the other advisers. The rules required counterintuitive behaviors. Instead of comforting a friend with fibs, you told him unwelcome truths. Instead of avoiding the socially awkward, the hopelessly uncool, you sought them out and engaged with them (making sure, of course, that you were noticed doing this). Instead of choosing friends as exercise partners, you (conspicuously) introduced yourself to newcomers and conveyed your belief in their unqualified worth. Instead of being strong, you blubbered. Where his tears on the night of drinking gin had been cathartic, his tears later on came more easily and were a more fungible currency, redeemable for progress toward the inner circle. Because it was a game, he was good at it, and although intimacies achieved by game-theoretical calculation were hard to feel great about, he sensed that other people genuinely valued his insights and were genuinely moved by his emotional displays.

The person he feared he wasn’t fooling was the one whose approval really mattered to him, Rick Ambrose. He admired Ambrose for, among other things, his intellectually plausible faith in God. Perry himself had yet to hear from God; maybe the lines were down, or maybe there was simply no one at the other end. One boring summer afternoon, he’d gone through one of his father’s religious magazines with a ballpoint and replaced every reference to God with “Steve,” for the hilarity of it. (Who was Steve? Why were otherwise sane-seeming people going on and on about Steve?) But Ambrose had an idea so elegant that Perry wondered if there might be something to it. The idea was that God was to be found in relationships, not in liturgy and ritual, and that the way to worship Him and approach Him was to emulate Christ in his relationships with his disciples, by exercising honesty, confrontation, and unconditional love. Ambrose had a way of talking about this stuff that didn’t seem insane. He’d inspired Perry to devise a theory of how all religion worked: Along comes a leader who’s uninhibited enough to use everyday words in a new and strong and counterintuitive way, which emboldens the people around him to use this rhetoric themselves, and the very act of using it creates sensations unlike anything they’re used to in everyday life; they find they know who Steve is. Perry was altogether fascinated by Ambrose, and he felt that his own singularity entitled him to a place near his side, and so he was disappointed that Ambrose, after the night of gin, had seemed to shun him. He was forced to conclude that Ambrose detected the fraudulence in his playing of the Crossroads game and didn’t trust him. The other likely explanation—that Ambrose was sensitive about encroaching on the Reverend’s family—had been demolished by the visibly close attention he’d been paying to Becky since she’d joined the group.

And now the dangerous lottery system, for which Perry had unwisely voted, had thrown him together with her. Being a furtive and curious little worm, he knew every nook in First Reformed. In the function hall, behind a door that looked locked but wasn’t, was a spacious coat closet into which, as the other “dyad” partners dispersed around the first floor of the church, he led his sister. They sat down crosslegged on the linoleum beneath rows of empty wooden hangers. A bare overhead bulb lit a dusty punch bowl, packages of waxed-paper cups, two orphaned umbrellas.

“So,” he said, his eyes on the floor.

“Yeah, so.”

“We could use some sort of system of marking slips to avoid this.”

“Agreed.”

Grateful that she agreed, he looked up at her. She didn’t have a Crossroads wardrobe yet, no overalls, no painter’s pants, no army jacket, but she was wearing an old sweater that at least had some holes in it. He still couldn’t believe she’d joined Crossroads; it upset the natural order of things.

“I really admire how smart you are,” she said in a rote kind of tone, not looking at him.

“Thank you, sister. And I admire, I really do, how sincere you always are. You’ve got a lot of phony friends, but you’re not phony. It’s actually kind of amazing.” Seeing her mouth harden, he added, “That came out wrong. I didn’t mean to criticize your friends. I was trying to say something positive about you.”

Her mouth remained set.

“Maybe we should move right along to the barriers,” he said. “I suspect it’s more fruitful terrain.”

She nodded. “What is a thing I’m doing that’s a barrier to you getting to know me better.”

Perry realized that the wording of the exercise left something to be desired. It presupposed, for example, that he and Becky wanted to get to know each other better.

“I would say,” he said, “that the fact that you don’t seem to like me, and always seem vaguely pissed off with me, including right now, and haven’t tried to have a personal conversation with me in the last three or four years, at least not one that I can remember, despite our living in the same house, could be considered something of a barrier.”

She laughed, but in a shaky way, as if a sob had also been an option. “Guilty as charged,” she said.

“You don’t like me.”

“I mean the part about us never having a personal conversation.”

Her face, which he took this unusual opportunity to observe from up close, was faultless. One’s eye sought for a blemish (he himself had several raging) or some underlying feature that detracted, a thinness of lip, a squareness of jaw, a defect of nose, and found none. Same thing with her long, straight, shining hair, which was of a richer color than the slightly false-seeming yellow of his own: she had the platonic teen-girl hair to which other girls compared their own invidiously. Perry could see why the world considered Becky attractive, but also why it was wrong to. An absence of negatives wasn’t necessarily a positive. It could be a thing that merely offered no resistance to the eye, like an invisible balloon on a string. Maddened by the sight of a taut vertical string that ended in nothingness, people followed it around and concluded, from their following it, that it must be highly desirable.

He didn’t like her either.

“So it’s something I’m doing,” she said. “Is that the idea?”

“In this half of the exercise, yes. I’m naming what appears to me to be a barrier.”

“Well, one thing that’s kind of a barrier for me is the way you speak. Are you aware of how you sound?”

“Let the character assassination begin.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. The way you just said that. Like you’re an English aristocrat.”

“I have a Midwestern accent, Becky.”

The flaw of redness entered her face. “How do you think it feels to the rest of us to be around a person who’s always looking down on us, like we’re funny to him? Who’s always smirking like he knows something we don’t know.”

Perry frowned. To object that he didn’t look down on Judson, except in the most literal physical sense, would have conceded her larger point.

“Who acts like I’m mentally deficient because I got a B in chemistry.”

“Chemistry isn’t a subject for everyone.”

“But you’ll get an A-plus in it, won’t you. Without even trying. Without even giving a shit.”

“It could happen. But you could have done it, too, if you really wanted. I don’t think of you as dumb, Becky. That’s just false.”

He could feel himself becoming sentimental, and there were no points to be scored for it here, in the privacy of the coat closet, with his sibling.

“I’m talking about my feelings,” she said. “You can’t say a feeling is false.”

“Yes, true. So, you’re saying you feel that my being good at school is a barrier.”

“No. I’m saying I don’t feel like you’re even there. Like you’re a thousand miles away from all of us. I’m saying that doesn’t make me want to get to know you better.”

Despite having every conceivable social privilege at high school, Becky wasn’t just day-tripping in Crossroads, wasn’t just slumming—he had to grant her that. She was giving it a real go, being open about her feelings, exercising honesty and confrontation, if perhaps falling short with the unconditional love. She was in the initial phase of Crossroads fervor. He himself had advanced through this phase so rapidly that by the time of the group’s first weekend retreat, in October, at a lakeside Christian conference center in Wisconsin, he’d felt a kind of nostalgic pity for the fellow sophomore, Larry Cottrell, who solemnly approached him with a broken rock. Frost by the lake had cracked the pebbles there, and some inner-circler had been inspired to give somebody one half of a pebble and keep the other, as a symbol of their being two halves of one whole, and this had quickly become a thing. Perry, who didn’t know Cottrell well, was touched to receive a half pebble from him, followed by a hug, but not for the intended reason. What touched him was Cottrell’s naïveté. Perry knew it was a game and Cottrell didn’t yet. He might have been similarly touched by Becky’s fervor if he could only figure out why she, the undisputed queen of her senior class, had deigned to join Crossroads in the first place.

He was on the verge of asking her why—confronting her—when she launched into the most extraordinary diatribe.

“The barrier,” she said, “is that I don’t actually believe you’re a good person. Do you have any idea how crazy it’s been for me to be in Crossroads? The first night I was here, do you know what people kept telling me? How great my younger brother is. Emotionally open, easy to relate to, incredibly supportive. And I’m thinking, are we talking about the same person? I actually wondered if I’d been a bad sister. Like, maybe I never took the time to get to know the real you. Maybe I was too self-involved to notice how emotionally open you are. But you know what? I don’t think that’s it. I think I’ve been exactly the sister you wanted me to be. Have I ever said a word to Dad or Mom about what everybody else knows about you? I could have. I could have said, Hey, Dad, are you aware that Perry’s the biggest pothead at Lifton Central? Are you aware he hasn’t made it through a day unstoned all year? That he goes up to the third floor after you’re in bed and uses drugs? That his friends are all junior alcoholics and everybody in the high school knows it? I’ve protected you, Perry. And all you do is sneer at me. You sneer at all of us.”

“Not true,” he said. “In fact, I think each one of you is a better person than I am. I mean—‘sneer’? Really? You think I sneer at Jay?”

“Judson is like your pet. That’s exactly the way you treat him. You use him when you need him and you ignore him when you don’t. You use your friends, you use their drugs, you use their houses. And, I swear to God, you’re using Crossroads, too. You’re smart enough to get away with it, but I can see what you’re doing. That first Sunday, when people were telling me how great you are, I thought I was crazy. But you know who else agrees with me? Rick Ambrose.”

Although the linoleum floor was cold, the closet felt overwarm to Perry, short on oxygen, bathyspheric.

“He thinks you’re trouble,” Becky said relentlessly. “That’s what he told me.”

Perry’s mind started down the road of imagining the circumstances under which she’d heard this from Ambrose but stopped and turned back. It was as if he’d been born dispossessed, by his sister. No sooner had he found a game he could play well, a place where he was valued for his skill at playing it, an adult whom he could actually admire, than his sister came along and overnight turned Ambrose against him, claimed Ambrose for herself.

“So it isn’t that you don’t like me,” he said, his voice unsteady. “That’s not the barrier. The barrier is that you hate me.”

“No. It’s that—”

“I don’t hate you.”

“I don’t even know you well enough to have a feeling about you. I don’t think anybody really knows you. I think the people who think they do are wrong. And boy are you good at using them. Have you ever once in your life done something for another person that cost you something? All I’ve ever seen from you is selfishness and self-involvement and selfish pleasure.”

He slumped forward and surrendered to tears, hoping they might soften her toward him, elicit a redemptive hug. But they did not. He struggled to think of a thing he’d ever done to harm her, a thing more visible than the occasionally unkind thoughts he had about her, to explain her hatred. Unable to think of one thing, he was forced to conclude that she hated him on principle, because he was an evil, selfish worm, and that she was testifying now merely to redress the abstract injustice of his being praised by other people.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this must be hard to hear. I mean, you are my brother. But maybe it’s good you picked my name tonight, because I’ve lived with you my whole life. I can see you better than other people can. I … I do want to get to know you better. You’re my brother. But first I have to see that there’s a person there worth knowing.”

She stood up and left him in the closet like a city leveled by a hydrogen bomb. Out of the rubble, he painfully reconstructed the gist of what she’d said. She knew a lot more about his extracurricular activities than he might have imagined. (The only blessing there was that she didn’t seem to know that he sold drugs to seventh graders.) Ambrose thought he was “trouble.” (The only consolation there was the certainty that Ambrose would be angry if he knew she’d betrayed this confidence.) His seeming good works in Crossroads counted for nothing. (But at least she’d reported that people thought well of him.) He was a bad person. He merely used Judson.

Too ashamed and self-pitying to leave the closet, he listened to the group reassembling in the function hall, the glad buzz of dyad partners who’d successfully worked on their relationships, the barking of Ambrose, the skillful strumming of guitars, the sing-along of “All Good Gifts” and “You’ve Got a Friend.” He wondered if anyone noticed he was missing. Though not yet in the inner circle, he was among the sophomores most likely to get there, a fairly bright star in the Crossroads sky, and he certainly would have noticed if, say, one of the stars in Orion’s Belt went dark. As the meeting broke up, he waited for a tap on the closet door from someone—a remorseful Becky, a worried adviser, a reassuring Ambrose, a fellow member who valued him, or even just someone who saw the strip of light under the door when the function-hall lights were turned off. That no one came to him, not one person, seemed to him a damning confirmation of Becky’s judgment. He was not a person worth knowing.

It was partly to prove his sister wrong and partly to become a person whom Rick Ambrose ought to trust (and perhaps prefer to Becky) that he’d formed his new resolution that night. Not the purest-hearted of motives, surely; but one had to begin somewhere.

Leaving only two Quaaludes behind in his strongbox, as a tiny Christmas present to himself, he readmitted Judson to their bedroom and hurried forth in his parka, under snow-threatening skies, to Ansel Roder’s house. A peculiarity of the Crappier Parsonage was that, although more in need of razing than of renovation, it stood in a much tonier part of town than the senior minister’s house. All of Perry’s old drug buddies lived close by. In his reluctance to liquidate the asset, he’d dithered past the start of Christmas vacation and now couldn’t rely on finding any of his regular customers behind the Lifton Central baseball backstop, but Roder was always Mr. Liquidity. The stuccoed Roder manse had a round turret with terra-cotta shingles. Inside were beam-ceilinged rooms whose least-fine piece of furniture was finer than Perry’s family’s finest. Such was the heating situation that Roder came to the front door barefoot and shirtless, like G.I. Joe on a beach holiday. “Just the man I’m looking for,” he said. “I’m getting this weird fuzz tone in my speakers.”

Perry followed his friend up a broad staircase. “Both of them?”

“Yeah, but only with the turntable, not the tape deck.”

“That’s useful information. Let’s have a look.”

He had neither the time nor the inclination to play stereo doctor, but one of the ways he balanced accounts with his friends was by applying his manifold dexterity to petty problems of theirs, home-appliance puzzles, clogged aquarium hosing, calligraphy for signage, forgery of parental handwriting, interpretation of dreams, anything involving glue or tweezers. Upstairs, in his bedroom, Roder blasted a bit of “Whiskey Train” on his powerful stereo, and Perry readily diagnosed and fixed the looseness of the phonograph’s needle cartridge. Without ceremony, he drew the asset from his parka pocket and tossed it onto Roder’s bed.

Roder’s eyes widened. “That is a princely Christmas present, Perry.”

“I was hoping you might buy it from me.”

“Buy it.”

Between them, unspoken, the matter of Roder’s perennial largesse, and the question of why Perry invariably accepted it if he had drugs of his own and didn’t share them.

“I need funds,” he explained. “There’s something I want to get Jay for Christmas.”

“Really. And so you’re selling … It’s like that story—Gift of the Madgie?”

“Mā-jī.”

“Wouldn’t it be funny if Jay sold his, I don’t know, so he could buy you a water pipe? Et cetera.”

“‘The Gift of the Magi’ is a story about irony, yes.”

Roder poked at the asset, perhaps counting the pills. “How much money do you need?”

“Forty dollars would be good.”

“Why don’t I just loan it to you.”

“Because we’re friends and I don’t know how I’d pay you back.”

“You mowing lawns again next summer?”

“I’m supposed to be saving for college. There’s some oversight of my earnings.”

Roder shut his eyes, trying to make sense of it all. “Then how did you manage to buy this shit? Have you been stealing?”

Perry’s palms began to sweat. “That’s really neither here nor there.”

“But don’t you think it would be a little weird if you ended up burning this with me after I had to buy it off you?”

“I won’t do that.”

Roder made a skeptical sound. This was the moment for Perry to announce, per the terms of his resolution, that he wouldn’t be burning anything with anyone anymore. But, again, the reluctance.

“Look,” he said, “I know I can’t be as generous as you are. But if you consider it rationally, I don’t see why it matters who you bought from if the outlay is the same either way.”

“Because it does, and I’m surprised you can’t see why.”

“I’m not stupid. I’m looking at it rationally.”

“You know, for a minute, I honestly thought you’d gotten me a present.”

Perry could see that he’d hurt his friend’s feelings; that they’d reached a crossroads. Are you willing to leave passive complicity behind you? The voice of Rick Ambrose in his head. Do you have the guts to risk the active witnessing of a real relationship? He hadn’t come to Roder’s intending to end their (passive, complicit, drug-using) friendship. But it was true that all they ever did together anymore was get high.

“How about thirty dollars, then?” Perry’s face, too, was sweating. “So it’s partly a present, partly a, uh…”

Roder had turned away and opened a dresser drawer. He dropped two twenties on the bed. “You could have just asked for forty dollars. I would have given it to you.” He scooped up the asset and put it in the drawer. “Since when are you a dealer?”

Outside again, as he made his way down Pirsig Avenue, Perry tried to reconstruct why, fifteen minutes earlier, he hadn’t thought to just ask Roder for the money, perhaps as a “loan” that both of them knew would not be repaid, and then flush the asset down a toilet, achieving the same result without hurting his friend: why he hadn’t imagined Roder reacting the way he had, which now made perfect sense to him. Never mind the nine-year-old Perry: the fifteen-minutes-ago Perry was a stranger to him! Did his soul change every time it achieved a new insight? The very definition of a soul was immutability. Perhaps the root of his confusion was the conflation of soul and knowledge. Perhaps the soul was one of those tools built to do exactly one specific task, to know that I am I, and was mutable with respect to all other forms of knowledge?

Whether it was the limitations of his intellect, vis-à-vis the mystery of the soul, or the difficulty of reconciling his new resolution with his thoughtless hurting of an old friend’s feelings, he felt a little downward tug inside him, the slipping of a gear, the first shadow of the end of feeling well, as he proceeded into the central shopping district of New Prospect. Ordinarily he loved the glow of commerce on a dark winter afternoon. Almost every store contained things he wanted, and in this season every lamppost was wound with pine boughs and topped with a red bow that spoke additionally of buying, of receiving, of things brand-new and useful to him. But now, although he didn’t quite have the feeling itself yet, he remembered how it would feel to be unmoved by the stores, unwanting of anything in them, and how much dimmer the lights of commerce would seem to him then, how dead the pine boughs on the lampposts.

As if the feeling could be outrun, he trotted on to New Prospect Photo. The camera he’d found for Judson was a mint-condition twin lens reflex Yashica. It had sat behind the window on a small white pedestal among twenty other used and new cameras, and Judson had agreed it was a beauty. As Perry entered the store, he almost didn’t glance at the window. But the white of an empty pedestal caught his eye.

The Yashica was gone.

Gift of the Fucking Magi.

The store smelled of acid from the darkroom in the rear. Its owner, a hinily bald man, had an air of irritable oppression, understandable at a time when drugstores and shopping centers were killing his business. It was clear that when he looked up from the lens he was cleaning and saw Perry, a long-haired teenager, his first thought was shoplifter or waster of his time. Perry put his mind at ease by wishing him, with the intonation that bothered Becky, a very good afternoon. “I was hoping to purchase the twin lens reflex Yashica you’ve had in your window.”

“Sorry,” the owner said. “Sold it this morning.”

“That is very distressing.”

The owner tried to interest him in a shitty Instamatic, and then some ugly older cameras, while Perry tried not to show how offended he was by the suggestions. They’d arrived at an impasse when his eye fell on a beautiful thing under the glass-top counter. A compact movie camera, European-made. Burnished solid-metal body. Adjustable aperture. He recalled the old movie projector in the storage room at home, the remnant of a more optimistic era, when the Hildebrandts might still have become a family that watched home movies as a close-knit group, and before the Reverend, set upon by wasps, had lost his camera over the side of a rowboat.

“That’s forty dollars,” the owner said. “It sold for twice that, new, in nineteen-forties dollars. It’s Regular 8, though. You have to load it in a bag.”

“May I see it?”

“It’s forty dollars.”

“May I see it?”

When Perry wound the mainspring and took a peek through the viewfinder’s luscious optics, he keenly wanted the camera for himself. Maybe Judson would share it with him?

Precisely the kind of thought that his resolution insisted that he banish.

And so he banished it. He left the store forty-eight dollars poorer but palpably richer in spirit. Imagining Judson’s surprise at receiving not the camera they’d ogled but something even finer and cooler, he was certain that, for once, he was glad for another person. Snow had started falling from the Illinois sky, white crystallizations of water as pure as he felt, himself, for having parted with the asset. His thoughts had slowed to a happy medium, no slower than that, not yet. He stood for a moment on the sidewalk, amid the melting snowflakes, and wished the world could just stand still.

From the street came the rumble of a familiar engine. He turned and saw the family Fury braking for the stop sign at Maple Avenue. The rear of the car was packed with cardboard boxes. At the wheel was his father, wearing an old coat that Perry hadn’t noticed missing from the third-floor closet. On the passenger side, angled to face his father, one arm draped over the backrest, was Larry Cottrell’s foxy mother. She waved to Perry gaily, and now the Reverend saw him. No attempt at a smile was made. Perry had the distinct impression that he’d caught the old man doing something wrong.

Becky that morning had awakened before dawn. It was the first day of vacation, in past years a day for sleeping in, but this year everything was different. She lay in the dark and listened to the tick and wheeze of the radiator, the struggling clank of pipes below. As if for the first time, she appreciated the goodness of being snug in a house on a cold morning. Also, no less, the goodness of the cold, which made the snugness possible; the two things fit together like a pair of mouths.

Until last night, she’d put make-out sessions in the category of non-obligatory activities. For five years she’d seen people making out all around her, and she knew girls who’d allegedly gone all the way, but she hadn’t felt ashamed of her inexperience. Shame of that sort was a trap girls fell into. Even the really pretty ones were afraid of losing popularity if they didn’t act the way boys wanted them to. As her aunt Shirley had said, “If you sell yourself short, that’s how the world will value you.” Becky hadn’t set out to be popular, but when popularity came to her she’d found she had a native instinct for how to manage and advance it. Being some athlete’s squeeze seemed like an obvious dead end. She wouldn’t have guessed how sweet it was to fall, and how much she would want to keep falling, and how altered she would feel in the aftermath, when she was by herself in bed.

Light grew in the windows half-heartedly, leaving monochrome the poster of the Eiffel Tower above her desk, the original watercolor painting of the Champs-Élyseés that Shirley had left her, the pony-themed wallpaper that she’d picked out for her father to hang for her tenth birthday, when she was too young to understand she’d have to live with it forever. In gray light, the wallpaper was more forgivable. An overcast sky was just the weather she would have wished for on the day after the night her life had become more serious. No sun to mark the hour, no change in its angle to take her out of the state of having been kissed.

When the alarm clock went off in her parents’ bedroom, one door over from hers, it wasn’t the usual cruel morning sound but a promise of everything the day ahead might hold. When she heard the faint buzz of her father’s shaver and the footsteps of her mother in the hallway, she was amazed she’d never noticed, until today, how precious ordinary life was and how lucky she was to be a part of it. So much goodness. Other people were good. She herself was good. She felt goodwill to all mankind.

If she nevertheless waited, before getting out of bed, until the family car had whinnied to life in the driveway and her mother had come upstairs to dress, it was because she wanted to prolong her aloneness in the aftermath. She knotted herself into the Japanese silk robe that Shirley had bought her and soundlessly, in her bare feet, went down to the first-floor bathroom. The person who sat down to pee was a woman a man had kissed. Afraid of finding the change as invisible from the outside as it felt momentous from within, she avoided the eyes of this person in the mirror.

The aftersmell of toast and eggs deflected her away from the kitchen and back up to her room. It seemed as if her stomach was fluttering because she had a thousand things to begin all at once, but the only thing she could actually think of doing was to tell someone that she’d been kissed. She wanted to tell her brother first, but he wasn’t home from college yet. She stood at her front window and watched a squirrel angrily send another squirrel scrambling up the trunk of an oak tree. Maybe it was a matter of a stolen acorn, or maybe her mind just went there because she herself had stolen. The nervousness in her stomach was partly a thief’s adrenaline. For a moment, the aggressor squirrel seemed content to let the matter drop, but then the conflict escalated—hot pursuit up the trunk, further pursuit horizontally, a flying leap into the bushes by the driveway.

She wondered if he was awake yet, what he was thinking about her, whether he had regrets.

Outside her door, Judson was afoot and speaking to her mother about sugar cookies. Becky didn’t enjoy the domestic arts and was grateful to have a brother who did, especially in December, when her mother had the burden of upholding certain traditions, like the manufacture of sugar cookies in the shape of Christmas trees and candy canes, that she’d invented for the family. As far as Becky could tell, the holidays to her mother were just another chore, and it appeared that her own new feeling of goodwill was somewhat abstract, because it would have been a kindness to go and sit in the kitchen, maybe help with the cookies, and she didn’t want to.

By way of compromise, she dressed in her best, faded jeans and took her application materials down to the living room (the only person she was actively avoiding, Perry, was unlikely to appear before noon) and set up camp in the armchair by the Christmas tree, whose decoration was another of her mother’s chores. Its scent recalled the frenzy that she and Clem as kids had whipped each other into when presents piled up beneath it; but now she was so much older. The light in the windows was somber, the sounds of cookie-making strangely distant. She might have been sitting in some far-northern place that smelled of conifers. In the kiss’s aftermath, she seemed to be watching herself from a point so elevated that she could see the earth’s curvature, the world newly three-dimensional and spreading out in all directions from her armchair.

She was applying to six colleges, five of them private and expensive. As recently as October, college catalogues had been objects of romance, variously flavored promises of escape from a family she’d outgrown and a school whose social possibilities she’d exhausted. But then she’d discovered Crossroads, which had lessened her impatience to leave New Prospect, and now, as she opened the folder of applications, she found that the kiss had foreshortened the future more drastically. Anything beyond the coming day seemed irrelevant.

Tell us about a person you admire or have learned something important from.

She removed the tooth-dented cap of a Bic pen and started writing in a spiral notebook. Her handwriting, its upright pudginess, struck her as childish this morning. She scratched it out and tried to make it leaner and more slanting, more forward, more like the woman she’d felt herself to be the night before, in the parking lot behind the Grove.

The person I most admire is

My family lived in Southern Indiana until I was eight. My father was the pastor of two small rural parishes. It was farm country but there were woods and creeks to explore with my brother Clem. Unlike most brothers, Clem never got angry if I followed him. Clem wasn’t afraid of anything. He taught me to stand still if a bee was bothering me. He liked all kinds of critters. He called animals “critters” and was curious about all of them. One day he scooped up a big spider and let it crawl on him and then asked if he could put it on my arm. I learned that spiders don’t bite if you don’t threaten them. There was a log over a deep creek that Clem ran across like it was nothing. He showed me how to cross the creek by sitting on the log and scooching along. I think most brothers would have been happy to leave their little sister behind, but not Clem. He had a baseball glove he

A weariness had overcome her. Her words seemed childish, too. She’d imagined that colleges would be charmed if she wrote about her brother, and that it would be easy to explain why she admired Clem, but she wasn’t feeling it this morning. For one thing, Clem had come home at Thanksgiving and told her, in strict confidence, that he had a girlfriend in Champaign, his first ever. She ought to have been purely happy for him, but in truth she’d felt a little bit left behind. Until then, despite being younger, she’d considered herself the more worldly and socially advanced one.

Clem’s friends in high school had mostly been slide-rule types, guys with dandruff-coated glasses, defiant body odor. She’d felt sorry that he couldn’t do any better than this, but he claimed to have no envy of her social position and only a “sociological” interest in her people. Coming home late on a Saturday night, she invariably saw light under his bedroom door. If she knocked, he set aside the book he was reading or the science problem he was cracking and listened, as only he in her family could, to her little tales of life in Camelot. He pronounced clear-eyed judgments on her friends, which she brushed aside in the moment (“Nobody’s perfect”) but privately recognized the justice of. He was particularly harsh about certain guys of her acquaintance, such as Kent Carducci, who wouldn’t stop asking her out on dates and who, according to Clem, tormented Clem’s friend Lester in the locker room. Still only a tenth grader, she’d walked up to Kent one day at lunch hour and spelled out, in front of his jock buddies, why she would never go out with him: “Because you’re a bully and a jerk.” Though Kent apparently continued to snap wet towels at Lester’s butt, Becky was keenly attuned to the hierarchy and detected a subtle new shunning of Kent by the highest tier. She was tempted to report this accomplishment to Clem, but she knew it was the hierarchy itself, more than any given member of it, that he disdained. And yet, as if he recognized it as the field of her own sort of excellence, he never pushed her to drop out of it. How grateful she was for that! It was one of a hundred ways she knew he loved her. Sometimes it happened that she dozed off on his bed and awoke to find herself tenderly covered with a quilt, Clem asleep on the rug by the bed. She might have worried that there was something weird about their friendship, that she felt close to him in an almost married way that maybe wasn’t healthy, that she wasn’t as physically repelled by his beanstalk body, his scarred and pimpled face, as a sister ought to have been, if she hadn’t been so sure that everything Clem did was good and right.

Even after he went off to college, he’d remained the star she navigated by. There were some fairly debauched, parentally unsupervised parties she found it necessary to attend because no sophomores and almost no juniors had been invited. In principle, Clem hated this kind of exclusivity even more than her parents did, but where her father gave her gentle lectures about remembering those less fortunate than her, and her mother worried aloud that she’d gotten pretty full of herself, Clem understood how important to her it was to be at the center of things. “Just be careful,” he said. “Don’t forget you’re better than the rest of that crowd put together.” She was protected at the parties, to an extent, by having been the leading vote-getter in the all-school cheerleader election, thus automatically a co-captain of the squad, despite being only a junior; if she raised her voice to wail that she hated the music, then, voilà, some unseen hand would lift up the needle and put on a Santana album. But the pressure to fuck up was still intense. She might not have been able to wave away the burning doobies she was offered if Clem hadn’t warned her that marijuana’s long-term effects on the brain were not well studied. At the infamous New Year’s party at the Bradfields’, where there was barfing in the back-yard snow and a disgusting truth-or-dare thing happening in the basement, she might have gone upstairs with Trip Bradfield, who was twenty and relentless, if she hadn’t been seeing him through Clem’s eyes.

The Bradfield party had been her last of that sort. Her aunt Shirley had passed away a few weeks later, and Becky had quit the cheerleading squad and applied herself more seriously to schoolwork. It was Shirley who’d taught her that staying home and reading a good book, letting people wonder where you were, could get you farther than chasing after every party. No longer exempted from family work rules by her cheerleading duties, she took an afterschool job at the florist shop on Pirsig Avenue. She’d been secure in her popularity for long enough to know she wasn’t in danger of being forgotten. Quite the opposite. By quitting the squad, she’d cast a diminishing light on all the girls who remained. Shirley had given her an ankle-length navy-blue merino coat, and when she walked in it on Pirsig after school, accompanied only by Jeannie Cross, her best friend and her loyal lieutenant since seventh grade, she could sense how the two of them looked to the cars full of peers driving by. Shirley’s word for it had been mystique.

She forced herself to take up her pen again. Her plans for the day were predicated on finishing an essay before lunchtime.

One warm hot humid summer afternoon Clem and I were out exploring near a farmhouse which had a large, vicious dog on a chain. Even Clem was a little afraid of that dog. Well, sSomehow the dog wasn’t on its chain that day, and it jumped over a fence and started chasing me. It bit my ankle and I fell down. I could have been very seriously injured if Clem hadn’t dove onto the dog and started fighting with it. By the time the farmwife came to the rescue, Clem was the one who was seriously injured. The dog bit his face and both of his arms, and he had to have thirty forty fifty forty stitches. He was lucky the dog didn’t cripple his arm or bite through an artery. To this day, whenever I see the scars on his arms and his cheek, I remember how he

Always does the right thing without caring what other people think of him

Sticks up for kids who get picked on not afraid of bullies (just like dog)

He helped me realize there are more important things in life than being the

Why did her writing have to make her sound like such a nitwit? She ripped the offending page out of the notebook. From the kitchen came the smell of a preheating oven, the morning slipping away. She felt unfairly stymied by the badness of what was on the page, as if she weren’t, herself, the person who’d put it there.

And now came her mother, carrying a pitcher of water into the living room. “Oh,” she said. “You’re up.”

“Yes,” Becky said.

“I didn’t hear you get up. Have you had breakfast?”

Her mother was already in her exercise clothes, a formless sweatshirt, saggy synthetic knit pedal pushers. It was a look that encapsulated, Becky felt, the difference between her mother and her aunt, who’d been as trim as her mother was bulky and couldn’t possibly have owned such a sweatshirt. As her mother kneeled down to water the Christmas tree, Becky averted her eyes from the impending exposure of lumbar flesh. Another, more tragic difference between her mother and Shirley was that her mother was alive. Shirley had stayed trim by smoking two packs of Chesterfields a day.

Her mother asked her if she had any fun plans.

“Working on my applications,” Becky said. “Christmas shopping.”

“Well, just make sure you’re home by six, so you have time to get ready for the Haefles’ party. We’ll leave as soon as your father gets home.”

“I’m going to a party?”

Her mother stood up with the pitcher. “Dwight invited everyone to bring their families. Perry’s staying home with Judson, and I don’t know what time Clem is getting here.”

“Sorry—what is this party?”

“An open house for clergy. Clem came with us last year.”

“Did I say I would do this?”

“No. I’m telling you now that you will.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but I have other plans. I’m going to the Crossroads concert.”

She kept her eyes averted, but she could imagine her mother’s expression.

“Your father won’t be happy about that. But if that’s your choice, we’ll be home from the Haefles’ by eight thirty.”

“The concert starts at seven thirty.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being fashionably late. Missing one hour, to maintain some semblance of peace at the holidays, doesn’t seem like much to ask.”

Becky inclined her head mulishly. She had her reasons, but she wasn’t going to explain them.

“How’s it going with your essay?” her mother asked.

“Fine.”

“I can help you with it, if you want to show me what you’ve written. Do you want to do that?”

This in a more honeyed tone, intended as a peace offering, but Becky took it as a reminder that her mother was better than her at writing, she herself better at nothing her mother valued. “I’m thinking,” she said, by way of striking back, “that I might write about Aunt Shirley.”

Her mother stiffened. “I thought you were writing about Clem.”

“It’s a personal essay. I can write whatever I want.”

“True enough.”

Her mother left the room. The light in the windows had brightened a little, and Becky was pleased to find her goodwill still intact. It wasn’t as if her mother was a bad person. She just didn’t understand how much nicer Becky’s own plans were than going to the Haefles’ party.

After the dog attack in Indiana, when the bite on Clem’s face was iodined and stitched and his arms were in bandages, her father had come home from a church meeting and yelled at him. How did you let this happen? What on earth were you doing at that farm? I gave you responsibility for your sister! She could have been killed! It happens all the time—a child no smaller than Becky gets killed by a dog! What were you thinking? All this to a ten-year-old boy who’d been mauled while protecting her. And then came the edict: Clem was henceforth forbidden to take Becky beyond the lines of their property, except on the county road to and from their school. When Becky thought about her and Clem’s unusual friendship, her mind went back to the word forbidden. Things that were forbidden were often precisely what the heart most wanted. Things became more attractive because they were forbidden by some cruel or uncomprehending authority. As a teenager, when she saw the light under Clem’s door, late on a Saturday night, it was like the beckoning glow of a forbidden thing. She and Clem were united against the authority that wanted to separate them.

Following the edict, her father had undertaken to replace Clem as the person she went on walks with. For Clem, outdoors, everything was an adventure—vines to be swung from, old wells to be sounded with pebbles, terrible centipedes to be discovered under rocks, seed pods to be sniffed and broken open, horses to be lured with an apple. For her father, nature was just a glorious but unspecific thing that God had made. He talked to Becky about Jesus, which made her uncomfortable, and about the hard lives of local farmers, which was more interesting but maybe not so wise of him. The stories she could tell on the playground—the Boylans had a son in an insane asylum, Mrs. Boylan could only take nourishment through a straw, Carl Jackson’s mother was actually his grandmother—had given her an early taste of popularity. Shocking true facts about grownups were at a premium in grade school.

After the family moved to Chicago, her father had continued the “tradition” of taking her on walks on Sunday afternoons, usually a simple loop around Scofield Park. Declining his invitation was seldom worth the guilt trip her mother would have laid on her. Becky already felt guilty enough for caring little about the church and even less about oppressed people, and she did appreciate that her father treated her like a grownup, respected her like that, and kept telling her things he maybe shouldn’t have. She heard a lot about his dreams of a larger life of Christian service, his frustrations at being an associate minister in an affluent and mostly white suburb, and she took what she heard straight to Clem. (“He’s frustrated,” Clem said, “that he has a wife and four kids.” Or, more wickedly: “Mom likes you being the one Dad goes for walks with, because she knows he can’t run off with you.”) In return, despite being prodded, she told her father nothing about her own dreams and frustrations.

She uncapped her pen again with her teeth. The first batch of sugar cookies was baking.

On January 16, it will be one year since my Aunt Shirley passed away.

This was better already. It had gravity and created immediate sympathy for the bereaved college applicant.

She was alone in the world, having lost her one true love in World War II. I had the privilege of knowing her later in life and learning the importance of culture and elegance, belief in oneself, and bravery in the face of solitude and sickness from her. Whatever my mother may think, she didn’t buy my affection. I truly loved her. Every summer, starting when I was ten, I got to go and spend a week in her small but elegantly tastefully furnished apartment in New York City Manhattan.

It was true that Shirley had bought her a lot of stuff over the years. Also true that none of Becky’s brothers ever got anything. True that the new clothes she brought home from New York had to be cleaned before she even wore them, to get the stink of Chesterfields out of them, and that on her first visit, in 1964, she cried every night on her aunt’s sofa bed (Shirley called it a “convertible,” as if it were a car) out of homesickness for Clem and the eye-burning oppression of the smoke in the airless apartment, and that, ironically, it was her mother who insisted that she accept Shirley’s invitation again the next summer, as an act of charity. (Only later, after Becky had come to look forward to her New York trips, did her mother start using words like vain and unrealistic about her sister.)

Even early on, though, Becky had been dazzled by her aunt. On Shirley’s first and last visit to the Indiana farmhouse, she’d taken Becky by her seven-year-old shoulders, looked her seriously in the eye, and informed her that she was destined to be a great beauty. That was something. Unlike her mother, who was only ever a pastor’s wife, Shirley had had a career as a Broadway actress, never as a big star, apparently, but an actual career, and Becky had marveled at how imperiously she sliced through the masses of humanity at the World’s Fair, in 1964, and how, when a waiter or a salesperson referred to Becky as her daughter, she merely winked at Becky, who until then had followed Clem’s example and abhorred dishonesty. The difference between dishonesty and make-believe, Shirley said, was artistic imagination. Though it was obvious that Becky didn’t have this kind of imagination—in New York, she preferred the mummies at the Met to the European painters, the dinosaurs across the park to the mummies, and Macy’s to the dinosaurs—Shirley told her that this was just as well, because the world of art and theater was entirely controlled by cruel men, many of them literally, pardon her French, cocksuckers, and it was better for a woman to be the patron, the appreciator, than patronized and unappreciated. By which, though Shirley never quite spelled it out, Becky understood that she would be better off rich than talented.

How much money her aunt had and where it might have come from was long unknown to her. Shirley’s apartment was small, but she had charge cards for all the department stores. Her furniture looked inexpensive, but her shoes and jewelry weren’t. She took Becky out for a fancy dinner only once per visit, but she also never cooked a meal. Instead, she and Becky paged through a ring binder wonderfully populated with takeout menus, and anything else Becky needed (milk and cookies in the early years; later Fresca and tampons) was summoned for delivery by a phone call and paid for in cash at the burglar-proof front door. Shirley conveyed, through the way she shuddered at the recollection, her enduring horror at the Indiana farmhouse where she’d foretold her niece’s destiny; the convulsive Maytag in the mud room, with its age-fissured rubber rollers, seemed to have made a particularly traumatic impression. Her own linens arrived clean in brown-paper packages tied up with white string.

Along with the shopping, what Becky most enjoyed about her summer visits was not having to pretend she didn’t care about status and didn’t want a future life in which she had it. Shirley methodically interrogated her about the professions of her friends’ fathers and the size of their houses, and thereby made Becky aware that New Prospect Township wasn’t a Midwestern utopia where everyone was equal, as she might have supposed, but a place where money counted socially and only good looks or athletic prowess could make up for the lack of it. In tenth grade, using funds that Shirley had provided for the purpose, and over her mother’s sour disapproval, Becky had signed up for New Prospect’s monthly formal dancing school, Messieurs et Mesdemoiselles, which her friends all rolled their eyes at but nevertheless attended. Still Clem’s emissary, but also inspired by her aunt’s insight that snobs were insecure and the true aristocracy gracious, she didn’t avoid the greasier and clumsier dancers the way her friends did (although she did notice, and enjoy what it said about her status, that a clumsy boy became even clumsier when she astonished him by picking him as a partner). Inclusiveness, as she practiced it at M&M, was not only gracious but no less valuable than exclusivity was in building popularity—witness the results of the cheerleader election the following year. To be both feared and liked was its own kind of feat, and it struck, in her mind, a happy balance between the two very different people whose example mattered to her.

Between cigarettes, on Becky’s last visit to New York, her aunt had sucked on nasty-smelling medicated lozenges. Despite the July humidity, there was a frog in her throat that she couldn’t get rid of. In hindsight, Becky wondered if Shirley had known what it meant, because she couldn’t keep it in her head that Becky still had two years of high school left, not one. The next summer, Shirley said, just as soon as Becky graduated, she wanted to take her on a grand tour of Europe: London for theater, Paris for the Louvre, Salzburg for music, Stockholm for white nights, Venice for atmosphere, Rome for antiquities. How did that sound to her? “I think,” Becky said, “you mean two summers from now.” Sad to say, she didn’t share her aunt’s impatience. Seeing Paris sounded good to her, but Shirley’s favoritism wasn’t playing well at home, and a grand tour of Europe would be an entirely different level of expense. Also, as Becky got older, the seeds of criticism planted by her mother had grown into an awareness that Shirley was somewhat loony and didn’t have close friends. Becky still loved her and valued her insights. She understood, as her mother didn’t seem to, how much Shirley envied her younger sister for having a husband and a family; how lonely she was. But she and her cigarettes weren’t the companions Becky would have chosen, in an ideal world, for a trip to Europe.

Four days after she returned from New York, before she’d even written her thank-you letter, her mother had taken a phone call from Shirley and sobbed when it was over. Her tears were appropriate but still surprising, a lesson in the power of sisterly love to overcome sisterly dislike. Becky herself didn’t cry at the news that her mother then gave her; cancer seemed to her both terrifying and unreal. Her own tears came later, when she wrote the thank-you and tried to think of how to end it (Get well soon? I hope you feel better soon?), and again when Shirley sent her a copy of Fodor’s Europe filled with underlinings and annotations, along with a letter in which she went into great detail about European rail passes and spoke of beating her cancer and how important it would be, in the difficult months ahead, to have something to look forward to “next summer.”

That fall, Becky’s mother became real to her, as a person of independent capability, in a way she hadn’t been before. She made two long trips to New York, where Shirley was getting radiation. When Becky asked if she could go there herself, her mother not only didn’t discourage her but said it would be a wonderful gift to her aunt. But Shirley didn’t want Becky to come, didn’t want her to see her looking the way she did, didn’t want her to remember her like that. Becky could come in the spring, when the treatments were behind her and she was more like herself. If everything went well, the two of them would then have the trip of a lifetime in the historic capitals of Europe.

She died alone in a room at Lenox Hill Hospital. There was no funeral. It was like Eleanor Rigby.

When I was younger I thought her elegance was effortless, but when I got to know her better I saw it was anything but. Now I think about all the things she did every day to put a brave face on. All the makeup supplies in her bathroom, her Chanel No. 19 spritzer, the hose she threw out if they got the tiniest run in them, the old white gloves she put on to read the newspaper to keep the ink off her fingers, the gold-rimmed cup she drank her tea from with her pinkie raised like a lady. And for what. Just to maintain her dignity in a world where she went by herself to the theater or a concert. No wonder, I thought, her little routines meant so much to her. She gave me so many insights into my own life but, too, an insight into the lives of people who wake up alone every morning and find the courage to get out of bed and show their face. I was always blessed with having many friends. I was “popular” and sometimes conceited about it. All that changed when Shirley passed away. She gave me new admiration for people who are lonely in the world.

Becky’s mother had gone to New York, one last time, to have Shirley’s body cremated and to deal with her estate. She came home with an old wicker suitcase of Shirley’s that contained a mink stole, the watercolor painting, silver earrings, a gold bracelet, and other keepsakes, all of it for Becky, who wept when her mother showed it to her.

“I understand why you’re crying,” her mother said coldly. “But you shouldn’t romanticize your aunt. She made nothing but mistakes in life. In fact, mistakes may be too kind a word for it.”

“I thought you were sad,” Becky said.

“She was my sister. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.” Her mother seemed to soften, but only for a moment. “I should have known that people don’t change.”

“What do you mean?”

“Shirley was the kind of woman who has no use for other women. All she wanted was men. And she had plenty of them in her day. Funnily enough, though, none of them stuck around. The good ones figured out in a hurry what kind of person they were dealing with, the bad ones disappointed her, and she was vicious on the subject of homosexuals. I never met the man she actually married, but I gather he had some family money. He left her an annuity when he was killed in the Pacific, and it was a good thing he did, because she wasn’t an actress. She was a pretty face who could memorize her lines. By the time your father and I moved to New York, she was ‘between roles.’ She was still between roles when we left. She lived in a fantasy world where nobody appreciated her talent and the men all either exploited her or disappointed her, but maybe the next man wouldn’t. She was one of the most miserable people I’ve ever known.”

The coldness of this speech shocked Becky. “But it’s so sad,” she said.

“Yes, it is,” her mother said. “That’s why I didn’t mind you going out there in the summer. You have a good head, a good heart, and God knows she was lonely.”

“If she didn’t like other women, then why did she like me?”

“I wondered that myself. But people like her never change.”

Eight months went by before Becky learned the reason for her mother’s coldness. It happened that her birthday, her eighteenth, fell on a Saturday. Jeannie Cross had organized a blowout party that everyone who counted was coming to. Everyone wanted to see Hildebrandt get drunk, which was Jeannie’s stated object and, God help her, Becky’s private intention. Unlike her dissolute younger brother, she’d always been sensitive to her father’s position as a man of the cloth, the unseemliness of a minister’s daughter getting shit-faced, but now she was old enough to vote, and her social instincts told her it was time to mix things up a little. After working the lunch shift at the Grove—she’d quit her florist job and taken a less dorky one, waiting tables—she hurried home to shower and dress and have an early dinner with her family. The parsonage seemed curiously empty. There were October sunbeams in the living room, a fading smell of baked cake. She went up to her room and was startled to see her mother seated on her bed. “You need to come upstairs with me,” she said.

“I need to shower,” Becky said.

“You can do that later.”

On the third floor, they found her father waiting in his home office, his windows open, cool autumn air filtering into the attic-like stuffiness. He motioned to Becky to sit down. Her mother shut the door and stayed standing. Becky was quite alarmed. It was as if she were facing punishment for the heavy drinking she hadn’t done yet.

“Marion?” her father said.

Her mother cleared her throat. “As you know,” she said to Becky, “my sister named me as the executrix of her will. What I have to say to you, I’m saying as the executrix. Your aunt left you a great deal of money. Now that you’re eighteen, the money is yours. The will doesn’t specify that it be held in trust. All it says is—Russ, will you read it?”

Her father unlocked a drawer and took out a document. “‘To my niece Rebecca Hildebrandt I will, devise, and bequeath the sum of thirteen thousand dollars for a Grand Tour of Europe, to be taken in my memory.’ That’s all there is. No mention of trustees.”

Becky was smiling broadly; she couldn’t help it.

“I put the money in your savings account yesterday,” her mother said.

“Wow.”

“I was legally obligated,” her mother said. “The lawyer said we could wait until your eighteenth birthday, but no longer than that. Shirley’s intentions were clear.”

“Wow. That’s so nice of her.”

“It’s not nice,” her father said. “It’s a foolish bequest, and we need to talk about it.”

“Thirteen thousand dollars,” her mother said, “is almost the entirety of your aunt’s estate. There were a few odd thousands left over for various museums, but you’re the main beneficiary. If you’d happened to predecease her, the money would have gone to the museums.”

Now Becky saw the problem. In case she hadn’t, her mother laid it out for her: not only had Shirley ignored Clem, Perry, and Judson, but she’d stipulated that Becky use the money for something frivolous. She’d lived in a fantasy world to the end, and beyond. “And she knew very well how I would feel about it. That was part of the equation.”

So everything is about you, Becky thought.

Her father might have had the same thought, because he suggested that her mother leave the two of them alone. When she was gone, he shifted into his gentle dad-to-daughter tone. “I can’t believe you’re eighteen already. It seems like only yesterday that we brought you home from the hospital.”

How many times had Becky heard that it seemed like only yesterday?

“But now here you are, eighteen years old, and I want you to think hard about this money. You’re not legally bound by the wording of your aunt’s will, and thirteen thousand dollars seems to me an awful lot to spend on a trip to Europe. Unless you’re staying at the Ritz, you could travel for two years on that.”

Staying at the Ritz, Becky thought, was exactly what Shirley had had in mind.

“I can’t tell you what to do, but it seems to me that you could honor Shirley’s intention by using a small portion of the money to travel abroad next summer. If you wanted to do something nice for your mother, you could bring her along. Again, I’m not telling you what to do—”

Really?

“But there’s also a question of fairness. I know you had a special fondness for Shirley, and she for you, but I do think she may have been trying to hurt your mother with this bequest. Your mother and I love all of you kids equally, and we think you should all be treated equally. For better or worse, we’re not a well-to-do family. Your mother and I want all of you to go to college, and a quarter of the bequest would make a real difference to each of you. I can’t tell you what the right thing to do is—”

Really?

“But I hope you’ll think carefully about how you want to proceed. Will you do that for me?”

“Yep,” Becky said.

“I know it’s not easy. Thirteen thousand dollars is a lot of—”

“I get it,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything else.”

“I just want you to know that I’m very—”

“I said I get it. Okay?”

She jumped to her feet, ran down to her room, and jerked open the top drawer of her dresser, where she kept her savings passbook. The balance had indeed been updated. It was $13,753.60. Christening money, birthday money, paychecks for the hours she’d spent in a stupid green florist’s apron, and tips and paychecks from the Grove added up to $753.60. Dear Aunt Shirley! She’d known what Becky wanted, and it was all the better for being unexpected. Becky had never, not once, wondered if her aunt had left her any money; the little suitcase of treasures had been enough. Only now, as she imagined the figure in her passbook reduced to a sad nubbin, did her mind spring to life with greedy rationalizations. Maybe she wasn’t legally bound to follow the letter of the will, but wasn’t she morally bound to honor the spirit? Wouldn’t it be an insult to Shirley’s memory to submit to her father’s wishes? And why should she give anything to her pothead little brother, who could probably get a full scholarship to Harvard anyway? Wouldn’t there be more money for Judson in the future, when her father got his own church and there were fewer mouths at home to feed? The only person she felt at all inclined to share with was Clem.

At the party that night, she quickly downed two Seagram’s and 7UPs, after which it was possible to slow down without being noticed. The main effect of the alcohol was to create a powerful but hazy sense of importance; of being on the verge of a great, warm insight. As her buzz began to fade, the sense of importance faded with it, leaving behind a small, cold insight: she was bored. She didn’t care who had a crush on who, what kind of prank was played on Lyons Township before the football game. The world was full of better places.

It’s because of an inheritance I received from Shirley, following her tragic death, that I’m able to consider attending a private college. She herself never attended college, having been a noted actress in her youth and busy with her career, but she loved the higher things in life and knew more about art and theater and music and coteur than many experts anyone I’ve ever known. It was from her that I learned to dream big and really make something of myself. I’m blessed to have an opportunity to educate myself in a way she never could, and learn more about the world. I intend to seize this opportunity fully.

She read what she’d written and wrinkled her nose. There seemed to be no way back to the pure feeling she’d had for Shirley before her mother clouded it with criticisms. Or maybe the morning after being kissed was simply not a good time to experience admiration. Considering her state, she felt good about having written anything at all.

She closed her notebook and went to the kitchen, where Judson was applying colored sugar to a tray of cookies. Through the open basement door came the sound of laundry chores.

“These look great, Jay,” she said.

“I need a better tool. It clumps on the spoon.”

“Which one is your least favorite? I bet I can make it disappear.”

“This one,” he said, pointing.

She ate the cookie and immediately wished she could eat another. “Is there anything special you want for Christmas? Something you haven’t told anyone about?”

“Nobody asks.”

“Perry didn’t ask you?”

Judson hesitated and shook his head.

“I’m asking,” she said.

“Colored pencils,” he said, intent on the cookies. “With interesting colors.”

“Got it. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.”

“If you or any of your I-enforcers are caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.”

“I think it’s ‘I.M. force.’ Impossible Mission.”

“I wondered about that.”

“You’re a good kid,” she said, brimming with goodwill.

“Thank you.”

Her mother was trudging up the basement stairs, so she fled to her room again. Seeing her unmade bed, she was drawn to lie down on it, as a way of falling back into the kiss. The day already seemed to have lasted longer than an entire ordinary day, and it had still barely started.

It was generally assumed, and specifically assumed by her father, in his jealousy, that Rick Ambrose was the reason Crossroads had exploded in popularity. According to Clem, though, there were two reasons, and the other one was Tanner Evans. Tanner’s parents belonged to First Reformed, and he’d come up with Clem through Sunday school and gone with Becky’s father on the first spring work camp in Arizona. Tanner was a nice person, from a nice family, but he was also a gifted musician and the coolest guy at New Prospect Township, one of the first to grow his hair long, a bell-bottomed dreamboat. In Clem’s telling, Crossroads had exploded when Tanner invited his music-playing friends, male and female, white and black, to come to Sunday meetings. Crossroads became as much a musical happening as a religious thing, Tanner’s coolness the counterweight to Ambrose’s intensity.

Tanner had postponed college to develop his skills and write songs. He had a regular Friday-night gig in the back room at the Grove, where liquor was served. He and his girlfriend, Laura Dobrinsky, who’d been his female counterpart in Crossroads, played together in a band called the Bleu Notes. Laura was short and somewhat chunky, but she had an impressive head of wavy hair and a face flattered by pink-tinted wireframes, and her voice, when she sang solo, made walls shake and hearts break. She was one of New Prospect’s original hippies, a walking yes to the question Are You Experienced? It was hard to imagine Tanner with anyone else, and so when Becky went to work at the Grove and started running into him, and he asked her how Clem was doing at college, and sent greetings to her parents, she assumed she was only a little sister to whom, being nice, he was being nice.

The night before she turned eighteen, after her shift ended, she stood in the doorway of the back room and listened to the last song of the Bleu Notes’ first set. Tanner’s voice and mustache resembled James Taylor’s, and he wore a fringed suede jacket. His hands were strong and lanky from playing guitar, his mouth full-lipped and fascinating when he sang. After the song ended and Becky had turned to leave, she heard him call her name. He came weaving through the bar tables and motioned to her to sit down with him. Laura Dobrinsky had disappeared somewhere.

“There’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said. “Why aren’t you in Crossroads?”

Becky frowned. “Why would I be?”

“Um, because it’s an incredible experience? Because you’re a member of First Reformed?”

She was not, in fact, a member of the church. She was so obviously not a religious person that her parents hadn’t bothered to pressure her to join.

“Even if I wanted to be in Crossroads, which I don’t,” she said, “I wouldn’t do that to my father.”

“What does your father have to do with it?”

“The group kicked him out?”

Tanner winced. “I know. That scene was messed up. But I’m asking about you, not him. Why don’t you want to be in Crossroads?”

It was true that Clem had joined the youth group, before it was called Crossroads, and that he was even less religious than she was. But Clem enjoyed service to poor people, the Arizona trip especially, and was naturally generous (or willfully perverse) in his choice of companions. Becky was turned off by the Crossroads look, the painter’s pants and flannel shirts, and by the superior air of Crossroads people at their tables in the high-school cafeteria, their ostentatious closeness, their indifference to the hierarchy. Though Clem had dismissed the hierarchy himself, he’d never seemed smug about it. The Crossroads people did.

“I just don’t,” she told Tanner. “It’s not my kind of thing.”

“How do you know it’s not your kind of thing if you haven’t tried it?”

“Why do you care if I try it?”

Tanner shrugged, stirring his suede fringes. “I heard Perry’s been going. I thought, ‘That’s cool, but what about Becky?’ It seemed weird that you weren’t in the group.”

“Perry and I are very different.”

“Right. You’re Becky Hildebrandt. You’re the queen of the soshies. What would all your friends say?”

It was nice that he’d paid enough attention to know her social standing. But she’d always hated being teased. “I’m not going to Crossroads. I don’t have to tell you why.”

“It’s not because you’re afraid of what you might learn about yourself.”

“Nope.”

“Really? It sounds to me like you’re afraid.”

“I am what I am.”

“That’s what God said, too.”

“You believe in God?”

“I think so.” Tanner leaned back in his chair. “I think He’s there in our relationships, if they’re honest. And the first place I ever had honest relationships, and felt close to God, was in Crossroads.”

“Then why did it kick my dad out?”

Tanner seemed genuinely pained. “Your dad is great,” he said. “I love your dad. But people couldn’t relate to him.”

“I can relate to him. So I guess there’s something wrong with me, too.”

“Whoa. That is, like, textbook passive aggression. You wouldn’t get away with that for five minutes in Crossroads.”

“Perry’s a total bullshitter, and he seems to be doing great there.”

“When I look at you, I see the girl who’s got everything, the girl everybody wishes they could be. But inside you’re so scared you can hardly breathe.”

“Maybe I’m holding my breath until I can get away from this town.”

“You were chosen for bigger and better things.”

She wasn’t accustomed to being mocked. Everywhere at New Prospect Township, the mere threat of her disdain carried weight. “Just so you know,” she said, in a frosty tone she rarely found it necessary to use outside her family, “I don’t enjoy being teased.”

“Sorry about that,” Tanner said. “It just seems like a waste, to hold your breath for a year. You’re supposed to be living. That’s the way we honor God—by being present in the moment.”

As Becky tried to think of a tart comeback, Laura Dobrinsky reappeared. Her cumulus of hair reeked of pot smoked in chill autumn air, which had hardened the nipples clearly visible through the crepe of her blouse, beneath her unzipped biker jacket. She sat down backward on Tanner, straddling one of his thighs.

“I’ve been telling Becky she needs to go to Crossroads,” Tanner said.

Laura appeared only then to notice Becky. “It’s not for everyone,” she said.

“You loved it,” Tanner said, his beautiful hands clasped low on Laura’s belly.

“I liked the intensity. Not everyone does. There were people who got fucked up by it.”

“Like who?”

“Like Brenda Maser. She had a nervous breakdown on the spring retreat.”

“She had a freakout,” Tanner said, “because Glen Kiel dumped her for Marcie Ackerman the day before the retreat.”

Laura asked Becky if she could imagine someone bawling for twenty hours straight. “It started with a screaming exercise,” she said. “You scream and then you stop, except that Brenda didn’t. I was in Ambrose’s car with her on the drive home. You could hug her, you could leave her alone, it didn’t matter. We ended up just sitting there listening to her cry. Kind of wanting to strangle her to make it stop. We got to her house, and Ambrose took her inside and handed her off to her parents. Like, here’s your daughter, there seems to be a problem, uh, we don’t know anything else about it.”

Becky tried to imagine Clem on a retreat, screaming, and could not.

“It wasn’t a nervous breakdown,” Tanner said. “Brenda was in school the next morning.”

“Oh, well, then.” Laura gave Becky a funny overbright smile. “Only twenty hours of crying. What’s not to like?”

Another thing Becky had enjoyed about her aunt was her disdain. Shirley had exercised it constantly, often with salty language. After she died and Becky’s mother pronounced her judgment, Becky understood what a survival mechanism disdain had been for her aunt, who had few other defenses against an uncaring world. For Becky herself, disdain was more of an emergency measure, taken only when someone directly tried to make her feel bad. Leaving the Grove that night, rattled by an unaccustomed sense of inferiority, she tried to summon it, but there was nothing to disdain about Laura Dobrinsky except her shortness, which Becky, even in an emergency, could see wasn’t fair. Laura was the Natural Woman that Becky had heard her sing about being made to feel like, in her giant voice, and there was no disdaining Tanner for anything. She went to bed that night wondering if Tanner had been right about her—if she really was afraid of life. The boredom she felt at her birthday party, the following night, was another sign that she needed to start living.

If Shirley hadn’t left her thirteen thousand dollars, she might not have chosen Crossroads as the place to start. She did have an instinct that showing up at Crossroads would be a delicious kind of shock to those who paid attention to such things. If she happened to like it, Tanner would be more respectful of her, and if she thought it was stupid, well, then she would have something to disdain. But she knew how her father loathed Rick Ambrose. She wasn’t exactly forbidden to go to Crossroads, but she might as well have been.

Only after he’d lectured her about Shirley’s money did she decide to defy him. It wasn’t that she thought he was wrong. She got that her loony aunt had played favorites and that it was up to her to make things right, by sharing her money. And yet she felt betrayed, in a way that hurt no less for being childish. How many times had her mother told her how specially dear she was to her father? How many stupid walks had she taken on the assumption that the walks were super-important to him? If she’d known he was going to yank away her inheritance before she could even be excited about it, she would never have gone on so many walks. What was the point if all she got out of it was a sermon about fairness? He couldn’t even wait for her to find her own way to a generous impulse. It was wham, bam, share the money with your brothers. Who, speaking of fairness, had never done anything for Shirley, never written her, never sacrificed valuable days of summer vacation for her, never lain awake on her convertible with eyes and nose assaulted by smoke. If her father was so fond of her, shouldn’t he at least have acknowledged that?

She invited Jeannie Cross to come with her to Crossroads. Jeannie would have run through a hail of bullets for Becky, and might have preferred it to visiting a Christian youth group, but Becky explained that Tanner Evans had dared her to go. Jeannie was duly impressed. “You’ve been hanging out with Tanner Evans?”

“Just casually. We talk.”

“Isn’t he with what’s her face?”

“Laura, yeah. She’s cool.”

“So…”

“I said. It’s just casual.”

“Would you go out with him if he asked you?”

“He’s not going to ask me.”

“I can actually sort of see it,” Jeannie said. “You and him together.”

“You haven’t seen the way he is with Laura.”

“You know what I mean, though. You’re going to be with someone, sometime. And, Jesus—Tanner Evans? I can really almost see it.”

So, now, suddenly, could Becky. She had only to picture it as it would appear to people like Jeannie, as a crowning confirmation of her status, a punishing lesson to every lesser boy who’d imagined he could date her, and the thought became lodged in her head. Why, after all, had Tanner challenged her to try Crossroads? Wasn’t this evidence of interest in her? Even his teasing—maybe especially his teasing—was evidence.

From Clem’s involvement with the group, she knew enough to dress down for it, but she wasn’t Jeannie’s keeper. When Jeannie picked her up, in the silver Mustang her parents had given her, she was wearing dress slacks, an expensive brocade vest, and a lot of makeup. Becky felt sorry for her, but she didn’t mind having an overdressed friend to feel cooler than. The Crossroads meeting room was shockingly crowded with people she knew the names of, had given many a congenial smile to in classrooms and hallways, and would never have dreamed of seeing socially. In a far corner was a tangle of bodies like a collapsed game of Twister with her brother Perry at the bottom of it, fighting a battle of tickles with a fat girl in bib overalls, his face red with happiness, quite a bizarre sight. Becky and Jeannie sat down with two former friends from Lifton Central. One of them, Kim Perkins, a cheerleader who’d strayed into promiscuity and drugs, gave Becky a welcoming hug and petted her head as if it were she, not Kim, who had strayed. Kim tried to hug Jeannie as well, but Jeannie raised a hand to ward her off.

And so it went. Downstairs, in the function hall, Becky opened herself to the activities because Jeannie couldn’t. When people taped a sheet of newsprint to their back and wrote messages on other backs with felt-tip pens, Becky scrawled Looking forward to getting to know you! Becky on back after back, stopping only to be scrawled upon, while Jeannie, looking miserable in her dress slacks, stood to the side and frowned at her pen as if its workings were a mystery. The group then formed a circle of crosshatched bodies, everyone’s head resting on their neighbor’s belly. There was no obvious point to the exercise except to start laughing as a group and feel your head bouncing on a laughing belly and another head bouncing on yours, but to Becky, positioned between two boys she’d never spoken to, it seemed strange that she’d spent her life surrounded by bellies, all of them as familiar to their owners as her own belly was to her, all of them potentially touchable, and yet they were almost never touched. Strange that a possibility constantly present was so seldom acted on. She was sorry when the exercise ended.

“We’re going to break into groups of six,” Rick Ambrose said. “I want each of us in the group to talk about something we’ve done that was wrong. Something we’re ashamed of. And then I want each of us to talk about something we’ve done that we’re proud of. The point here is to listen, all right? Really listen. We’ll meet back here at nine.”

Not wanting to be in a group where she knew nobody, Becky pounced on the one Kim Perkins was forming and left Jeannie to fend for herself. A friend of Perry’s, David Goya, tried to join Kim’s group, but Rick Ambrose stepped in front of him and blocked him out. Becky hadn’t expected that Ambrose himself would participate in the exercise. She and the others followed him upstairs and sat down in the hallway outside her father’s office. At the sight of her father’s name on the door, her chest constricted with the consequence of what she was doing to him. She’d had every right to try Crossroads, but a betrayal was a betrayal.

Rick Ambrose was smaller than he loomed in her parents’ demonology. He was like a little black-mustached satyr with stack-heeled hooves. Following his own instructions, he listened intently while a tough kid Becky had known only by face told the story of breaking windows at Lifton Central with a slingshot after he’d gotten a D-minus in physical science, Kim Perkins the story of having sex with a summer-camp counselor whose girlfriend was the counselor in her cabin.

“And you think that was wrong,” Ambrose said.

“Definitely it was shitty of me,” Kim said.

“But I’m listening to you,” Ambrose said, “and what I’m hearing is more like bragging. Is anyone else hearing that?”

What Becky was hearing was more like statutory rape. Kim had long had a bad reputation, but at some level Becky hadn’t quite believed the rumors about her. Becky was three years older than Kim had been at summer camp, and she hadn’t even kissed anyone. What story could she tell when it was her turn? Behaving irresponsibly had never been her thing.

“I liked that I could have him,” Kim said. “Like, how easy it was. Maybe I was proud of that. But when I went back to my cabin and saw his girlfriend, I felt awful. I still feel awful. I hate that I was ever the kind of person who would do that to someone, just because I could.”

“That, I’m hearing,” Ambrose said. “Becky?”

“I’m hearing it, too.”

“Do you want to tell us something about yourself?”

She opened her mouth but nothing came out. Ambrose and the others waited.

“Actually,” she said, “right now I’m feeling bad about my friend Jeannie. I made her come with me tonight, and I don’t know where she went.”

She looked down at her hands. The church was very quiet, the other groups dispersed, their guilty disclosures a distant murmur.

“I think she might have gone home,” Kim said.

“Okay, now I’m feeling really bad,” Becky said. “She’s my best friend, and I … I think I’m a bad friend. Everywhere I go, I want everyone to like me, and this is my first time here—I want to be liked. But I should have been taking care of Jeannie.”

The girl next to her, whose back she’d scrawled on without learning her name, put a soft hand on her arm. Becky shuddered and sort of sobbed. It was more emotion than the situation perhaps called for, but something about Crossroads brought emotion to the surface. I want to be liked might have been the most honest words she’d ever uttered. Recognizing the truth of them, she bent forward and surrendered to her emotion, and now other hands were on her, hands of comfort and acceptance.

Only Ambrose held back. “What are you waiting for?” he said.

She wiped her nose. “What do you mean?”

“Why aren’t you looking for your friend?”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

The silver Mustang was still in the parking lot. As Becky approached the driver’s side, Jeannie started the engine and turned down the radio, which was tuned to WLS and playing “Save the Country.” She lowered the window.

“I’m sorry,” Becky said. “You don’t have to wait for me.”

“You’re staying?”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come back inside? I’ll stick close to you.”

Come on down to the glory river, the radio said. Jeannie shook her head. “I thought you were only doing this because Tanner dared you.”

“He dared me to try it. Not just go for one hour.”

“One hour was plenty for me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re forgiven,” Jeannie said. “I swear to God, though, Bex. You’d better not go religious on me.”

To her own surprise, she went religious. It began with being bored and wanting to be liked, but even on her first night she was forced into interactions with kids less fortunate than she was, forced to listen to them, forced in turn to account for the person she really was, undefended by status, and thereby, just as Tanner had promised, forced to learn things about herself, not all of them flattering. Crossroads didn’t look religious—there was nary a Bible in sight, and whole evenings went by without reference to Jesus—but here again Tanner had been right: simply by trying to speak honestly, surrendering to emotion, supporting other people in their honesty and emotion, she experienced her first glimmerings of spirituality. She could feel herself vindicating Clem’s long-standing faith in her, as a person of substance.

A hundred and twenty kids were in Crossroads, and only one exciting leader. In two hours on a Sunday night, every member could hope for one minute of Ambrose’s attention. Becky, in the weeks that followed, averaged a lot more than that. Ambrose twice chose her as a dyad partner, praised her for her guts in joining the group, and called her out in larger discussions, praising her honesty. She would have been more self-conscious about hogging him if she hadn’t felt a natural affinity with him. She, too, had been a person other people measured and compared their time with; she knew the pleasure but also the burden of that. Plus she’d come painfully late to Crossroads—she had two years of lost time with Ambrose to make up for.

Her father, meanwhile, was barely speaking to her. She was theoretically sorry to have hurt him, but she didn’t miss the charade of closeness. He’d needed to be shown that she was eighteen years old and had a right to her own life. The ancient edict needed punishing as well.

The action that had truly taken guts occurred in the school cafeteria some weeks later. She’d already stopped putting on makeup in the morning and taken to wearing only jeans, never skirts, but she didn’t think she’d ever felt more glaringly visible than the day she plunked her sack lunch down between Kim Perkins and David Goya. They acted like it was nothing, but every eye at Becky’s usual table was on her, especially Jeannie Cross’s. Though Jeannie should arguably have been grateful to her, for vacating a rung on the ladder that she herself could then ascend to, Jeannie didn’t see it that way. She continued to give Becky rides to school in her Mustang, and Becky still enjoyed hearing her gossip, but a line had been crossed when she sat down at a Crossroads table. Jeannie referred to Crossroads as Kumbaya, which wasn’t funny even the first time she said it, and Becky, although she couldn’t prove it, sensed that Jeannie was no longer telling her every secret she learned.

Offsetting her self-imposed demotion was her rise in Tanner Evans’s estimation. Not only had the thought of her with Tanner not left her; after she publicly declared herself a Crossroads person, the thought had acquired new urgency. Certain people who thought less of her for going religious might think again if they saw her with Tanner Evans. This was a calculation, but her feelings had quickly fallen in line with it. She imagined holding one of Tanner’s hands in hers, touching the tips of his long fingers one by one. She imagined his hands clasped on her belly, the way she’d seen them clasped on Laura Dobrinsky’s. She imagined him writing a song about her.

At the Grove, on the Friday after her first Crossroads meeting, she resisted the urge to find him and tell him what she’d done. She’d enjoyed the meeting, and she planned to go to the next one, but as soon as she saw Tanner arrive with his guitars she wondered if she’d capitulated too easily. If she’d offered more resistance, he might have kept pressing her, and teasing her.

The Bleu Notes were playing without the Natural Woman that night. By the time their first set ended, Becky was putting chairs up on tables in the empty dining room. The urge was there but she resisted it. And was rewarded when Tanner came looking for her.

“Hey,” he said, “I saw Rick Ambrose. You know what he told me?”

“No.”

“You actually went! I couldn’t believe it. I thought I’d totally pissed you off.”

“You did piss me off.”

“Well, and apparently it worked.”

“Yeah, once. I’m not sure I’ll go back.”

“You didn’t like it?”

She shrugged, trying to maintain her resistance.

“You’re still pissed off with me,” he said.

“I still don’t see why you care if I’m in Crossroads.”

She hoisted a chair onto a table, feeling his eyes on her. She expected him to ask what she’d made of Crossroads. Instead he asked her if she wanted to stay for the second set.

“I’m not allowed in the back room,” she said, “except to get drink orders.”

“You work here. No one’s going to card you.”

“Where’s Laura?”

“She went to Milwaukee for the weekend.”

“Well, then, I don’t think I’d better.”

Tanner looked away, blinking. He had wonderful eyelashes.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s cool.”

All the way home and well into the night, she revised the evening in her head. Her chance had come and gone so suddenly, she hadn’t had time to think it through. Had she said no because she considered it unethical to sneak around behind Laura’s back? Or was it because the idea of being a temporary replacement, a second-stringer, was insulting? If only she hadn’t said no so quickly! Deflection of male advances had become a reflex, because until now the advances had always been deflection-worthy. But what if she’d stayed for the second set? And hung out afterward with Tanner and the band, and let him drive her home, and then seen him again the next day, and the day after that, while Laura was in Milwaukee?

She didn’t get a second chance. The following Friday, Laura was back at the Grove, playing with Tanner, doing harmonies with him and then a solo song at the piano, “Up on the Roof,” that Becky fled into the kitchen to avoid hearing even distantly. That Sunday, she almost didn’t go to Crossroads, since there seemed to be nothing further to be gained with Tanner by going. But when seven o’clock rolled around she experienced a pang of actual loneliness, not a feeling she was used to. She threw on her only halfway scruffy coat, a corduroy jacket that Clem had outgrown, and ran-walked down to First Reformed, arriving just in time to be chosen by Rick Ambrose as a dyad partner.

The instruction was Share something you’re struggling with that the group might help you with. Ambrose led her to his office, which he had the privilege of using for dyad exercises, and offered to share first. His dark eyes uncharacteristically cast down, rather than boring into hers, he spoke of being frightened by the size and intensity of the group he’d helped create, the power that so many kids had given him over their lives. It was hard for him to maintain humility, and he worried that his relationship with God was suffering, because the horizontal relationships within the group were so compelling. “It’s easier to pray when you feel weak,” he said. “It’s easier to pray for strength than for humility, because humility is what you need to pray in the first place. Do you know what I mean?”

“I haven’t really tried to pray yet,” Becky said.

“That’s the next step,” Ambrose said. “I don’t just mean for you. This group started as a Christian fellowship, but it’s taken on a life of its own. I’m a little worried about what we’ve unleashed. What I’ve unleashed. I’m worried that, if it doesn’t end up leading us back to God, it’s just an intense kind of psychological experiment. Which could just as easily end up hurting people as liberating them.”

Even by Crossroads standards, his disclosure seemed extreme to Becky. She was flattered by his openness with her, which she took as another token of their affinity. But she was only a high-school kid, not his spiritual adviser.

“I know it’s a sore subject,” she found herself saying, “but one thing my dad is good at is keeping religion front and center. It’s always made me uncomfortable. But maybe it was a good contribution he made to the group?”

Ambrose winced. “I hear what you’re saying.”

“I mean, it’s great, what you’re doing. I’m not a pray-er. I like that I don’t have to do that. But…”

But what? Suggest that her father be reinstated in Crossroads? She cringed at the thought of him and his Christ talk at a Sunday-night meeting. She would quit the group in a minute if he came back.

“And what about you?” Ambrose said. “What are you struggling with?”

To reciprocate his openness, she told him that she had feelings for Tanner Evans. That Tanner was the reason she’d joined Crossroads. That, if she was not mistaken, Tanner was interested in her, too. That she wanted to pursue a relationship with him, but she didn’t think it was right to get between him and Laura. What should she do?

If Ambrose was surprised, he didn’t show it. “I love Tanner,” he said. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever had a better experience in this group. If everyone were like him, I wouldn’t be worried about where we’re going. He really did find his way back to God, and he had a beautiful way of keeping it light.”

“But Laura,” Becky suggested.

“Laura gave me constant shit. And I respected that. If Laura’s got a problem with a person, the person’s going to hear about it.”

“Okay.”

“But Tanner is mellow, and that cuts both ways. I can’t tell you what the right thing to do is. But I can tell you my impression, which is that Laura was always the one driving that relationship. For Tanner it was more like the path of least resistance.”

Helpful information.

“But maybe,” Becky said, “I should just keep away?”

“If you want to be safe, yes. Do you want to be safe?”

She already knew that safety, like passive aggression, was a dirty word in Crossroads. Safety was the opposite of risk-taking, without which personal growth could not occur.

“It’s not your job to hide your feelings,” Ambrose said. “It’s Tanner’s job to deal with them, and with his own feelings.”

Like her father, Ambrose had told her what to do while claiming not to, but it didn’t bother her when Ambrose did it. The problem was how to show her feelings. She loved safety! Her entire life to date had been organized around it! But since she’d blown her chance with Tanner, it was now up to her to take some kind of initiative, and she didn’t like the image of herself coming on to him. It would be extremely unsafe, not to mention difficult to manage if Laura was in the vicinity, and she wasn’t sure she’d be good at it anyway. She decided instead, as a semi-unsafe measure, to write him a letter.

Dear Tanner,

I was lying when I said I was still mad at you. In fact, I owe you a big debt of gratitude for introducing me to Crossroads. After just three weeks I can feel myself expanding as a person and taking new risks. You were right that I was just holding my breath. Well, I’m not holding it anymore. I’m trying to be more forthright about my feelings, and one of those feelings is that I’d like to get to know you better. If you feel the same way, maybe we can meet up sometime and take a walk or something? I would like that very much.

Your friend (I hope),

Becky

The letter, which she rewrote and copied three times to get the tone right, terrified her. She sealed it in an envelope, tore open the envelope to read it again, and sealed it in a new envelope that she then hid in her dresser. It was waiting to be delivered to Tanner, in person, forthrightly, the next time she saw him, when Clem returned from college for Thanksgiving.

She was glad that her father was the one to bring her brother home from the train station, so that she could pointedly exclude him when she invited Clem to take a walk with her. Since the summer, Clem had grown a sort of beard, and let his hair go long, and somewhere acquired a black peacoat. He looked a lot more than just three months older. As they walked in the low afterschool sunlight, he in the peacoat, she in his corduroy jacket, she had an elated sense of her own imminent adulthood; of their new formidableness as the pair of older siblings. They were the next generation. They had to be reckoned with.

From their mother’s letters to him, Clem had learned that Becky had joined Crossroads. He approved, but he wondered why she’d done it.

“I was mad at Dad,” she said.

“About what?”

“I’m more interested in why you were in it. I mean, now that I’m there and I see what it’s like. Some of those exercises…”

“The exercises weren’t that big a thing until Dad left. I stayed in for the work and the music. The sensitivity training was just a price you had to pay. There were enough other guys like me that we could pick each other as partners and talk about books or politics.”

“Did you ever do a screaming exercise?”

“I didn’t mind that one. It was better than the hugging. You were supposed to go around the room and give people hugs. Which, A, there were kids that nobody wanted to hug, and B, how did you know if a person wanted a hug? You were supposed to ask if it was okay, and the answer was supposed to be yes. I remember walking up to Laura Dobrinsky and asking her, and her saying no. She told me she wasn’t into doing things unless she really felt them. And I’m thinking, thanks, Laura. Glad we got that straight. I’d really been worrying about whether you felt like hugging me.”

“What do you think of Laura?”

“She’s got a real gift for humiliating people. You wouldn’t believe the way she spoke to Dad. She was at the center of that whole mess.”

“I didn’t realize that.”

“It wasn’t just her, but she was definitely the ringleader.”

Though Clem had explained it to her at the time, Becky had only a sketchy sense of why their father had left Crossroads. Her understanding was that he’d preached too much, and that Rick Ambrose had asked him to leave. She wasn’t feeling very loyal to him, but she was offended to think of Laura hurting him. “What did she do?”

“The whole scene was horrible. I can’t even tell you.”

“I’ve been talking to Tanner Evans, at the Grove. He and Laura play there every Friday.”

“Good old Tanner.”

“I know. It’s kind of strange that he’s with Laura.”

“How so?”

“Well, I mean, they’re both musicians. But he’s so nice, and tall, and she’s so—midgety. You know what I mean?”

Clem spoke sharply. “Laura can’t help how tall she is, Becky.”

“No, of course not.”

“You shouldn’t be hung up on superficial appearances.”

Becky felt stung. She had made, she thought, an innocuous point—that Tanner’s superficial appearance was extremely pleasing, Laura’s less so. All she wanted was that Clem agree that they looked strange together.

Instead, he launched into a telling of how Tanner and his musician friends had doubled the size of Crossroads. She appreciated the confirmation of Tanner’s social status, but Clem seemed to have changed more than just physically. It wasn’t just the beard, the hair, the peacoat. It was that he seemed more interested in talking than in listening to her. As they sat on a picnic table in Scofield Park, watching tree shadows lengthen on the yellowed grass, she learned the reason.

The reason’s name was Sharon. She was a junior at U of I, and he’d met her in a philosophy class. As he related to Becky how he’d boldly asked Sharon on a date, and how, on that date, they’d had a heated argument about Vietnam, and how amazing it was to find a woman who could more than hold her own in an argument with him, Becky had the unprecedented sensation of not wanting the details. Of being, herself, less interested in listening. The antipathy she felt toward Sharon, the discomfort it caused her to hear about Clem’s happiness, was inappropriate. It seemed to confirm, retrospectively, the inappropriateness of other things about her and Clem’s friendship. When he went on to effuse about what a revelation it was to experience a powerful animal attraction for the first time, and intense animal pleasure, by which he apparently meant full-on sex, and what a revelation it would be for Becky, someday, when she was ready for it, to connect with her own animal nature, her ears started roaring and she had to walk away from the picnic table.

Clem hopped off the table and followed her. “I’m such an idiot,” he said. “You didn’t want to hear about any of that.”

“It’s okay. I’m glad you’re happy.”

“I just wanted to tell somebody, and you’re the person I always want to tell. You’ll always be that person, Becky. You know that, right?”

She nodded.

“Is it okay if I give you a hug?”

It took her a second to get the joke. She laughed, and things were right with them again, and so she told him about the money from Shirley and what their father had said. Clem’s response was “Fuck him. Fuck that guy.”

Things were right with them again.

“Seriously, Becky, that is so fucked up. That money is yours. You totally earned it, Shirley loved you. You can do whatever the hell you want with it.”

“What if I want to give you half of it?”

“Me? Don’t give it to me. Go to Europe, go to a great college.”

“But what if I want you to have it? You could transfer to a better school next year.”

“There’s nothing wrong with U of I.”

“But you’re smarter than I am.”

“Not true. I just never had a social life.”

“But if U of I is okay for you, why isn’t it okay for me?”

“Because—I don’t mind farm kids. I don’t care what kind of room I’m in. You should be at Lawrence, or Beloit. That’s the kind of place I picture you.”

That was the kind of place she pictured herself, too.

“But with sixty-five hundred dollars,” she said, “I could still go there. And you could save your half for graduate school.”

Only now did Clem get that she was offering him thousands of dollars. In a calmer voice, he explained that she had two choices, either to keep all of the money or to share it equally. Singling him out was hurtful to Perry and Judson; it looked bad. And since three thousand dollars wasn’t enough money to make a difference to anyone, whatever the old man might think, she should keep the entire sum.

His analysis made perfect sense—he was, in fact, smarter than she was, also more considerate of other people’s feelings, also less greedy—and she was undeniably happy to think of keeping all the money. But her gratitude made her even more inclined to share it with him.

“I can’t do it,” he said. “Don’t you see how bad it would look?”

“But Dad’s going to kill me if I keep all of it.”

“Let me talk to him.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“No, I want to. I’m sick of this pious shit.”

Night had fallen when they returned to the parsonage. Clem marched straight up to the third floor, and it was strange to be Becky then, sitting on her bed one floor below, hearing him and her father fighting over her. She didn’t know Sharon and didn’t want to, but it seemed to her unlikely that Sharon fully understood how good a person Clem was. He came back downstairs and appeared in her doorway.

“I set him straight,” he said. “Let me know if he bothers you again.”

Her passbook, which had been radiating unease in its drawer, settled down as soon as its five figures were secure. She had the money, and this seemed right to her, since she was the sibling who most wanted money and had the clearest idea of what to do with it, and now Clem, the only judge who mattered, had certified that it was right. Her father couldn’t be any colder to her than he already was, and when her mother expressed her own unhappiness Becky threw her off balance by inviting her to join her in Europe the following summer, and by promising to spend the remaining money on education. Though not originally her idea, the invitation was a brilliant stroke. Her mother had no great selfish interest in seeing Europe, but family life was like a microcosm of high school. Her mother wasn’t popular, and Becky’s invitation was gracious.

The night after Thanksgiving, she took her frightening letter to the Grove and put it in the pocket of her apron. All nerves, she proceeded to mix up orders, twice bring the wrong salad dressing to the same diner, and get stiffed on her tip by a red-faced father who’d had to track her down to get his check. Why was she even still working at the Grove? She had thirteen thousand dollars. If she could just deliver the letter, she thought, she might quit. But the back room was jammed with friends and fans of Tanner’s home from college, and when the first set ended, a mob of well-wishers blocked her way to him.

From her blind side, as she hesitated on the margins, came the voice of Laura Dobrinsky. “I hear you’re in Crossroads.”

Becky looked down and flashed hot. The pink-spectacled shorty she meant to steal from was putting a match to a cigarette.

“Tanner convinced you, I gather?”

“Well, it is my church.”

Laura shook the match and frowned. “You go to church?”

“You mean, on Sunday?”

“I wasn’t aware that you’re a churchgoer.”

“I guess you don’t know me.”

“Is that a yes?”

Becky didn’t see why it mattered. “I’m saying you don’t know me.”

“Yeah, and maybe I don’t know Crossroads, either. Kind of makes me glad I got out when I did.”

Again Becky flashed hot. “I’m sorry—do you have a problem with me?”

“Only in a general way. I hope it’s a good experience for you.”

Leaving Becky trembling, Laura plunged into the oily ponytails and embroidered denim surrounding Tanner and dispensed some of the hugs she hadn’t felt like giving Clem. Only in a general way? So far, at least, Becky had done nothing more threatening than join Crossroads. It was almost as if the Natural Woman had smelled the letter she was carrying.

Seeing no chance of catching Tanner alone, she went home with the letter. It now had a spot of salad oil on it, but she couldn’t bear to open it again. She also couldn’t bear to keep it for another week. She thought of mailing it, but she didn’t know if Tanner still lived with his parents; she had only the dimmest sense of his life outside the Grove. She was at the point of looking for his name in the phonebook when she recalled the word churchgoer.

In the morning, she asked her mother if she ever saw Tanner Evans at Sunday services. Her mother conveyed, with a look and a pause, that her curiosity about Tanner had been noted. “Not the nine o’clock,” she said. “I think I have seen him on Sunday, though. You can ask your father.”

It was none of her father’s business. On Sunday morning, when Clem and Perry were sleeping and her parents and Judson had left for the early service, she put on a demure full-skirted dress and walked down to First Reformed with the letter in her purse. Except for “midnight” Christmas services (which, like all things Midwestern, happened an hour early), she hadn’t gone to a service since she finished Sunday school. The faces of older parishioners brightened with pleasure and surprise when she crossed the sanctuary’s carpeted parlor. Her mother, in a church dress, and her father, in his vestments, were chatting with some nine o’clockers who’d lingered at the inter-service coffee hour. Judson sat in a corner reading a book, waiting to be taken home. When her mother saw Becky, it was clear from the slyness of her smile that she knew why she was there.

Taking a program from the greeters, she sat down in the last row of pews and waited to see if she’d guessed right about Laura’s peculiar question. Might Laura come here, too? From the way she’d said churchgoer, Becky doubted it. The organist started up, playing something that her aunt could have named the composer of, and the late crowd began to fill the pews. With each new arrival, she turned to see if it was Tanner, until she became self-conscious about turning too often. She smoothed her skirt, folded her program into a small triangle, and fixed her eyes on the huge wood-and-brass cross hanging behind the altar. The longer she stared at it, the odder it seemed. The fact of its being manufactured somewhere, with the same kind of tools that made useful cabinets and furniture. Cross maker: what a weird nine-to-five to have. And paid how? With the money that people unaccountably, in exchange for nothing, dropped into wood-and-brass collection plates, possibly made by the same worker.

The Tanner who entered the sanctuary, by himself, just after eleven, was hardly the Tanner she knew. He was wearing a dopey plaid sport coat and an actual necktie, albeit loose-knit and lumpily knotted. He slipped into the pew across the aisle from her, and she returned her eyes to the altar, where her father and Reverend Haefle were entering through a side door, but her skin knew precisely when Tanner turned and saw her; she felt it go hot. The music stopped, and Tanner, half standing, crossed the aisle and sat down by her.

“What are you doing here?” he whispered.

She shook her head to shush him.

“Heavenly Father,” her father prayerfully intoned from the pulpit; and that was all she heard before her ears went deaf. He was a tall and handsome man, but to Becky the black robe he was wearing and the devout sincerity of his delivery more than negated any standing he had as a man in the world. She sat frozen but squirmed inside, counting the seconds until he shut up. It came to her now, with a clarity brought by her return after long absence, how much she must have always hated being a minister’s daughter. The fathers of her friends designed buildings, cured illness, prosecuted criminals. Her father was like a cross maker, only worse. His earnest faith and sanctity were an odor that had forever threatened to adhere to her, like the smell of Chesterfields, only worse, because it couldn’t be washed off.

But then, when the congregation rose to sing the Gloria Patri and Tanner, at her side, in his ridiculous sport coat, sang forth in a clear, strong voice, unlike her own self-conscious murmur, and when she tried raising her own voice accordingly, As it was in the Beginning, is now and ever shall be, she caught a strange flashing glimpse of a desire, buried somewhere inside her, to belong and to believe in something. She wondered if the desire might always have been there; if it had only been her father, the shame of him, that repelled her from pursuing it. If maybe the fact of the brass cross, its manufacture, wasn’t so dumb. Maybe it was more like amazing that two thousand years after Jesus’s crucifixion people were still filling collection plates to make crosses in his honor.

In a further flash, she saw that Laura did not like Tanner’s churchgoing; that it might be a fault line between them; that she, Becky, if she opened herself to the possibility of belief, might gain an unforeseen advantage; and that it therefore might be wiser, after all, not to put her letter in Tanner’s hand now, since this would suggest that delivering it was the only reason she’d come to church, but instead to keep coming on Sunday mornings.

They shared a hymnal for the singing of “For the Beauty of the Earth,” Becky’s hair touching Tanner’s shoulder as she leaned in, and then Reverend Haefle gave the sermon. During the one year she’d been obliged to attend entire services, Becky had sat still for her father’s sermons, for fear of making other congregants restless with her restlessness, which would have embarrassed her as a Hildebrandt, but Dwight Haefle’s interminable slabs of lyrical abstraction had defeated her. Listening to him now, hoping greater age might bring greater understanding, she followed him only as far as Reinhold Niebuhr before losing herself in admiration of Tanner’s hands. She had to will herself not to touch them. In his jacket and necktie, he looked like a boy dressed up for church by his mother. Haefle had moved on to the importance of humility, not Becky’s favorite subject, though one she would need to work on if she got more serious about religion, and it occurred to her that, for Tanner, leaving his fringed jacket and his Frye boots at home was exactly what Haefle was talking about. All but one hour a week, Tanner’s coolness was beyond question, but he humbled himself for church, and this struck her as extremely dear.

Rising with him to recite the Lord’s Prayer, she might already have been his girlfriend, not to say his wife of many years, and the trespass for which she asked their Father’s forgiveness her theft of him from Laura.

“You’re here,” he said, when the service was over.

“Yeah, everything’s changing. I’m trying new things.”

He was looking at her as if he couldn’t figure her out. This was good.

“I owe you a big debt of gratitude,” she said. “For making me try Crossroads. I’m learning to be more open with my feelings. And—” She faltered, her face hot. He kept looking at her. “Will you be here next Sunday?”

“It’s what I do.”

She nodded, too vigorously, and stood up. “Okay, I’ll see you then.”

On her way out through the parlor, she paused to be noticed by her father, hoping to take some free credit for having come to a service, but he was engaged with Kitty Reynolds and a petite blond woman whom Becky didn’t recognize. Her father was smiling, and the blond woman was apparently a magnet for his eyes. When they flicked up to Becky, his smile faded. When he returned them to the woman, it came back to life.

The message was unmistakable. He’d written her off and moved on. As she left the church, the word asshole popped into her head. Clem had uttered it, blasphemously, but it was new to her. Her growing interest in First Reformed, which ought to have pleased her father, was clearly of less consequence to him than his grudge against Rick Ambrose. And he a Christian minister.

“Yes Tanner was there,” she announced to her mother when she got home, before her mother could annoy her by asking.

“That’s nice,” her mother said. “He’s spoiling Rick Ambrose’s otherwise perfect record of turning young people off church services.”

Becky declined the bait. “I’m sure Tanner would be thrilled to know he has your approval.”

“I imagine he’d rather have yours,” her mother said. “As I’m gathering he does.”

“Not talking about it,” Becky said, leaving the room.

A few days later, she was felled by a cold so bad that she had to call in sick at the Grove and couldn’t go to church on Sunday. As soon as she recovered, she took the new step of hanging out at First Reformed after school, joining the girls outside Ambrose’s office, who kindly explained the stories behind their Crossroads gossip, helping her understand what was funny and what was appalling. When she tired of being the newcomer, she wandered down to the function hall and found a team of three boys, led by her own brother, silk-screening posters for the Christmas concert. In theory, she should have lent a hand, because she needed to start accumulating “hours” toward the Arizona trip—to be eligible for Arizona, you had to perform at least forty hours of service or paid work for the group—but Perry was the one thing about Crossroads she didn’t like. Perry was the brother who was brilliant at everything, including art (the poster design bore the mark of his hand), but lately the mere sight of him had made her scalp tighten and prickle, as if she were a dog in the presence of the occult; as if she shared a house with a psychopath whose brilliance was undergirded by all manner of dark doings. She knew about some of those doings but not, she suspected, all of them. He looked up from the silk screen, red-handed with Christmas ink, and smirked at her. She turned and fled.

When she finally gained admittance to Ambrose’s office and he asked her how things were at home, she found herself saying that she was worried about her mother. Even two weeks ago, she would have considered it treasonous to pass family information to her father’s enemy. Now she positively relished it.

“My mom keeps up a good front,” she said. “But underneath I get the sense she’s falling apart, and meanwhile Clem is convinced that my dad is going to leave her. It could just be an idea in Clem’s head, but he really harps on it.”

“Clem is smart,” Ambrose said.

“I know. I love him so much. But I’m worried about my mom. She’s so dependent on my dad, and the only time she ever stands up to him is when he criticizes Perry. She thinks Perry is a genius. Which, I mean, he is sort of a genius. But he does all this bad shit that she doesn’t have a clue about.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“She doesn’t know anything from me, that’s for sure.”

“You protect him.”

“It’s not him I’m protecting. I feel bad for her—she’s having a hard enough time already. But I also don’t want Perry to hurt her.”

“Do you think we can help him?”

“Crossroads? I think he only joined because his friends were in it, and then suddenly he’s like Mr. Gung Ho. I don’t know—maybe that’s good?”

Ambrose waited, his dark eyes on her.

“It’s just,” she said, “some part of me doesn’t believe it.”

“Me neither,” Ambrose said. “The minute he walked in the door, I said to myself, ‘That kid is trouble.’”

Becky felt breathless. She couldn’t believe Ambrose trusted her enough to say that. For a disorienting moment, her heart confused him with Tanner. His honesty with her was like an eighty-proof version of Tanner’s gentler brew. There was no wedding ring on his dark-haired hand, but she’d heard he had a girlfriend at the seminary where he was nominally still a student. It was a little like hearing that Jesus had a girlfriend.

A burst of female laughter outside his door reminded her that she was one of many. As if to preempt a rejection, to save her dignity, she excused herself hastily and ran from the church, reorienting her heart.

The following Sunday, after the service ended, she and Tanner sat in the rearmost pew and talked for more than an hour. When someone turned off the sanctuary lights, and the last distant voices died away, they stayed on in the more solemn light of the stained-glass windows. Becky was relieved that she did not, after all, need to do the Crossroads thing of telling Tanner she wanted to get to know him better.

An exchange of past impressions yielded the interesting fact that Becky, even as a sophomore in high school, had seemed to Tanner impossibly unapproachable. When she countered that, no, he had been that person, he laughed and denied it, as befit his unconceited nature, but she could tell that he was pleased. While they skated around on the subject of Crossroads and the friends of Tanner’s who now served as advisers in the group, her mind worked furiously below the surface. It ought to have followed logically, even irresistibly, that two such singularly unapproachable-seeming people were meant to be together. But what if being together only meant being friends?

She saw that she had no choice but to take a risk. In a studiously offhand tone, she asked Tanner why Laura didn’t come to church with him.

“She was raised Catholic,” he said, with a shrug. “She hates institutional religion.”

Becky waited.

“Laura’s way more radical than me. She was ready to split for San Francisco as soon as we finished high school. Sleep in the van, be part of the scene.”

“Why didn’t you?” Becky said, barely breathing.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m not that into the scene—going back to someone’s house and staying up all night. That’s okay once a week, or if you’re into drugs, but I’d rather be sleeping and getting up early to practice. I’ve still got so far to go as a musician.”

“You already sound amazing.”

He looked at her gratefully. “You’re not just saying that?”

“No! I love listening to you.”

She watched him take this in. It seemed to go down well. He squared his shoulders and said, “I want to cut a demo album. That’s my whole focus right now. Twelve songs good enough to record before I’m twenty-one. I was afraid, if we hit the road, I’d lose sight of that.”

“I understand that.”

“Really? I’m not sure Laura does. She’s so gifted, but she doesn’t care about being a professional. If it were up to me, we’d be doing three or four gigs a week. Blues, jazz, Top Forty, whatever. Putting in the hours, developing an audience. The only thing bar owners care about is making money, and Laura hates that. If somebody asked her to do Peggy Lee, she’d just laugh in their face. But me…”

“You’re more ambitious,” Becky suggested.

“Maybe. Laura’s got a lot going on, she’s working the crisis hotline, she’s got her women’s group. For me, it’s enough to work on my music and try to feel closer to God. You know, I really like going to church. I like seeing you here.”

“I like seeing you, too.”

“Truly? I was starting to worry that you didn’t.”

She looked into his eyes, wordlessly telling him he had nothing to fear. God only knew what might have happened if they hadn’t heard footsteps in the vestry, the reverberant bang of metal. Dwight Haefle, no longer in his robe, had popped the release on one of the sanctuary doors. “You don’t have to leave,” he told them. “The doors open from the inside.”

But Tanner was already on his feet, and Becky stood up, too. Their moment had been too fragile to be reassembled now. As they left the sanctuary, he told her how Danny Dickman and Toby Isner and Topper Morgan had smoked grass and drunk whiskey in the sanctuary on the night before the third Arizona trip, and how Ambrose, in the church parking lot, beside the idling and fully loaded trip buses, had led the group in reaming out the miscreants and debating whether they should be barred from the trip. The confrontation had lasted two hours. Topper Morgan had cried so violently he burst a blood vessel in his eye. And the church had started locking the sanctuary doors.

Becky went home frustrated by her failure to get a clear statement on Tanner and Laura. She needed to be more than just his experiment. She was, admittedly, inexperienced in love, but her pride and her ethics and her basic sense of tidiness insisted that, before she consented to be added, Laura be explicitly subtracted. The only useful nugget she’d gleaned in this regard was that Tanner still lived with his parents. Since he wasn’t shacked up with Laura, there was no decisive action he could take. But this made a formal renunciation all the more necessary. She considered this requirement absolute, and so it was with a confusing sense of self-betrayal, of observing a person she morally disapproved of and didn’t understand but nevertheless was, that she let Tanner kiss her before he’d satisfied it.

At the Grove, five nights after their seemingly crucial conversation in the sanctuary, she’d seen Laura Dobrinsky standing on tiptoes to press her face to Tanner’s, and him letting himself be nuzzled, a contented smile on his face. Becky had felt stabbed in the gut. She’d fled to a bathroom stall and shed her first tears on account of a man. In her ensuing misery, she’d skipped both Sunday service and Crossroads, which she felt had failed to warn her that the risk in risk-taking was stabbing pain, and dragged herself through the last days of school before vacation.

And then, last night, she’d subbed at the Grove. It wasn’t her usual night. When Tanner walked into the restaurant, alone, it shouldn’t have been with the expectation of finding her there. Assuming it was just wretched luck, she asked a veteran waitress, Maria, to take his table. She could feel him looking at her, but she didn’t look at him, not once, until the last of the other diners were leaving. He was slouched low, the picture of composure, an emptied dessert plate on his table. He waved her over.

“What,” she said.

“Are you okay? I looked for you in church on Sunday.”

“I didn’t go. I’m not sure I’m into it anymore.”

A taste from childhood was in her throat, a horrible self-spiting taste that she couldn’t help wanting more of.

“Becky,” he said. “Did I do something? You seem pissed off with me.”

“Nope. Just tired.”

“I called your house. Your mom said you were here.”

There was no law against just walking away. She walked away.

“Hey, come on,” Tanner said, jumping up to pursue her. “I came here to see you. I thought we were friends. If you’re pissed off with me, you could at least tell me why.”

Maria was watching them from the table she was wiping down. Becky continued on into the kitchen, but Tanner wasn’t afraid of the kitchen. She turned on her heel.

“Figure it out,” she said bitterly.

She knew her worth. He was required to say that he was done with the Natural Woman. Nothing less would do.

“Whatever it is,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you for being sorry.”

“Becky—”

“What.”

“I really like you.”

It wasn’t enough. She picked up a rag and returned to the dining room to wipe down tables. It wasn’t enough, and then she heard how hard he slammed the front door behind him. She heard the hurt of his having called her house and come looking for her, only to be treated so meanly, and suddenly the person she was but didn’t understand was running out into the night. Tanner was slumped against the side of his Volkswagen bus, his head bowed. At the sound of her feet, as they outran her better judgment, he looked up. She ran straight into his arms. A breeze from the south had risen, more springlike than autumnal. The hands she’d dreamed of were on her head, in her hair. And then, just like that, in the most unplanned and unconsidered way, it had happened.

She was awakened by the telephone. She’d fallen asleep on her back, crossways on her bed, and opened her eyes to a gray sky framed by her window and broken by black branches. Her mother was tapping on her door.

“Becky? It’s Jeannie Cross.”

She went to the phone in her parents’ bedroom and waited for her mother to hang up downstairs. Jeannie was calling about a party that night at the Carduccis’. Becky appreciated that Jeannie was still including her, and she might have liked to accept the invitation for friendship’s sake. But she was going to the concert.

“There’s a concert?”

“Crossroads,” Becky said.

A silence.

“I see,” Jeannie said.

“You know what, though? I’m going with Tanner.”

“Tanner Evans?”

“Yeah, he’s the headliner, and he’s taking me.”

“Well, well, well.”

Becky was tempted to say more, but she might already have said too much. Tanner didn’t quite know yet that he was taking her to the concert. In her mind, their very long kiss had been definitive, but much had been left unspoken, and she wouldn’t feel secure until the world had seen her walk into First Reformed on his arm. She asked Jeannie if she wanted to go shopping with her. It was almost funny how eagerly Jeannie said yes, after all these weeks of distance. But Jeannie wasn’t free until three thirty.

“Shoot,” Becky said. “I’m meeting Tanner at four.”

“Wow, Bex. Too busy with a guy.”

“I know,” she said happily. “It’s weird.”

“Tomorrow, though? I’m not doing anything all day.”

Becky took a long shower and performed delicate work at the bathroom mirror, applying makeup that was enhancing without, she hoped, being noticeable. Perry banged rudely on the locked door, offered some commentary which she ignored, and went away. Dressing, too, she labored to strike a balance between elegance and Crossroads. She had to look good for at least the next ten hours, beginning especially at four o’clock. By the time she went down to the kitchen, her mother was bundling herself into a frightful old coat.