Crossroads

“Are you the landlord?”

“Why, yes, I am. Please come in.”

In the living room were comfortably weary chairs, framed soft-focus head shots of young actresses or models, also a framed poster for King Kong. A bottle of red wine and a stemmed glass of it stood on a coffee table. “Let me get you a glass,” the man said, disappearing.

Farther back in the house, water was splashing in a bathtub, skin squeaking resonantly on porcelain. The white-bearded man returned with a glass, sat down, and filled it. He seemed very happy to see Marion.

“I just need to find Isabelle,” she said.

“I understand. But you’re shaking like a leaf.”

This was undeniable, and the wine looked good to her. She sat down and drank some. It was much weaker than the whiskey she’d drunk with Bradley. By the time she’d explained how she knew Isabelle and had come to the red house, her glass was empty. When the man moved to refill it, she didn’t stop him. The wine helped her rise with the upwellings of her fear, like a buoy on deep ocean.

“I’m afraid I don’t actually know where Isabelle is at present,” the man said, “with respect to her street address and so forth. But I know one girl who might.”

“That would be good,” Marion said, drinking.

“You’re a very comely young woman,” he added for no obvious reason.

Marion reddened. The wine was both weak and not so weak. She heard a door open, water draining from a tub, the soft stepping of bare feet, a door closing.

“So the girl,” she said. “The person who knows where she lives.”

“Oh, dear, you look terrified,” the man said. “Are you frightened? Marion? Why are you so frightened?”

“I just want to find Isabelle.”

“Of course,” he said. “I can help you with that.”

There was a kindly light in his eyes, a sort of gentle mirth.

“I’m a helpful person,” he said. “You wouldn’t be the first girl to come here in trouble. Is that what it is? Are you looking for Isabelle because you’re in some kind of trouble?”

She couldn’t answer.

“Marion? You can tell me. Are you in trouble?”

Her trouble was too large to be spoken. To emerge from her in words, it needed to be broken into smaller pieces and arranged in a coherent sequence, and even if she’d been capable of the breaking and the arranging she would have been telling a total stranger that she was carrying a married man’s child. As the stranger waited for her to answer, she noticed a different, less kindly sort of light in his eyes. She noticed that his shirt was untucked and that he had quite a potbelly. She must have been mistaken about Isabelle’s romantic interest in her landlord.

“It’s man trouble, isn’t it,” he said.

She couldn’t breathe, and she had no intention of answering, not even with a nod.

“I see,” he said. “And is your man still in the picture?”

Had she nodded? Apparently she had. She went ahead and shook her head.

“I’m very sorry,” the man said.

“But the girl you mentioned. The one who knows where Isabelle is.”

“Would you like me to telephone her?”

“Yes. Please.”

He left the room. Marion’s glass was empty, as was the bottle. While she waited, a series of small noises culminated in a clicking of heels, a woman entering the room. She stopped when she saw Marion. She was dressed in a narrow skirt and a matching jacket with padded shoulders. Her mouth, crimson-lipsticked, had a hard set to it. “You here about the room?”

“No,” Marion said.

“Good for you.”

The woman turned and left the house. The man returned with a corkscrew and a second bottle of wine. Marion waited in suspense while he opened it.

“No luck,” he said, pouring. “Jane hasn’t seen her since before Thanksgiving. She thinks she might have gone back to Santa Rosa. Apparently she’d talked about doing that.”

Isabelle’s returning to Santa Rosa seemed strange to Marion, but everything seemed strange to her. She wished she hadn’t already spent the travel money Roy Collins had wired her. Imagining Isabelle in Santa Rosa made her homesick for the place.

“We’ll have to think of something else for you,” the man said.

“I think I’ll go to Santa Rosa.”

“Yes, that would be one plan. Although, of course, we’re not sure that Isabelle is actually there. She could have gone anywhere. She could still be right here. All Jane said was that she hadn’t seen her in a while.”

“But it sounds like … I’ll bet she went home to Santa Rosa.”

“Mm.”

He took a sip of wine, possibly to hide a smile. Why would he be smiling? Marion stood up and thanked him for making the call.

“Sit down, dear,” he said. “You don’t want to go back to Santa Rosa. It’s a Podunk town—people talk. You’re much better off in the big city. We can arrange things here that would be difficult, if not impossible, in Santa Rosa. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She did understand. Bradley had once asked her exactly the same question, and she was fast. Sitting down again, accelerated by the wine in her, she landed unexpectedly and tilted sideways.

“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” the man said. “I’ve had this house for fifteen years, and there’s nothing I haven’t seen. So why don’t we speak frankly, you and I.”

The thing was growing in her, and it was Bradley’s. This was the fact she couldn’t get around. She didn’t want to have the thing inside her. It reminded her of the boy who’d answered the door at his house, the horror of Bradley having children, the horror of his marriage, the horror of what she’d done to herself.

“Perhaps you’ve missed a monthly,” the man said. “Perhaps more than one?”

She affirmed it with a whimper.

“How many?” he said. “Surely not more than two—you’re skinnier than a post.”

She shook her head.

“I like a skinny pretty little girl,” he commented in a throatier way. “And you are definitely that.”

She could sooner have recited the Koran than raise her eyes to Isabelle’s former landlord. Except for the ticking of a clock on the mantel, the house was silent. She was certain that no one but the two of them was in it.

“Luckily for you, I can help you,” he said. “I happen to know just the man—he’s very good. Tip-top hygiene. Nice office. Complete discretion.”

She was breathing either far too fast or not at all. The man’s words came from a distance and receded further as he spoke them. “Do you have a hundred fifty dollars? That would include the twenty-five for me. And, let’s see, today is Thursday, isn’t it. We could have you good as gold again by Saturday night.”

She heard wine being poured.

“Do you have a hundred fifty dollars?” he said.

The question came through clearly. She indicated that she didn’t.

“How much money do you have?” He waited for a response and got none. “Marion, do you have any money at all?”

The answer must have been obvious. She heard him leave the room and return, felt the heat of him as he crouched by her. “I know how frightened you are,” he said. “You’re terribly frightened. Understandably frightened. You’ll feel better if you take these.”

He opened one of her clenched hands and pressed two tablets into it.

“It’s only Seconal. It’ll help you sleep.”

She felt the heat of his hand on her knee.

“I imagine you’re wondering if I can really solve your problem. I suppose I could give you references, but the other girls I’ve helped may be reluctant to talk about it. The way I see it, you’ll just have to trust me. I’ve run an honest business here for fifteen years. I never take anything I haven’t paid for, and I never give a girl anything she hasn’t paid for. That’s the rule in this house. Everything here is quid pro quo.”

By bodily reflex, she removed the hand that was creeping up her leg. As soon as she let it go, he put it back.

“I’m going to Palm Springs for the holidays,” he said. “If you’ll stay with me until then, we’ll have you good as gold by Christmas. That is a solemn promise. A mere eleven days. If I may say so, the terms are rather advantageous to you. Luckily for you, you’re just my kind of girlie. Very, very much my kind of girlie.”

Her feral intelligence understood perfectly well what he was proposing. To agree to it, all she had to do was not stand up and leave. She raised her hand and put the two pills in her mouth. Her arms felt too short to reach for her glass, so she chewed them.

Her mental illness, compounded by a Seconal fog, spared her from remembering much from her eleven days in the red house. She did remember listening for footsteps outside her door, the landlord’s and the other tenant’s, the latter even more dreadful than the former. She thought she would die if the other woman’s gaze so much as brushed her, she cowered at the clatter of high heels in the hallway, she let the landlord bring food to her room. Disgusting things were visited on her, but they rarely seemed to last long. As long as she stayed in the house, she remained entirely a victim and would have had nothing to confess to her priest in Arizona—in fact, she might have had grounds for going to the police. The Satanic thing about the landlord was that he’d struck a deal with her. Satan was a stickler when it came to contracts, and by following through with his side of the bargain, punctiliously delivering her to the doctor and paying for the abortion, he deprived her of her victimhood. By keeping his word, he made her submission to his lechery one half of a transaction, a quid pro quo, in which she was complicit. She couldn’t claim ignorance or innocence. She’d knowingly committed adultery with Bradley Grant, and then she’d knowingly sold herself to pay for the murder of her baby.

Satan was gone, vanished seemingly for good, when she emerged from the scene of the crime, a few blocks from Lerner Motors. It was late in the afternoon of December 24. The leading edge of a storm system had crept across the city sky, scalloping it with cloud. The last Seconal she’d swallowed, in the morning, was wearing off. She was light-headed, and the pain in her belly, though not severe yet, felt evil in its novelty. In place of her specific dread, now put to rest, a more general dread was creeping across her sky-wide mind. She still had six dollars and change in her purse, but she couldn’t bring herself to board a streetcar. Weaving a little, pausing to rest against the sides of buildings, she made her way toward her apartment.

It wasn’t more than twenty blocks away, but traversing that distance finished her off, because she couldn’t get away from him. His elfin face loomed up in window after window. Twinkling-eyed. White-bearded. Dressed in a bright red suit with ermine trim. Posters and greeting cards and cookie tins and life-size manikins all advertised his pawing, wine-breathed malice. She needed more Seconals to get away from him. He was watching her from every direction. His penis was short and fat and tan, like a miniature him. He stood potbellied on a corner, in a red suit, and rang a bell beside a red can into which passersby dropped money. Everywhere, red. She couldn’t get away from red. It was the color of his house. It was how he signaled that wherever she turned he was already there. Red bows, red ribbons. Red-striped candy canes. Shiny stars and crescent moons of metallic red cardboard. The red house. The red car. The red in the sink at her old rooming house. The red wagon. The red wagon. The red wagon. The red wagon. Evil had pursued her all her life, and now the world was exploding with the color of it, and nowhere was there refuge. It found her in her bathroom, the bathroom of her apartment. Red was inside her, too, and it was coming out. She was nothing but a thin-skinned bladder bursting-full of red. Her hands were red, her things were red, there was red on the floor, red on the walls she wiped her hands on. Red annihilated her mind. Merry Christmas.

“So here’s a memory,” she said. “It’s the best memory I have of Christmas. Do you want to hear it?”

“I would,” Sophie Serafimides said. “If you’re sure you’re done punishing me.”

Marion opened her eyes. Out on the rail tracks, snow was falling heavily. The tracks already had a thick coconut frosting.

“You needed punishing,” she said.

Sophie didn’t smile. “Tell me your memory.”

“It was 1946, in Arizona. Russ and I had been together for the better part of a year—we were already a couple in every way except marriage. He still had his alternative service to finish, even though the war was over, but things had gotten very lax at the camp. He could get some days off almost whenever he wanted, and that was nice for me. I’d invited him to Christmas at my uncle Jimmy’s, but he said he had a better idea. There was an old Willys truck that the camp director was willing to let him borrow, and Russ wanted to see more of the Southwest. Jimmy gave us some money as a Christmas present, and off we went. It was a huge deal for Russ, because his parents didn’t know about me, and everywhere we went we had to pretend that we were married. It was a huge act of defiance for him, and I was in love with him. It was heaven to have him all to myself, driving wherever we felt like going. We spent a day in Santa Fe, and then we were in Las Vegas—Las Vegas, New Mexico—when the snow came. Do you know Las Vegas?”

“I don’t.”

“It’s an old, old Spanish colonial town up by the Sangre de Cristos. The Willys had bad tires and we got stuck there by the snow. There was only one hotel where people like us could have stayed, and that’s where we had our Christmas. Our room was probably terrible, but we had each other, so I thought it was wonderful. The hotel was on the old town square, with a dining room on the ground floor, and that’s where we ate on Christmas Eve. To be there with Russ felt like a reward beyond anything I deserved. There was frost around the edges of the windows, and actual cowboys—real cowboys in long coats were coming in to have their dinner. There was also a little family, maybe stuck by the snow like us, an Anglo family with two little girls. And it was like those little girls were the family we were going to have. Like we were looking at ourselves in the future, and then the most amazing thing happened. Outside on the square, there was a big truck that somebody had rigged up to look like Santa’s sleigh. There were two reindeer sticking out in front of it, above the hood, and they’d rigged up lights to make it look like they were flying. They’d also lit up the sleigh on the roof of the cab. From a distance, you couldn’t see the truck. All you could see was the reindeer and the sleigh and a cowboy in a Santa suit waving his hand while the truck went around and around in the snow. And—I, uh.”

Marion faltered, avoiding Sophie’s eyes.

“I never liked Santa Claus. I thought he was scary and creepy. I had a problem with him. But the look on those two little girls’ faces, when they caught sight of the reindeer and the sleigh—I don’t think I’ll ever see more pure wonder and joy. The girls’ eyes were just huge. One of them said, ‘Oh! Oh!’ And they ran to the window and looked out, and they were saying, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ It was just pure joy and credulity. Their utter belief in what they were seeing was just the most beautiful thing. And all the … all the … I’m sorry, but all the shit I’d been through in California, it just got washed away. It was like I was being reborn, just by watching those girls and their reaction.”

“That does sound beautiful.”

“But what does this have to do with anything?”

The dumpling inclined her head suggestively.

“Russ didn’t see it the way I did,” Marion said. “He didn’t get it at all. And I couldn’t tell him what it meant to me, because I couldn’t tell him what I’d been through.”

“It’s never too late to tell him.”

“No, it’s definitely too late. That Christmas Eve would have been the time to do it. ‘I had an affair with a married man, I tried to break up his marriage by telling his wife, and I got so crazy they had to lock me up on Christmas morning.’ There was no way that story was going to fly, not with Russ.”

“You were institutionalized on Christmas?”

“Had I not mentioned that?”

“You hadn’t.”

“Well, there you go. That’s how the leopard got his spots.”

“Meaning?”

“Now you know why I hate Christmas. We can call it a breakthrough, and I can go home and eat some more sugar cookies. Tra-la-la, tra-la-la. I can live happily ever after.”

Sophie frowned.

“We had a horrible fight that night,” Marion said. “Russ and I, in New Mexico. It was our first real fight, and I promised myself we’d never have another one. No matter what it took, I wasn’t going to raise my voice with him again. I would love him and support him and keep my mouth shut. Because he saw something very different when he looked at those two girls. He said he was disgusted by the parents—that they were encouraging their children to worship a false idol. That they were lying to their kids and neglecting the true meaning of Christmas, which had nothing to do with Santa Claus. And I went out of my mind again. I felt like I’d experienced a kind of magical rebirth—something truly Christian, by the way, which was to forgive, oh, not forgive, but to get over … well.”

She felt herself going red. The dumpling’s eyes were on her.

“It was … I’m not explaining it right. Santa was … Santa wasn’t … I could see that it was only an illusion. It was just some cowboy in a Santa suit, not … And somehow that, plus the girls—I was sharing in someone else’s joy and wonder. I knew it was only an illusion, but because it was only an illusion I could be an innocent little girl again myself. And that mattered so much to me, and Russ didn’t get it. I was screaming at him, just out of control. I hated him, and I could see I was scaring the daylights out of him, and I said to myself, nope, never going to do that again, ever. And you know what? I never did. Tomorrow will be exactly twenty-five years that I’ve been keeping my mouth shut.”

The dumpling seemed preoccupied. She glanced over her shoulder at the falling snow. “I’m sorry if this is a difficult question,” she said. “But I feel I have to ask again. Is there something important you’re not telling me?”

A coldness surged in Marion. “What kind of thing.”

“I’m not quite sure. There was just—something in your tone of voice. I’ve thought I might have heard it once or twice before, and just now I heard it again, very clearly. I’m not saying I’m a world-class practitioner. And, by the way, in case you didn’t know, I don’t believe in Just So stories. I don’t believe there’s a single key that unlocks everything. But when I’ve heard that particular tone of voice in the past, it often turns out that the patient has experienced a particular kind of trauma.”

The dumpling was relentless.

“My father killed himself,” Marion said. “My mother didn’t love me. I lost my mind. Is that not enough?”

“No, that’s a lot,” Sophie said. “And I definitely hear that in your voice, too. But that’s the funny you. That’s the you who survived a rotten childhood and the aftermath of that and made adjustments, made a good life for yourself, found a way to cope with the turmoil in your head. That’s the survivor in you. What I was hearing was something else, and I’m not saying I’m right. I’m just asking.”

Marion looked at her watch. She was two minutes past the end of their second “hour.” As if the little office were the living room of a certain red bungalow, she stood up hastily and took her coat off the hook. She jammed one arm and then the other into its sleeves. She still had time to run home, raid her hosiery drawer, and buy something nicer for Perry. For twenty-five years, she’d believed that her life with Russ was the blessing she’d received from a forgiving God, a blessing she’d earned by her years of Catholic prayer and penance, a life she continued to earn daily by suppressing the badness in her and keeping her mouth shut. It was true that she’d lately hated Russ at least as much as she still loved him; there was little reason to keep pretending for his sake. But she loved Perry more than ever. His suffering, for which her side of the family was responsible, was the punishment that God had waited three decades to inflict on her.

“You don’t have to leave on my account,” the dumpling said from behind her. “Costa and I are here until five.”

Marion faced the door, her hand on the knob. The office was godless, and she knew what God expected of her. She needed to devote herself to Perry and begin atoning for her sins. And yet to leave the office was to relinquish all hope of getting better.

“Maybe you should tell me about Santa,” Sophie said.

“Oh, there’s Perry,” Frances Cottrell said, waving. “Speak of the devil.”

Seeing the pale yellow locks of his son at the corner of Maple Avenue, not twenty seconds after he and Frances had made a clean getaway from First Reformed, Russ was tempted to drive through the stop sign, but the township police station was right across the street. He braked and made himself turn and look where Frances was waving, so as not to seem guilty. Perry was standing on the sidewalk, all-seeing, a plastic bag in his hand. Russ held his gaze for a moment and stepped hard on the gas.

Speak of the devil?

“He’s an impressive kid,” Frances said. “I think Larry’s got a little crush on him.”

Beyond Maple, the speed limit on Pirsig Avenue could safely be broken. Luckier snowflakes were blindly evading the Fury while others met their end on the windshield. If Perry had been standing anywhere but at the stop sign, he might not have seen that Russ’s only passenger was Frances. Now Russ could only hope that Perry would forget; and there was little chance of that.

“So here’s an awkward question,” Frances said.

Russ eased up on the gas. “Mm?”

“Since I have you all to myself today, this is kind of like private counseling, right? Even though we’re not in your office? It’s still confidential?”

“Absolutely,” Russ said.

Frances had been bouncing and repositioning her limbs ever since she got in the car. Her left foot, on the bench seat, was currently no more than an inch from his leg. “I’m wondering,” she said, “how old you think your kids should be before they try marijuana.”

“My kids?”

“Yes, or any kids. How young is too young?”

“Well, marijuana is illegal. I don’t think any parent wants to see his children breaking laws.”

Frances laughed. “Are you really that square?”

The coat he was wearing, the coat she’d admired, wasn’t the coat of a square. The blues 78s he’d brought for her and left in his office weren’t the records of a square. The thoughts he had about her weren’t a square’s thoughts.

“I’m not against breaking the law,” he said. “Gandhi broke the law, Daniel Ellsberg broke the law. I don’t think rules are sacred. I just don’t see that breaking drug laws serves any meaningful purpose.”

“Wow. Okay.”

He could hear that she was smiling, but the dichotomy of square and hip, the unfairness of it, was offensive to him.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a square,” she said. “I think it’s cute. But I gather you’ve never tried pot yourself?”

“Ah, no. Have you?”

“Not—yet.”

There was a twinkle in her voice. He took his eyes off the road and saw that she was watching him for a reaction. She seemed very activated, very happy with herself; seemed ready to play. He, too, had come to play, but his game wasn’t flirting. He had no faith in his skills there.

“Your question,” he said. “Were you asking about your son?”

“Yes, partly. But also partly about yours.”

“My son? You mean Perry?”

“Yes.”

His son? Using drugs? Well, of course. It made such perfect sense, Russ couldn’t believe he hadn’t suspected it before. God damn Marion.

“Can I tell you some things?” Frances said. “Since we’re having a confidential session?”

The white flurry on the road ahead of them was thick and disorienting. He kept his eyes on it, but he could feel her leaning toward him in her hunting cap.

“Do you remember,” she said, “when I came to see you last summer?”

“I do. I remember it very well.”

“So, I was in a bad place, but I wasn’t very honest with you. Actually, I wasn’t even a little bit honest. You were so nice about Bobby, about losing a husband, but that wasn’t really why I was there. I was upset because I’d just found out that the man I’d been seeing was also seeing someone else.”

The brittle rubber of the Fury’s wipers shuddered on the windshield. Russ wanted to ask a clarifying question, to confirm that seeing meant what it seemed to, but he didn’t trust his voice. A day that had begun well was now conclusively terrible. As stupid as he’d been about Perry, he’d been even stupider about Frances. It had never occurred to him that another man might already have swooped in on her. Last summer, she’d been widowed for barely a year.

She leaned back into her corner of the front seat. “It was one of those things that seemed too good to be true because it was. One of my old girlfriends set us up on a date, and it just immediately felt right—we clicked right away. Philip’s a surgeon, and he’d been in the service. He’d served on one of the same bases Bobby had, so we had that in common, and heart surgery is like the medical equivalent of being a fighter pilot—not for the faint of heart. Philip’s got a gorgeous apartment in one of the high-rises on the lake, just north of the Loop, with an incredible view. As soon as I saw it, I thought, ‘Okay, sign me up!’ In hindsight, it was way too early for me to be thinking that way, but I just wanted everything to be right again. I wanted there to be four of us, not three.”

Russ tried to imagine the scenario in which Frances had been in the heart surgeon’s apartment and not had intimate relations with him.

“I wanted Larry and Amy to meet him,” she said. “I thought we could all have lunch and go to the Field Museum. I kept pushing until finally one night he tells me, in the spirit of full disclosure, that there’s something I should know. Apparently, the entire time I’ve known him, he’s been seeing someone else. A nurse, of course. Younger than me, of course. So that’s where my head was when I came to see you. I really was missing Bobby, but not for the right reasons. I’d kind of had my heart broken.”

The black exhaust of a dump truck in front of Russ was soiling the snow before it even reached the ground. “I see,” he said.

“But here’s something else I didn’t tell you. Things hadn’t actually been so wonderful with me and Bobby. I was only twenty-one when we got married. He was my brother’s best friend, he was piloting planes that broke the sound barrier, he was awesomely good-looking, and I was the girl who got to marry him. He was gone a lot, but I didn’t mind that—I was an officer’s wife, which had its privileges. He was stationed at Edwards when the kids were born, and I would have followed him anywhere—it wasn’t me who made him quit the air force. But he wanted the kids to grow up in one place, in one school district, and the pay was a lot better with General Dynamics. And then as soon as we were there in Texas he decided he’d made a mistake. He missed the military, and I could tell he blamed me, even though it wasn’t my fault. Year after year, I watched him get more angry. Everyone knew he was a stud, and it wasn’t like I was giving him an argument, but he kept making me pass these loyalty tests. If I laughed too hard at something a neighbor said, it meant I was flirting with him, and Bobby wouldn’t let it go until I admitted that the neighbor was less of a man than he was. If I watched the news and made some comment about the war not going well, he’d start interrogating me. Didn’t I agree that America was the most powerful country on earth? With the best economic system? Weren’t we morally obliged to keep the Communists from expanding their blah-blah-blah? He honestly believed the reason so many troops were getting killed was that the protesters at home were undermining their morale. I was getting boys killed, by having doubts about the war. And Larry, he wanted to be an astronaut, but he wasn’t exceptional at sports, wasn’t a straight-A student, and Bobby was constantly yelling at him. ‘Do you think you get to be an astronaut by not sliding hard into second base? Do you think John Glenn ever got a B on an algebra test?’ Larry was just a dreamy kid who was interested in space, and he was so proud of Bobby, so desperate to please him, his disapproval was a torture. Have you ever seen the cockpit of an F-111?”

Russ should have been glad that she was opening up to him, but all he could hear was that she commanded the attention of test pilots and heart surgeons. He was an associate minister with a wife, four kids, and no money. What had he been thinking?

“It’s incredible,” she said. “The amount of instruments they have. They give you the sense that you’re utterly in control, and that’s the way Bobby was with us. We needed his approval, and he controlled us by making it conditional. Larry had to be a star athlete, and I couldn’t have a little fun talking to a neighbor. For me, the most terrible thing about the crash was imagining him losing control of the aircraft. He must have felt so furious.”

The sky was darkening, the traffic slow. How many millions of dollars did an F-111 cost? How could a nation that called itself Christian spend billions of dollars on weapons of death? The instrument panel of Russ’s Fury consisted of a speedometer and three gauges, one of them broken. The car urgently needed new brakes and new snow tires, but Marion had asked for two hundred dollars for Christmas shopping. The sum had struck him as excessive, but he’d been mindful of how little else he’d given her lately, mindful of the four hours alone with Frances that he’d contrived to give himself for Christmas. He’d imagined that the four hours would fly by all too quickly. Now he wondered how he could survive another minute of hearing about the kind of man she loved. There was a hard, sour knot in his throat.

“I’ve been talking a lot to Kitty about this,” Frances said. “I’m never going to be a bra-burner, but she’s given me some books that make a lot of sense to me. It’s not that Bobby was physically abusive. He was just cold, cold, cold. In a way, though, that was almost worse. I was the little wife, and the only thing that mattered was that I do everything exactly right. It was the opposite of a marriage of equals. When I look back now, I realize that our neighbors all thought I was married to a jerk. The only people who didn’t think so were his pilot buddies, and they were jerks, too. I mean, obviously, it’s terrible, the way he died—I feel so sorry for him. But sometimes I almost wonder if I’m better off without him. Is that bad of me?”

“Marriage is difficult,” Russ said.

“But does it have to be difficult? Is yours difficult? Or—sorry, maybe I can’t ask that.”

If Russ had had the nerves of a test pilot or a heart surgeon, now would have been the time to open his heart and declare that his marriage was a miserable thing, held together by habit and vow and duty. Now would have been the time to make his pitch. But his complaint with Marion was that she was heavy and joyless, unexciting to him, dulling of his edge. He didn’t see how he could voice this complaint without sounding like a jerk.

“Anyway,” Frances said, “you did me a huge favor, putting me in touch with Kitty and getting me into the Tuesday circle. It’s exactly what I needed. I’ve been taking a class at Triton College, and that’s been good, too. All in all, I was having a pretty good fall. But then—”

“I know,” Russ said. “I want to apologize again for what happened with Ronnie. That was my mistake.”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks. You don’t have to apologize. What happened was that Philip got in touch with me again. He called me out of the blue and said his mind was clearer now. He’d broken things off with the nurse, and could I find it in my heart to forgive him? I didn’t think I could, but he sent me roses and called me up again. He really turned on the charm, and things just kind of clicked. The weekend after Thanksgiving, after the thing with Ronnie, I went in to the city and had a whole afternoon and evening with him.”

The snow was still melting when it hit the pavement, but the forecast called for as much as eight inches. If Russ and Frances got stuck somewhere, it would mean additional hours with a heart surgeon’s girlfriend.

“Everything felt different, though,” she said. “It was partly the books I’ve been reading, but it was partly—it was partly what you’ve given me. I mean, the Tuesday circle, and, I don’t know, just the example of a different kind of man. Philip took me to Binyon’s, and when the waiter came he took the menu out of my hand and ordered for me. The old me would have liked that—it would have made me feel safe. But—and then we were in his apartment, with the amazing view, and I was looking at the family pictures on his piano. I picked one up, and I must have set it down wrong, because he came over and moved it, like, one inch further back. He came all the way across the room to move the picture one inch. Which probably makes him a great surgeon, but I thought to myself: Uh-oh. Here we go again. You know what I mean?”

Russ was feeling whipsawed, despairing one moment, daring to hope the next.

“It was like I’d wanted to replace Bobby with someone like Bobby. I guess that’s the kind of man I’m attracted to, or one kind of man. Bobby could be charming, too, when he’d been a jerk to me and I was mad at him. I realized that if I stayed with Philip I’d probably have another kid or two—I think he wants his own kids—and that would be the end of me. He’d be controlling everything. But so, anyway, I didn’t get home till nearly midnight—”

After having intimate relations with the surgeon? Russ had no grasp of contemporary dating protocol.

“And I found Larry in the family room by himself, watching TV. He’s old enough to babysit for Amy, but he seemed a little weird. I bent over to give him a kiss, and I couldn’t believe it. He smelled like pot and mouthwash. He’d gotten high after Amy went to bed! I couldn’t believe it. I knew he’d had a hard time after Bobby died, and starting a new school in ninth grade wasn’t any picnic, but he’s a good kid, and he’s doing a lot better this year, thanks to Crossroads. He still has bad posture, he still hides his face with his hair, but he seems to be maturing. When I realized he was high, my impulse was to feel guilty about leaving him and Amy alone for so many hours. I told him I was disappointed that he’d taken a stupid risk while he had responsibility for his sister, but I wasn’t going to punish him. I just needed to know some things, such as where he got the marijuana. But his hair is hanging in his face, he won’t look at me, won’t answer. I ask him if there’s marijuana in the house. He still won’t answer, and that’s when I kind of lose it. I demand that he show me where his pot is, I march him up to his room, and you know what? He’s got a whole bag of it! I take it away from him, I ask him again where he got it, and you know what he says? He says, ‘I’m not a nark.’ It made me so angry, I took away his TV privileges for a month.”

Russ had an uneasy sense of where her story was heading. The coin had dropped when she mentioned Perry.

“So, like I said, this is awkward,” she said. “But I thought you should know.”

“You think Larry got the marijuana from my son.”

“I don’t know for sure. But the two of them are together a lot, and Larry—it’s sweet—he’s obviously smitten with Perry. They come home from school and go straight to his room. Larry builds models, and I can smell the glue and the paint when they’re up there. I don’t care if they spend their time building models. I’m not sure I even care if they smoke pot. Larry says half the kids at school have tried it, which is probably an exaggeration, but I gather it’s pretty common. But to have a whole bag of it, a good-size bag—that didn’t seem like Larry.”

God damn Marion.

The previous spring, when the gross extent of Perry’s misbehavior had come to light, Marion had thrown religion in Russ’s face—had accused him of an Old Testament fixation on commandments, accused him of forgetting the New Testament forgiveness he preached on Sundays. According to Marion, Perry needed love and support, not punishment. He’d skipped a total of eleven days of school and had forged Russ’s handwriting on notes explaining his absence, but Marion insisted that his problems were psychological, not moral. The boy was hypersensitive and moody and couldn’t sleep at night. Marion, pleading for compassion, had proposed psychiatric counseling for him (as if they had the money for that). In Russ’s view, Marion herself was the problem. From the very beginning, she’d indulged Perry in his moods and his whims, his incessant whining and crying as a toddler, his pompous superiority as he got older. Although Russ was aware that all four of his kids, to varying degrees, preferred Marion to him, because she was always near them, always at home while he was away serving others, Perry’s preference for his mother was the most glaring and exclusive. Russ might have felt jealous of their closeness if he’d liked Perry better and Marion still excited him. He’d chosen to leave them to each other, and now, as a consequence of her coddling and his indifference to it, Perry had embarrassed them in front of the junior high school authorities.

He’d clearly sensed moral fault in Perry, and he should have suspected drug use, but he’d been led astray by Marion’s story of a gifted, sensitive child who only wanted to get some sleep. Summoning Perry to his office in the parsonage, where he had a stack of handwritten notes addressed to the junior-high principal and penned in a hand that he had to admit was uncannily like his own—Perry was undeniably a boy of many talents—Russ had undertaken to impose, on his girly-haired son, the discipline that Marion had failed to.

“You can’t be sleeping in the daytime,” he’d said. “You need to sleep at night like the rest of us.”

“Dad, I would love to,” Perry said. “But I can’t.”

“There are plenty of mornings when I don’t feel like getting up and going to work. But you know what? I get up and do it. If you just make yourself do it, one day, you’ll be so tired at night you’ll go to sleep. And then you’re on a normal schedule again.”

“With all due respect, that’s easier said than done.”

“You’re very bright, and I’m sorry if you’re not challenged enough at school. But part of growing up is learning to be disciplined. All I ever see is you reading a book or messing around with your art supplies. You should be outside, tiring yourself out. I wonder if you should join an intramural softball team.”

Perry stared at him with insolent incredulity. Russ tried to contain his irritation.

“You need to do something,” he said. “Starting this summer, I want to see you working. That’s the rule in this family: we work. I want you to set a goal of earning fifty dollars a week.”

“Becky didn’t have to work in tenth grade.”

“Becky was involved in cheerleading, and she’s working now.”

“She hates that job.”

“Well, that’s what self-discipline is. You may not like it, but you work anyway. I’m not trying to punish you, Perry. I’m doing this for your own good. I want you to start looking for work tomorrow. That way, you’ll have it lined up when summer comes.”

To Russ’s disgust, Perry began to weep.

“Frankly,” Russ said, “I’m letting you off very lightly. I should be taking away all your privileges for what you did.”

“This is punishment.”

“Stop crying. You’re too old to be crying. This is not punishment. You can always mow lawns if you can’t find anything else. If mowing lawns was good enough for Clem, it’s good enough for you. I guarantee you’ll sleep at night if you’ve been mowing grass all day.”

Marion had complained to Russ, in her mild but stubborn way, that mowing lawns was a senseless waste of Perry’s talents, a painful assault on his sensitivities, but Russ had been vindicated by the ensuing improvement in Perry’s habits. In the summer, Perry had slept from midnight to late morning, normal for a teenager, and in September, on his own initiative, he’d joined Crossroads. Aligning himself with Rick Ambrose was probably his idea of revenge for having been forced to mow lawns, and Russ had refused him the satisfaction of disapproving. The truth was that he’d felt increasingly repelled by Perry, vaguely nauseated by his adolescent body. The afterschool hours that Perry spent in Crossroads, the entire weekend he was away on a Crossroads retreat, had been a relief from the corporeal affront of him.

But now Russ wondered if what had repelled him was simply Perry’s bad character, his smug enjoyment of the secret of his drug use. It was all the goddamned fault of Marion. She wouldn’t hear a word against her precious son, and Perry had exploited her trust in him, and now, in the eyes of Frances, who’d become the source of delight in Russ’s life, Perry had reduced him to an unsuspecting square whose son had lured her Larry into drugs. God damn Marion. He could already taste the cruel pleasure of informing her that Perry was a drug user, of rubbing her nose in what her coddling had wrought: of making her pay for the humiliation of his learning it from Frances. He would make Perry pay, too.

But if Perry turned around and made insinuations? If he asked Russ, in Marion’s presence, where he’d been going with Mrs. Cottrell and a car full of boxes? Russ, God help him, had felt compelled to lie to Marion at breakfast—to tell her that he was delivering the food and toys with Kitty Reynolds.

“Don’t you want to take the turn here?” Frances said.

Skidding a little, rattling toys in the rear cargo area, he veered across two slushy lanes to make the turn onto Ogden Avenue. Horns blared behind him.

“You shouldn’t feel bad,” she said. “Rick Ambrose says a lot of other parents are dealing with the same thing.”

Street-credible Rick Ambrose, his finger on the pulse of contemporary youth.

“You were talking to Rick about Larry?” Russ managed to say.

“Yeah, but don’t worry—I didn’t nark out Perry. I mean, I just did, to you. But not to Rick. I only wanted a little guidance on how to think about fifteen-year-olds smoking pot. Rick said the one thing I don’t have to worry about is Crossroads. Apparently they have very strict rules against drugs and drinking on Crossroads time. Against sex, too. Although, poor Larry, I don’t think I have to worry about that one yet. I’ve never even seen him look at a girl. The person he has a crush on is Perry.”

Russ struggled to think of something wise to say, something to compete with Ambrose’s special insight into young people.

“Coming home and finding Larry high,” she said, “was a real eye-opener. I came down with a wretched cold, and when I finally got over it I felt like I’d turned a corner. Like I needed to get my life on a different kind of track—be more involved with my kids, stop chasing the fantasy second husband. I want to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty. I want to get more involved with you and Kitty and your work, and I asked Rick if there’s a way for me to get involved in Crossroads, too. Part of it is feeling I have to be a kind of father for Larry and Amy, not just a mother. But part of it is just—do you ever feel like you were born too early?”

“You mean, do I wish I were younger?”

“Yeah, I guess we all end up wishing that. But I’m talking about what’s happening now. I mean, the simple fact that girls can wear the same clothes as boys now—I missed all that. I missed the Beatles. I missed living with a guy before I decided if I should marry him, which wouldn’t have been a bad idea in my case. I feel like I was born fifteen years too early.”

“But what you’re describing,” Russ said, “was already happening in the early fifties. The spirit in New York, in Greenwich Village, when I was there, was everything you’re describing, except, in a way, it was purer.”

“In New York, maybe. It sure wasn’t happening in New Prospect.”

“Well, personally, I’m not sure I wish I’d been born any later.” He warned himself not to oversell Greenwich Village, since he and Marion had lived there for only two months, following two years in seminary housing on East Forty-ninth Street. “What galls me about so-called youth culture now is that people seem to think it came out of nowhere. The kids today think they invented radical politics, invented premarital sex, invented civil rights and women’s rights. Most of them have never even heard of Eugene Debs, John Dewey. Margaret Sanger, Richard Wright. When I was in Birmingham in 1963, a lot of the protesters were my age or older. The only real difference now is the fashions—different music, different hair. And that’s just superficial.”

“You really think that’s the only difference? If there’d been a group like Crossroads when I was in high school, I would have joined it in a heartbeat. If I’d read Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem when I was twenty, my whole life might have gone differently.”

Russ frowned. He’d known that Ambrose was a menace, but the gravity of the threat from Kitty Reynolds was unanticipated.

“I’m only saying,” he said, “that civil rights and the antiwar movement and, yes, feminism are the fruit of seeds that were planted a long time ago.”

“Okay, noted. But can I tell you one other terrible thing?”

She repositioned herself again, putting her back against the passenger door and one of her feet against his seat belt. He felt a tug in the belt, across his groin.

“I still have Larry’s bag of pot,” she said. “Can you believe it? I went to flush it down the toilet, so he could hear me doing it, but somehow I didn’t do it. I hid it in my bedroom.”

Everything Russ had just said about his youth was hogwash. The age he wanted to be was exactly the age of Frances.

“I’m waiting, Reverend Hildebrandt. Are you going to tell me I did a bad thing?”

“Legally, I suppose there is some hazard.”

“Oh, come on. No one’s going to kick my door down.”

“Still. What are you planning to do with it?”

“Well, um—what do you think I’m going to do with it?”

He nodded. He felt some pastoral responsibility to steer her from the path of iniquity, but he didn’t want to seem like a square. “In that case,” he said, “I suppose my concern would be that it complicates your message to Larry. If you’re telling him that drugs are bad for him—”

“That’s why I asked you how young is too young. Because I’m not too young. I’m trying to start my life all over at thirty-seven. I’m curious to try new things, and I had this image … I was thinking, you know, maybe I could invite Kitty, and you could invite your wife. The four of us could do a little experiment together, to see what all the fuss is about. If we’re forbidding our kids to do something, shouldn’t we know what we’re forbidding?”

“I don’t need to jump off a cliff to know that children shouldn’t be jumping off a cliff.”

“But what if it turns out to be great? What if it helps us understand our kids better? Or, I don’t know, just generally expands our minds. I was thinking, if you were there with me, it would be okay to try it. You’re a man of God, and you’re not a fearful person. You’re the opposite of the usual kind of minister.”

She could hardly have said anything more warming to his heart and loins. An early dusk was gathering, snow whitening the metal surfaces along the road, slush mottling the sidewalks. It was the best of days again.

“I don’t think my wife would be interested,” he said.

“Okay. Just you and me and Kitty, then.”

While he groped for a plausible reason to exclude Kitty as well, Frances gave him a playful little kick on the hip.

“Unless you don’t think we need a chaperone,” she said.

Among the revelations of the night before, in the front seat of Tanner’s VW bus, had been the excellence of lips. In the past, Becky’s lips had mostly just annoyed her, by being chapped or by wearing off her lipstick unevenly, their sensitivity in spin-the-bottle situations a matter of ticklishness and grossness. Only when they found their way to Tanner’s lips, which mirrored hers but had their own unpredictable volition, did she discover their connection to every nerve in her body. His mustache was at once plushy and sharp-bristled, his tongue shy at first but then less so, his teeth unexpectedly close to the action. Every sensation was a novelty, every angle of contact subtly different. The reality of kissing Tanner Evans was shockingly much better than the idea of it. She could have done it for hours, insensible of the discomfort of twisting sideways on the passenger seat, if they hadn’t been interrupted by noises in the parking lot.

“Hey, that’s Tanner’s van,” they heard a girl say.

In the imperfect darkness, he pulled away from Becky and cocked an ear. The voices of the girl and a second girl receded, presumably heading into the back room of the Grove.

“We should get out of here,” he said.

Having thrown herself at him, Becky understood his not wanting to be caught with her, but to her the hazard of being caught was thrilling. She drew him close and kissed him again. Moments later, the voices were back.

“Tanner?” the girl called, approaching the bus. “Laura?”

Tanner jerked away and peered out the window. Catching his panic, Becky bent over double and tried to hide her face in her hair, but it was obviously insufficient cover. She groped behind her, felt the Navajo blanket that was draped over the passenger seat, and pulled it over her head. From under its dusty woolenness she heard Tanner rolling down the window.

“Sally, yeah, hey,” he said.

“Are you guys coming in?”

It was Sally Perkins, Laura Dobrinsky’s good friend.

“Yeah,” Tanner said. “Yeah, I’m just helping a friend here for a second.”

Through the wool, Becky could feel Sally Perkins’s eyes on her ridiculous blanketed form.

“Laura’s not here?” Sally said.

“Uh, no.”

“Marcie and I are celebrating, if you felt like joining us. She just turned legal.”

“Yeah, um. That sounds—yeah.”

“See you inside?”

When Sally was gone, Becky sat up giggling and shrugged off the blanket. “Oops,” she said. This would have been a natural moment to ask about the status of Tanner and Laura as a couple, but he was giggling, too. For now, Becky thought, it was enough to share a secret with him, to be his partner in crime. She already had a sleepless night’s worth of new sensations to process and relive, and it seemed unwise to overstay her welcome. “You should go inside,” she told him.

“I don’t even like Marcie Ackerman.”

“It’s okay.” She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “You do like me?”

“Yes! Why do you think I came down here?”

“So maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Definitely. We could—” He slumped. “Actually, tomorrow’s not so great.”

“I don’t have anything all day until the concert.”

“Yeah, that’s the thing. I have to work until four, and then we’ll be setting up.”

By we he meant his band. He meant the Natural Woman. Becky’s nerves, hypersensitized by kissing, were defenseless against her disappointment.

“I’m really sorry,” he said. “What about Friday?”

“Friday’s Christmas Eve. Clem’s coming home. I’ll be busy with my family.”

“Right.”

“So I guess I’ll just see you when I see you.” She reached for the door latch. “Maybe in church, if I decide to go again.”

“Becky—”

“It’s okay. I understand. You’re really busy tomorrow.”

As she opened the door, he grabbed her shoulder. “I don’t have to be at the church until five thirty. I could meet you somewhere before then.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No, I want to.” His expression was pleading. “I want to.”

Satisfied that she had power over him, unsure only about the extent of it, she declined his offer of a ride and left him to Sally and Marcie. As she walked home, alone, the image of herself cowering beneath the Navajo blanket became less funny, more troubling. She was now officially the kind of girl who stole another girl’s boyfriend. She couldn’t tell if she sincerely felt guilty or was just scared of being confronted by the Natural Woman.

They’d agreed to meet at Treble Clef, the music store where he worked. As the appointed hour approached, Becky forced herself to linger at New Prospect Books, leafing through European travel guides, until she was a few minutes late. It was Tanner’s job to be eager now, not hers. In her shoulder bag she had the colored pencils that Judson had requested, a velveteen-boxed pen and mechanical pencil for Clem, and a Laura Nyro album so desirable to her she didn’t care if Perry wanted it himself. She’d stuck to her usual Christmas budget, despite the thirteen thousand dollars in her savings account, and had postponed the last of her buying until she could ride to the shopping mall in Jeannie Cross’s Mustang in the morning. The cellophane-wrapped newness of the items in her bag, which was the thing about Christmas presents—that they passed unused through the hands of the giver, were wonderfully new-feeling and new-smelling when the recipient unwrapped them—was of a piece with the freshness of the snow beneath her feet, the world’s rebirth in whiteness, when she finally walked around the corner to the music store. Being kissed had made her feel like a brand-new person, a just-opened present whose life was imminent but unbegun. When she saw Tanner standing in the snow by his bus, outside the store, he seemed equally new to her, because she had an actual date with him. She recognized his fringed jacket, the dark fall of his hair on his shoulders, but what a difference there was between wishing for a thing and finding it yours on Christmas morning.

Instead of embracing her, he helped her—not to say hustled her—into the bus and ran around to the driver’s side. Wet snow on the windows had made an ice cave of the interior, private but dreary. The rear of the bus was piled with amps and instrument cases that seemed impatient to be unloaded. After Tanner had started the engine and turned up the heater, Becky waited for him to lean over. She’d made the first move the night before, so now it was his turn. Her entire self was poised to open itself up to him as soon as he kissed her. But he was nodding to himself, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

“I just got some news,” he said. “It’s pretty far-out.”

She turned to him and presented her face, to suggest that his news could wait.

“Do you remember that time we were talking in the sanctuary?”

“Do I remember it?”

“Well, it got me thinking,” he said. “You got me thinking. I realized it was time for me to take the next step.”

In Becky’s mind, his next step was to make a definitive break with Laura Dobrinsky. If the news was that he’d done it without her having insisted on it, she was happy to hear it.

“So, you know Quincy, right?”

Quincy Travers was one of Tanner’s black friends, the drummer for the Bleu Notes.

“So Quincy’s been playing with this guy from Cicero whose cousin is an agent. A really good agent—he gets his acts into clubs all over Chicago. And you know what? He’s going to be there tonight. I just got a call back from him.”

Becky shivered in the long coat her aunt had given her. The seat of the bus was much colder than it had been the night before. “That’s great,” she said.

“I know. This is our biggest crowd of the year by far. It’s the perfect showcase.”

The VW’s little vents were blowing nothing but freezing air.

“Congratulations,” Becky said.

“I only made the call because of you.” Tanner took her gloved hands in his bare hands and squeezed them, as if to infuse her with enthusiasm. “Just knowing you understood what I’m trying to do—that made a huge difference.”

Only abstractly did she appreciate being thanked. She didn’t like sitting in an ice cave, talking about his music career and not about the night before. She didn’t like imagining him and Laura and the Bleu Notes playing more gigs around Chicago.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“Nothing. That’s great news.”

He tenderly put two fingers on her cheek, but she averted her face. The lumpy, shadowy snow coating her window was like the cellulite pictured in her mother’s Redbooks. Tanner rested his chin on her shoulder, his mouth near her ear. “When I see you, I feel like I can do anything.”

She tried to speak, shivered, tried again. “And Laura?”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought she was your girlfriend.”

He sat up straight. Outside the bus, teenaged boys were bellowing in the snow.

“I’m just wondering where I stand,” Becky said. “I mean, after last night.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, shouldn’t we talk about it? Or is that too Crossroads?”

“It’s pretty Crossroads.”

“I only joined because of you. I thought you loved it.”

“Yeah. I know. I have to have a conversation with her. It’s just—here’s the thing.”

A snowball hit the frosted windshield. It stuck there, a darker blurry mass, and now a red-fingered hand was swiping snow off Becky’s window. Through the cleared glass, she saw a junior-high kid packing a snowball. He fired it across the street, and another one slammed into the side of the bus. Tanner popped open his door, shouted at the kids, and shut the door again. “Stupid juvies.”

Becky waited.

“So, it’s hard,” he said. “Everybody sees Laura as this intense, scary person, but there’s a side of her that’s really insecure. Really vulnerable. And—well, here’s the thing.”

“Who you want to be with,” Becky said firmly.

“I know. I know what I need to do. It’s just—tonight is not the night to have that conversation. Laura doesn’t even care if we get an agent, but the rest of us do, and she’s so radical, I can see her just walking out. Which—there go our keyboards, there go my harmonies. Even if she plays, and she’s up there pissed off with me, it’s going to be a mess.”

Realistically, Becky knew there wasn’t any rush. The fact of their having kissed, the fact of her sitting in his bus with him now, the fact of their having this conversation, was evidence of the inroads she’d made on his heart. If only she hadn’t set her own heart on going to the concert with him! It was too late to undo how fervidly she’d imagined walking into the church on his arm, showing the world that he was hers, and telling Jeannie Cross about it in the morning.

“Aren’t there other agents?”

“There are tons of agents,” Tanner said. “But this guy, Benedetti, he’s supposed to be really good, and this isn’t like playing the Grove. Darryl Bruce is home from college, he’s sitting in on lead guitar, and Biff Allard is bringing his congas. We’ve got a really full sound tonight, and the perfect audience.”

“I thought the main thing was your record. Your demo, with your songs.”

“Yeah. It still is. But you were right—I need to think bigger. I need to be playing four times as many gigs, building up an audience, making contacts.”

Becky hoped he couldn’t see, in the dreary cave light, that she was clenching her face muscles to keep from crying. “But so … if Laura’s in the band … and you’re playing gigs … how does that work?”

“I can find someone to replace her. I just can’t do it in the next three hours.”

An embarrassing squeak escaped from Becky’s throat. She cleared it loudly. “So,” she said. “You’re breaking up with her?”

When Tanner didn’t answer, she looked and saw that his eyes were closed, his hands pressed together between his knees.

“It’s kind of important for me to know,” she said. “After what happened last night.”

“I know. I know. It’s just hard. When you’ve been with a person for so long, and she’s still so into you. It’s hard.”

“Or maybe you just don’t really want to.”

“That’s not it. I swear to God, Becky. This is just a bad night to do it.”

The need to cry could be as urgent as the need to pee. She picked up her shoulder bag. “I should probably go.”

“You just got here.”

“It’s all right. There’s a reception I told my mom I couldn’t go to because I was going to the concert. I can at least make her happy.”

“I’m not saying you can’t go to the concert.”

“You want me to go there and act like nothing happened? Or, what, I’m supposed to put a blanket over my head again?”

He filled his fists with his hair and pulled on it.

“It’s almost like you’re ashamed of me,” she said.

“No, no, no. This is just—”

“I know, a bad night. I was really looking forward to it, but now— I’m not.”

Before he could stop her, she jumped out of the bus. Leaving the door hanging open, she narrowed her eyes against the stinging snow and ran up the alley behind the bookstore, where the bus couldn’t follow her. She could only hope that she was disappointing him as much as he’d disappointed her. She’d felt so certain of how their date was going to go: a delicious resumption of their kissing, followed by testimonials of amazement that they’d found their way to each other, followed by lengthier kissing, followed by her triumphal entry into the church with him. Now even the snow was unromantic, a painful hindrance. Everything had gone to shit.

She could feel wetness creeping into her only decent boots, which she was probably damaging irreparably, as she trudged the long blocks home in slanting snow. It was getting too dark to see well, and the physical effort of not slipping and falling kept her tears at bay until she reached the parsonage. She’d held out hope that Tanner might be waiting in his bus there, waiting to apologize and beg her to come to the concert with him, the consequences be damned. But except for a forlorn distant scraping of a shovel and a pair of unrecent tire tracks, nearly refilled with snow, her block of Highland Street was desolate. The only light in the parsonage was in Perry and Judson’s room.

Inside, there was no sign of her mother. Was she still not back from her exercise class? Becky now felt ashamed of having been so unforthcoming with her, so certain she knew better how to handle Tanner. Her mother seemed to her the one person with whom she might safely share her disappointment. She brushed snow out of her hair and hurried upstairs, past the closed door of her brothers’ room. At the sight of her bed, where just a few hours earlier she’d innocently dreamed of going to the concert, her disappointment came bursting out.

As she lay on the bed and wallowed in her conviction that Tanner was still in love with Laura, that he cared more about Laura’s feelings than he did about hers, she thought she was crying not too loudly. But after some minutes there came a gentle knocking on her door. She went rigid.

“Becky?” Perry said.

“Go away.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. Leave me alone.”

“You sure?”

She wasn’t all right. An anguished sound came out of her, the disappointment erupting again. It must have been audible to Perry, because he entered her room and shut the door behind him. Her irritation stopped her tears.

“Go away,” she said. “I didn’t say you could come in.”

Increasing her irritation, he sat down beside her. Skin-crawling repugnance was probably a normal response to a pubescent brother’s proximity, the abnormal thing her lack of a similar response to Clem, but the badness she sensed in Perry made the repugnance especially intense. She scooched away from him and wiped her face on her pillowcase.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“Nothing you would understand.”

“I see. You think I lack empathy.”

She did suspect that he lacked empathy, but this wasn’t the point. “I’m upset,” she said, “about something that has nothing to do with you.”

“I’m sensing a barrier to our getting to know each other better.”

“Get out of my room!”

“Joke, sister. That was a joke.”

“I got the joke. Okay? Now please get out of my room.”

“There’s something I need to say to you. But I have the distinct impression that you’ve been trying to stay away from me.”

It was true that she’d been avoiding him, even more than usual, since the night he’d drawn her as his partner in a Crossroads dyad exercise. During the exercise, she’d felt proud of confronting him with his selfishness and self-involvement; excited to think that Crossroads was empowering her to become the family truth-teller. She’d guessed that she was hurting him, to the extent that an amoral brainiac was capable of being hurt, but she’d hoped that her honest witnessing might foster his own personal growth. Ever since that night, though, the sight of him had troubled her. No matter how on-target her assessment of his faults had been, no matter how much the truth had needed airing, she felt that somehow she, not he, had done a wrong thing.

“Here’s what I’ve been wanting to say,” he said. “To put it very simply, you were right. In our coat-closet conversation, which you’ll no doubt remember. I’ve come to the conclusion that you were right.”

His highbrow intonations were repellent. She reared away from him and stood up. “Where’s Judson?”

“Judson is mulling the Stratego board. He luxuriates in the planning aspect.”

“And Mom? Did she come home?”

“I’ve seen neither hide nor hair all day.”

“That’s weird,” Becky said, heading to the door.

“Excuse me?” Perry jumped up and blocked her escape. “Did you not hear what I just said to you?”

“Please get out of my way.”

“I think I’m entitled to two minutes of your attention, Becky. You said you wanted a relationship with me. You said, ‘You’re my brother.’ That is a direct quote.”

“That was Crossroads. You’re supposed to say you want a relationship with everybody.”

“Ah, so, in fact, you don’t want a relationship with me.”

“Will you give me a break? I’m having a really shitty day.”

“And that’s your response? Just walk away?”

Walking away was a well-known Crossroads no-no. Becky rolled her eyes and said, “Fine. Thank you for saying I was right. I’m not sure I was, but thank you for saying it. Now can I please go blow my nose?”

Perry stepped aside but followed her into the bathroom. For no fathomable reason, its Depression-era tub and sink had been installed in one cramped corner, leaving a needlessly large expanse of floor tiles, now cracked and discolored. Perry shut the door and sat down on the laundry hamper while Becky blew her nose.

“When I say you were right,” he said, “I mean that you were right that I’ve never taken you seriously enough. We can skip over my reasons for that—they do me no honor. Suffice it to say I’ve never given you the credit you deserve. You were right to call me on that.”

“Perry, come on. You don’t have to do this.”

“I need to say it. I’ve been unjust to you. And you were honest with me.”

She threw up her arms in frustration. Wrong time, wrong place for a Crossroads dyad.

“I need you to believe,” he went on, “that I’m trying to become a better person. That I’ve taken everything you said to me to heart. I won’t bore you with every detail, but I’ve made some changes. I’ve sworn off intoxicants, for one thing.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Is that what this is about? Were you afraid I was going to nark on you?”

“Not at all.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes!”

“Well, good. I’m glad to hear you’ve done some thinking. I’m glad my criticism was constructive.”

“I need your help, though. I need—”

He broke off, his face reddening. She prayed that he wouldn’t start crying on her. The one time she’d seen him cry at Crossroads, a hundred other people had been there to perform the task of touching him. It was strange that a person so visibly emotional, so ready to cry, both in public and in private, should persistently give her the impression that his emotings were detached from any real thing inside him. It made her feel as if something were wrong with her head.

“It’s hard enough,” he said, “to be in the same house with you and feel like I’m your enemy. But if we’re going to be together in Crossroads, too, we need to find a way to have a better relationship.” He took a deep breath. “I want to be your friend, Becky. Will you be my friend?”

Too late, she saw that she’d been cornered. She well knew, as did he, that the biggest of all Crossroad no-nos was to reject a person’s offer of friendship. You had to accept the offer even if you didn’t really mean to spend time with the person. If she spurned Perry’s offer, and then went to Crossroads and practiced unconditional love, accepted the unqualified worth of everyone else in the group, became “friends” with whoever asked her, he would know she was a hypocrite. She would be a hypocrite. Craftily or not, he’d cornered her.

Overcoming her natural repugnance, the way Jesus had done with lepers, she went and crouched at his feet by the hamper. “I have a lot of trust issues with you,” she said.

“For good reason. I am so sorry.”

“You’re right, though. We should try to get to know each other better. If you’re willing to try, so am I.”

Now he did let out a sob, but only one, a kind of gulp. He slid off the hamper and put his arms around her. “Thank you,” he said into her shoulder.

Returning his hug wasn’t so bad. Whatever precociously illicit things he might have done in secret, he was still a human being, still basically just a boy. He was small for a Hildebrandt, truly her little brother. At the feel of his narrow shoulders in her arms, something maternal stirred in her. He tried to cling to her when she stood up.

“I wonder where Mom is,” she said. “Are you sure she didn’t come home?”

“Jay said he hadn’t seen her. It’s conceivable she went straight to the Haefles’.”

“Not in her exercise clothes.”

“Good point.”

She had to admit that in the wake of their embrace she felt slightly more at ease with him.

“It’s weird,” she said. “She made such a big deal about me being home by six.”

“What for?”

“So I can go to the reception.”

“What are you doing that for? You’ll miss half the concert.”

Disappointment welled up in her again. She turned away to hide it from him. “I’m not going.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Is that what you were crying about?” He jumped up and put a hot little hand on her shoulder. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

She almost laughed. “You mean, now that we’re friends? That’s pretty slick, Perry.”

“I guess I deserve that, but you have me all wrong.”

“Part of being a friend is respecting a person’s boundaries.”

“Fair enough. I just wish you’d give me a chance. I know I haven’t earned your trust. I haven’t earned anybody’s trust. But when I heard you crying, I thought, ‘She’s my sister.’”

“Judson’s probably wondering when you’re coming back.”

“I’m going right now. Unless you want to tell me—”

“I don’t.”

“Okay, but listen. If you change your mind about the concert, I’ll be here with Jay. You and I can walk over together when you’re back.”

Returning to her room, lying down on her bed, she tried to make sense of Perry’s sudden kindness to her. Ordinarily, she would have assumed he had some hidden selfish motive. But in hugging him she’d caught a glimmer of the unqualified worth of every human being. Perry had no choice but to be his hot-handed, overly articulate little self, and the vulnerability he’d revealed to her hadn’t seemed like just an act. Walking to the church with her pothead little brother, being together in the snow with him, was the bizarrest of scenarios, but the chance of their becoming friends was exciting in its very slenderness. She’d always had, in Clem, the only brother she needed, but now Clem was far away, preoccupied with his evidently fascinating girlfriend. The biggest barrier to Becky’s relationship with Perry had been her feeling that he disdained her for her lesser intelligence. Maybe all she’d needed was some sign that he respected her and was interested in her as a person. Now that he’d given her such a sign, maybe they really could be friends. Maybe her whole family could be happier, beginning with the unlikely duo of her and Perry.

The feeling of goodwill with which she’d awakened in the morning, before losing it in the ice cave of Tanner’s bus, was coming back. She felt a particular glow of gratitude for Crossroads, which had taught her to take risks. The risk she’d taken with Tanner had brought her pain, but in the glow of her goodwill she could see that she might have overreacted, might have pushed him too hard on the wrong night, might have set too much store on the outward appearance of going to the concert with him. Meanwhile, the risk of confronting Perry, in the coat closet at church, had encouraged him to take his own risk, by offering her his friendship. For better and for worse, but mostly for better, Crossroads was making her more alive.

At six o’clock, though there was still no sign of either of her parents, she got up to make herself presentable. The spectacle of blotch reflected in the bathroom mirror discouraged her, but she brushed her hair, reapplied her makeup, and went and knocked on Perry and Judson’s door.

“Who is it?” Perry answered sharply.

“The war-game police. I’m coming in.”

Opening the door, she saw Perry reclining on one elbow and Judson kneeling over their homemade board game, his ankles crossed beneath him in a position that would have excruciated anyone older than ten. With a subtle movement of her head, she beckoned Perry into the hallway. He hopped right up.

“Do you have any eye drops?” she asked him in a low voice.

“Yes, as it happens, I do.”

She waited while he ran upstairs to the third floor, thereby betraying where he’d been hiding his paraphernalia. The complicity in their transaction, like the complicity of being in on the secret of his and Judson’s war game, was giving her a sense of what life might be like in a happier family, with her at the center of it.

“You can keep this,” Perry said, returning with a bottle. “My eye-drop-using days are over.”

“Are you worried about Mom? The fact that she hasn’t even called?”

“You think she’s lying frozen in a snowdrift.”

“It’s just weird.”

Perry frowned. “What time does the reception start?”

“Six thirty.”

“So here’s an idea. Why don’t you go to the concert and let Jay and me go to the Haefles’? Admittedly, I’m judging only by appearances, but I have the sense you don’t actually want to miss the concert.”

“I don’t think the Haefles want little kids there.”

“Assuming you don’t put me in that category, I think you’re underestimating Jay. He has an old soul.”

Becky considered her long-haired brother. To feel allied with his brainpower, rather than mocked and threatened by it, was a strange sensation. “You would do that for me?”

It was painful to recall, but Russ had loved Rick Ambrose.

Once upon a time, in New York, at the seminary on East Forty-ninth Street, Russ and Marion had been the It couple, into whose married-student apartment other young seminarians crowded three or four nights a week to smoke their cigarettes, listen to jazz, and inspire one another with visions of modern Christianity’s renaissance in social action. Twiggy, pretty Marion, more deeply and eclectically read than anyone else, wearing snug pedal pushers and bulky sweaters that evoked the Welsh countryside of Dylan Thomas, was the envy of Russ’s fellow seminarians. Whatever she and Russ did was ipso facto the hip thing. Even pulling up stakes and relocating to rural Indiana, which he’d felt obliged to do when Marion became pregnant and his applications for more exotic postings were rejected, had seemed like an edgy move. Only when Marion withdrew into motherhood, grew heavier and wearier, and Russ needed to come up with fifty sermons a year, rewritten by Marion and delivered in two churches with a combined flock of fewer than three hundred, at eight thirty and ten o’clock every Sunday, did the life she’d once made large for him begin to feel inescapably small. Whenever he contrived a respite from the Indiana farmhouse, by begging favors of pastors from nearby churches, and attended conferences in Columbus or Chicago or protested for civil rights, he was bittersweetly reminded of the edge that he and Marion had lost.

In prosperous New Prospect, although he continued to agitate for social justice, the political sleepiness of First Reformed had just about defeated him when Rick Ambrose arrived to wake it up. Where Russ came by his alienation from the suburbs honestly, by virtue of his Mennonite childhood, Ambrose’s was adopted. He’d been the causeless young rebel in the otherwise happy family of an endocrinologist in Shaker Heights, Ohio. On the night of his high-school graduation, he and his girlfriend had ridden his motorcycle down the main drag of Shaker Heights and straight out of town. A month later, on a highway in Idaho, he and the girl had been passed by four teenagers doing a hundred miles an hour in a Chevy that broadsided a rancher crossing in front of them in his pickup. Beside the road, staring at teenaged death, Ambrose had heard a bell-clear calling from God. Seven years later, as a minister in training, he felt called to work with troubled young people. When he came to Russ’s office to accept, in person, the job of director of youth programming, he flattered Russ. A congregation in Oak Park had offered him a position with better pay, but he’d chosen First Reformed because, he said, he admired Russ’s vocal commitment to peace and justice. He said, “I think we’ll make a great team.”

Warmed by the sense of being recognized, and taken with the simmering charisma of his young associate, imagining they might become friends, Russ repeatedly invited him to dinner at the parsonage. When Ambrose finally accepted, and lingered at the table after the kids had been excused, he paid so much attention to Marion that Russ felt uneasy about the scant attention he’d lately given her himself. Marion had never been a flirt, but she seemed enjoyably energized by Ambrose’s intensity. After he left, Russ was surprised to hear she hadn’t liked him. “That glower of his,” she said. “It’s like a mind-control trick he picked up somewhere and fell in love with. It’s a car salesman’s trick—making people afraid they don’t have your approval. They’ll do anything to get it, and they never stop to wonder why they even want it.”

It was true that, for all his foul-mouthed forthrightness, there was something unknowable about Ambrose, and Russ never quite shook the awareness of his affluent background, in contrast to his own. But Russ had an eager and generous heart, which suited him well to the ministry, and Ambrose had been right: they made a good team. Their mentoring styles were complementary, Ambrose’s psychological and streetwise, Russ’s more political and Bible-oriented, and he was grateful that Ambrose took charge of the stormier kids in the youth fellowship, leaving him to lead the others by example.

After hearing Russ’s stories of his time among the Navajos, Ambrose had proposed that the fellowship refocus itself on a spring work camp in Arizona. Russ loved the idea so much that he soon forgot it hadn’t been his. Arizona was his place, after all. Arriving on the arid reservation, landing in waste and privation beyond what anyone else on the bus had experienced, he felt forty pairs of suburban teenage eyes looking to him for courage and guidance. It transpired that Ambrose, though he had the swagger of a tough who didn’t shy from manual labor, couldn’t so much as drive a clean nail without first bending two of them. Time and again, he came to Russ, or even to Clem, for help with seemingly elementary tasks. Although his ineptitude later became a real issue—was arguably, indeed, the catalyst of Russ’s humiliation—on the first spring trip it served to highlight Russ’s capability.

By the following October, so many teenagers were thronging to the fellowship that Russ worried about a surprise inspection by the fire marshal. Beyond the sheer numbers, what excited him was the kind of kids who were joining. There were long-haired musicians, there was a raft of blond girls from the Episcopal church, there were even some Black kids, and they weren’t just seeking spiritual renewal. They wanted to invite guest speakers from the inner city and the peace movement, they wanted to examine their suburban affluence. For six years, in his sermons, Russ had tried to awaken the adult congregation of First Reformed to the implications of its privilege. Now, suddenly, for the first time since New York, he was at the center of the It place. He knew he had Ambrose to thank for this, but he also knew that reports of the Arizona trip had set the high school afire, and that the promise of a second trip was driving the rise in membership numbers. In November, after a rollicking Sunday-night meeting, Ambrose, who so rarely smiled, turned to Russ with a cockeyed grin.

“Pretty wild, isn’t it.”

“Incredible,” Russ said.

“I counted fourteen kids who weren’t here last week.”

“Absolutely incredible.”

“It was Arizona,” Ambrose said, more seriously. “That trip completely changed the dynamic. That’s what made this whole thing real.”

Russ, already giddy, felt even giddier. Arizona was his place. He, no less than Ambrose, had changed the dynamic. In his giddiness, through the winter and into the early spring, he plunged into the spirit of the times. He took the risk of rapping about his feelings, he opened himself to new styles of music. He found that shutting his eyes and raising a clenched fist, while speaking of Dr. King or Stokely Carmichael, whose hand he’d once shaken, had a powerful effect on the young people. Though it never sounded quite convincing, he took to using curse words such as bullshit. He let his hair grow over his collar and started a beard, the latter lasting until Marion remarked on his resemblance to John the Baptist. He was stung enough to shave the beard, but he felt that Marion was becoming a drag. He preferred the excitement of the attention he was getting from the new breed of girls in the fellowship. They swore as bluely as the boys did, they were loud and gross in the sexual innuendoes they traded with the boys, and yet, being suburban, their naïveté was even greater than his had been at their age. None of them had decapitated a chicken or seen a bank seize a man’s ancestral farm. Russ believed he could offer them a depth of authentic experience lacking in young Ambrose. He put more thought into his Sunday-night prayers than he put into his Sunday-morning sermons (Marion did much of that thinking for him anyway), because the dream he’d once had in New York, the vision of a nation transformed by vigorously Christian ethics, was alive in the blue-jeaned throng in the First Reformed function hall, not in the sleepy gray heads in the sanctuary.

Among the new converts to the fellowship was a young woman, Laura Dobrinsky, who was tight with Tanner Evans and thus instantly popular. At her first meeting, Russ had greeted her with a hug that she did not return, and at subsequent meetings he’d been unsettled by the openly hostile way she stared at him. It seemed strangely personal, unlike anything he could remember being the object of. Per the discussions of adolescent psychology he’d had with Ambrose, Russ hypothesized that Laura had a problem with her father and was seeing him in Russ. But one afternoon in March, ten days before the Arizona trip, he emerged from the church library, where he’d been consulting references for a sermon, and heard Laura Dobrinsky uttering the words That dude is such an unbelievable fucking dork. From the silence that fell as he rounded a corner and saw half a dozen girls seated in the corridor, and from the glances the girls then exchanged, the smirks they imperfectly suppressed, he conceived the hurtful suspicion that Laura had been referring to him. Especially hurtful was that one of the girls smirking was the popular, blond Sally Perkins, who a few weeks earlier, after school, had come to his office and opened up to him about her unhappiness at home. Most of the popular kids preferred to go to Ambrose with their troubles, and Russ had been surprised and gratified that Sally had come to him.

Returning to his office, he tried to cheer himself with the thought that Sally Perkins wouldn’t have come to him if she thought he was a dork, and that, even if Laura Dobrinsky did think so, it was silly to let himself be hurt by a girl with wildly unresolved anger issues, and also that maybe she hadn’t been referring to him, maybe the dork in question was Clem, which would explain the girls’ embarrassment when they saw Clem’s father; but he was still in distress when Rick Ambrose came knocking on his door.

Taking a seat, his expression pained, Ambrose told Russ that he’d been hearing some complaints—or not complaints, concerns—about Russ’s style of ministry. Some of the kids seemed uncomfortable, in particular, with Russ’s weekly prayers. Ambrose himself was fine with them, but he suggested that Russ consider “toning it down a bit” with the scriptural language. “Do you know what I mean?”

He could hardly have found a worse moment to criticize Russ. “I put a lot of thought into those prayers,” Russ said. “When I cite Scripture, it’s always in direct relation to the theme that you and I have chosen for the week.”

Ambrose nodded judiciously. “Like I said, I don’t have a problem with it myself. It’s just something you should be aware of. Some of the kids we’re drawing don’t have any religious background. Obviously, the hope is that everyone will find their way to an authentic faith, but people need to find their own way, and that takes time.”

Because of Laura’s remark, Russ felt angrier than Ambrose’s tactful words merited. “I don’t care,” he said. “This is a church for believers, not a social club. I’d rather lose a few members than lose sight of our mission.”

Ambrose pursed his lips and blew a silent whistle.

“Who are the people complaining?” Russ said. “Is there anyone besides Laura Dobrinsky?”

“Laura is definitely the most outspoken of them.”

“Well, and I would not be sorry to see her leave.”

“She’s a handful, I agree. But the energy she brings is really valuable.”

“I’m not going to change my style because one angry girl is complaining to you about me.”

“It’s not just her, Russ. This is something we need to deal with before we leave on Spring Trip. I wonder if you’d be willing…” Ambrose glowered at the floor. “I wonder if we should open up part of the meeting on Sunday and talk about where we stand, as a group, with expressions of Christian doctrine. You could hear Laura, she could hear you. I think it could be a really valuable conversation for the group to have before we all get on the bus.”

“I’m not interested in a public shouting match with Laura Dobrinsky.”

“I’ll be there to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand. I promise, I will back you up. I just—”

“No.” Russ stood up angrily. “I’m sorry, but no. That does not sound right to me. I’m happy to let you do your thing, but I would ask that you let me do mine.”

Ambrose sighed, as if to suggest a withholding of approval, but he said nothing more. Russ was left with the impression that much whispering was being done behind his back, and that he would do well to strengthen his relationships with the group’s rowdier element. At the next Sunday meeting, the last before Arizona, he made friendly forays into that element. Whether the negative vibe he got from it was real or just the product of his paranoia, it gave his movements a marionette-like clumsiness; a dorkiness. Sitting in the huge group circle at the end of the meeting, he sought the eyes of Sally Perkins, hoping to exchange a warm smile, but she seemed determined not to look at him.

On the Friday afternoon before Palm Sunday, aware of the emotional bonding that occurred on long bus rides, he stationed himself between the two interstate buses in the First Reformed parking lot and waited to see which of them would be preferred by the kids with whom he needed to bond, so that he could board it. But the normally visible forces of teenaged social physics were scrambled in the parking lot. Parents stood chattering among haphazard piles of luggage, preteen siblings ran on and off the buses, latecomers arrived with tooting car horns, and everyone kept pestering Russ with logistical questions. He was loading five-gallon drums of paint into a bus’s luggage bay when, behind his back, the hidden social forces resolved into a mob of long-haired kids outside the other bus, which Ambrose had chosen.

Too late, he saw that he and Ambrose should have discussed their bus assignments—that he should have insisted on having a chance to repair his rapport with Laura Dobrinsky’s clique. Riding west into the night, in the unpreferred bus, he felt exiled. Even when he succeeded, the next morning, in trading places with Ambrose, the scene on the other bus was unsatisfactory. The kids had been awake all night, laughing and singing, and now they only wanted to sleep. Tanner Evans kindly sat down with him, but soon Tanner, too, was sleeping. By the time they reached the reservation, Russ had become afraid to look over his shoulder at the kids behind him. It was a relief to know that most of them were going on with Ambrose to the demonstration school at Kitsillie, up high on the mesa.

Waiting in the settlement of Rough Rock was Russ’s Navajo friend Keith Durochie. The back of Keith’s Ford pickup was heaped with new and scavenged plumbing supplies. He informed Russ that he and the other elders were expecting him to install a septic line and put a sink and toilet in the school. When Russ replied that Ambrose, not he, was leading the Kitsillie contingent, Keith didn’t hide his displeasure. He’d seen, the year before, the kind of skills Ambrose had.

Russ waved Ambrose over and explained the situation. “How would you feel about doing some plumbing work up there?”

“I would need help,” Ambrose said.

“This is the job at Kitsillie,” Keith said to Russ. “This is what we have for you this year.”

“Shoot,” Russ said.

“I kept the equipment safe all winter.”

“I’m willing to give it a try,” Ambrose said. “Between Keith and Clem, we’ll probably be okay.”

Keith threw Russ a look—Clem was seventeen—and turned to Ambrose. “You stay here,” he said firmly. “Let Russ go to Kitsillie.”

“That’s fine.”

“Rick,” Russ said. He didn’t want to be the white guy arguing with a Navajo, but the kids going to Kitsillie had counted on being with Ambrose. “I think we should talk about this.”

“I’m no kind of plumber,” Ambrose said. “If that’s the job, I’d be more comfortable trading places with you.”

Keith walked away, satisfied that the matter was settled, and Ambrose hurried off to the kids with whom he was unexpectedly spending a week in Rough Rock. Russ could have pursued him and made him speak to the Kitsillie group, made him explain why he’d chosen not to join it, but instead he placed his trust in God. He thought that God’s will might be at work in Keith, guiding the course of events, offering Russ a providential chance to forge better relationships with the popular kids. Submitting to His will, he shouldered his duffel bag and boarded the Kitsillie bus; and there it was instantly clear that God had harsher plans for him.

The week on the mesa was torture. Everyone, even his own son, thought he was lying about why he’d replaced Ambrose, and to tell them the full truth—that Keith Durochie had a low opinion of Ambrose—would have been unfair to Keith and unkind to Ambrose. Russ was still stupid about Ambrose, still considered him a friend worth protecting. But he wasn’t stupid otherwise. He saw how acidly the group resented him for being there. He saw the lengths to which Laura Dobrinsky and her friends went to avoid working with him, he felt their hatred at every nightly candle talk, and he knew he had a pastoral responsibility to raise the issue. He tried repeatedly to have a private word with Sally Perkins, who not long ago had trusted him enough to confide in him, but she kept eluding him. Afraid that terrible things might be said to his face in a group confrontation, he chose to endure his misery in silence until Ambrose could confirm the reason he’d stayed behind in Rough Rock.

By the time the two groups reunited, Russ was too low to beg Ambrose to make a clarifying statement. He waited for Ambrose to do it voluntarily, but Ambrose had had an amazing week in Rough Rock—had wowed the half of the group that still related to Russ; had gained ground on Russ’s own turf—and he seemed oblivious to Russ’s misery. Witnessing the pointedly joyous hugs with which the Kitsillie group greeted Ambrose, Russ lamented his heart’s generosity. He rued that he hadn’t heeded Marion’s warnings. Only now could he see that he and his young associate had been engaged, from the beginning, in a competition of which only one of them had been aware.

And even then, even knowing that Ambrose was not his friend, had never been his friend, he was shocked by the audacity of Ambrose’s betrayal of him. At the first Sunday meeting after Arizona, when Laura and Sally stood up to lacerate Russ’s heart and hurl their teenaged acid in his face, Ambrose did nothing to stop it—just stood in a corner and glowered with disapproval, presumably of Russ himself—and when the majority of the group walked out of the fellowship room, which was baking in an April heat wave, Ambrose sided not with his colleague, not with the well-mannered kids from the church that employed him, but with the rabble from outside the church, the hip kids, the popular girls, and left Russ to ask God what he’d done to deserve such punishment.

He got the answer, or at least an answer, some endless minutes later. Ambrose returned to Russ and asked him to come downstairs. “I tried to warn you,” he said as they descended the stairs. “I really think this could have been avoided.”

“You said you would back me up,” Russ said. “You said, quote, you wouldn’t let it get out of hand.”

“And you refused to have the conversation.”

“I’d say this qualifies as out of hand!”

“This is serious, Russ. You need to hear what Sally just told me.”

The air was scarcely cooler on the second floor. Ambrose led Russ into his unventilated office, where Laura and Sally were seated on his sofa, and shut the door. Laura gave Russ a cruel smile of victory. Sally stared sullenly at her hands.

“Sally?” Ambrose said.

“I don’t really see the point,” Sally said. “I’m done with this church.”

“I think Russ has a right to hear from you directly.”

Sally closed her eyes. “It’s just that I’m totally creeped out. It’s just what a nightmare Spring Trip turned out to be. It was like my worst nightmare when he walked onto that bus. I couldn’t believe it.”

“There was a reason Russ and I traded places,” Ambrose said. “He was better at the work that needed to be done up there.”

“Yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure he found some reason. But the way it felt to me was that I couldn’t get away from him.”

The office was unbearably hot. Russ was appalled and frightened and perplexed. “Sally, look at me,” he said. “Please open your eyes and look at me.”

“She doesn’t feel like opening her eyes,” Laura said in a righteous tone.

“I just wanted him to leave me alone,” Sally said. “I got a really creepy feeling, that time in his office. And then, I couldn’t believe it, he followed me to Kitsillie.”

Worse even than her refusal to look at Russ were the words he, his, him. They reduced him to the It in an I–It relationship.

“I don’t understand,” he said to Sally. “You and I had a good conversation in my office, and it would have been wrong of me not to follow up. That’s what I do as a minister. I don’t know why you think I’m somehow singling you out.”

“Because that’s how it feels to me,” she said. “How many ways do I have to find to tell you to leave me alone?”

“I truly wasn’t aware of trying to push you. I just wanted you to know that I’m available. That I’m a person you can trust and open up with.”

“That’s the thing,” Laura said. “She doesn’t trust you.”

“Laura,” Ambrose said. “Let Sally speak for herself.”

“No, I’m done,” Sally said, jumping to her feet. “He ruined Spring Trip for me. He gives me a bad feeling about this whole group. I’m done.”

She fled the office. With a withering glance at the It that was Russ, Laura stood up and followed her. It seemed to Russ, in the silence that ensued, that only he was sweating. When Ambrose leaned back in his desk chair and clasped his hands behind his head, the underarms of his denim shirt were enviably dry.

“I don’t know what to do here, Russ.”

“I was only trying to help her.”

“Really? She says you complained to her about your sex life with Marion.”

Sweat flowed from so many of Russ’s pores, it felt like a skin he was shedding. “Are you out of your mind? That is simply a lie.”

“I’m just reporting what she said.”

Blindsided by the accusation, Russ tried to shake his head clear, tried to remember his exact words in his conversation with Sally.

“That’s not correct,” he said. “What I said to her was—I said that marriage is a blessing but can also be a struggle. That the enemy in a long relationship is boredom. That sometimes there’s not enough love in a marriage to overcome that boredom. And then—you have to understand, there was a context to it.”

Ambrose waited, glowering.

“We’d been talking about her parents’ divorce, how angry she is at them, and I thought we were close to a breakthrough. When she asked me if I was ever bored in my marriage, I felt I had to share something honest with her. I thought it was important for her to know that even a man of the cloth, even a pastor she respects—”

“Russ, Russ, Russ.”

“What was I supposed to do? Not answer honestly?”

“Within reason. There’s a certain art to it.”

“She asked me, ‘Are you bored in your marriage?’”

“I’m sorry to say that’s not how she remembers it. As she understood it, you were coming on to her.”

“Are you out of your mind? I have a fifteen-year-old daughter!”

“I’m not saying that’s what you were doing. But can you see why she might have perceived it that way?”

“She came to see me. If anyone was doing the coming-on, it was—do you know what I think happened? It was Laura. As soon as she saw Sally getting closer to me, putting her trust in me, Laura turned her against me. The person with the dirty mind here is Laura. Sally was perfectly comfortable with me until Laura got ahold of her.”

Ambrose seemed unexcited by Russ’s theory. “I know you don’t like Laura,” he said.

“Laura does not like me.”

“But take a step back and look at yourself. What were you thinking, talking about your sexual boredom to a vulnerable seventeen-year-old? Even if she was coming on to you, which I don’t believe, you had a clear responsibility to shut that down. Hard. Right away. Unambiguously.”

It didn’t matter if Ambrose’s glowering was just a trick. Under the pressure of it, Russ stepped back and was mortified by what he saw: not the sexual creepiness he stood accused of (the girls of the fellowship were taboo to him in umpteen ways) but the fatuousness of thinking he could ever be as hip as Ambrose. More than once, he’d heard Ambrose confess to the group that he’d been an arrogant, heartless prick as a teenager, and Russ had seen how thrilled the group was, not only by Ambrose’s honesty but by the image of him breaking female hearts. Made giddy by attention from a popular girl, Russ had imagined that he’d mastered the skill of honesty himself and could somehow erase his own timidity as a teenager, retroactively become a boy at ease with the likes of Sally Perkins. In his giddiness, he’d confessed, at least by implication, that Marion no longer turned him on. He’d felt the need to shed Marion, break free of her, in order to be more like Ambrose; and now his vanity stood shamefully revealed. His only thought was to get away, find fresher air, and seek comfort in God’s mercy.

“I guess I need to apologize,” he said.

“It’s too late for that,” Ambrose said. “Those kids aren’t coming back.”

“Maybe you should tell them why you weren’t in Kitsillie. If they heard it from you—”

“Kitsillie’s not the issue. Didn’t you hear what they were saying? The issue is your style of ministry. It’s simply not compatible with the kids I’m trying to reach.”

“The groovy kids.”

“The troubled kids. The ones who need an adult they can relate to. There are plenty of other kids who appreciate a more traditional style, and you’ll be fine with them. The numbers should be small enough for you to handle by yourself.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I can’t keep working here.”

Ambrose’s eyes were on him, but Russ felt too loathsomely sweaty to raise his own. The trip he’d been on since October had been the fantasy of a dork freeloading on another man’s charisma. Picturing the sorry little rump group that would remain after tonight, he could see only shame. Even the kids who stayed would never respect him after what they’d witnessed.

“You can’t leave,” he said. “You’re still under contract.”

“I will finish out the school year.”

“No,” Russ said. “It’s your group now. I’m not going to fight you for it.”

“I’m not saying you should quit. I’m saying I will find another church.”

“And I’m saying take it. I don’t want it.” Fearing he would cry, Russ stood up and went to the door. “You didn’t say one goddamned word in my defense up there.”

“You’re right,” Ambrose said. “I’m sorry about that.”

“The hell you are.”

“It’s unfortunate that the whole group got pulled into this. I know that was brutal for you.”

“I don’t want your compassion. In fact, you can shove it up your ass.”

Those were the last words he ever spoke to Ambrose. He left the church that night with a shame so crippling that he didn’t see how he could set foot in it again. His impulse was to resign from First Reformed and never again have anything to do with teenagers. But he couldn’t put his family through another move—Becky especially was having a splendid time at school—and so, the next morning, he went to Dwight Haefle and asked that Ambrose be given full charge of the youth group. Haefle, alarmed, asked why. Embracing his shame, not going into detail, Russ said he couldn’t relate to high-school kids. He said he would still run Sunday school and confirmation classes, would happily do more pastoral visitation, and might like to start an outreach program in the inner city.

“Hmm,” Haefle said. “Perhaps a few more sermons, too?”

“Absolutely.”

“More committee work.”

“Definitely.”

Haefle, who was sixty-three, seemed to weigh Russ’s failure against the agreeable prospect of working less. “Rick does seem to be doing a bang-up job,” he said.

From the senior minister’s office, Russ went to the church secretary and asked her to instruct Ambrose to direct any future communications to him in written form. Later that day, after getting the message, Ambrose came and tapped on Russ’s door, which Russ had locked. “Hey Russ,” he said. “You in there?”

Russ said nothing.

“Written communication? What the fuck?”

Russ knew he was being childish, but his hurt and hatred had a horizonless totality, unrelieved by adult perspective, and beneath them was the sweetness of being thrown upon God’s mercy: of making himself so alone and so wretched that only God could love him. He refused to speak to Ambrose, either on the day following his humiliation or ever after. While he performed his other duties vigorously, starting a women’s circle in the inner city, reaching new heights of political eloquence in his sermons, earning his paychecks and proving that everyone else still valued him, he avoided Ambrose and lowered his eyes when they accidentally met. By and by—Russ could sense it—Ambrose began to hate him for hating him. This, too, was sweet, because it gave Russ company and helped sustain his own hatred. Though he had some hope that the congregation was unaware of their feud, there was no hiding it in the church offices. Dwight Haefle kept trying to broker a peace, calling meetings, and the shamefulness of Russ’s refusals, the knowledge of how childish he appeared to Haefle and the secretarial staff, even to the janitor, compounded his wretchedness. His grievance with Ambrose was like a hair shirt, like a strand of barbed wire he wore wrapped around his chest. He suffered and in his suffering felt close to God.

The torment for which there was no reward came from Marion. Never having trusted Ambrose, she blamed him entirely for Russ’s humiliation. Russ ought to have been grateful for her loyalty, but instead it made him feel all the more alone. The difficulty was that he could never tell her the real story of the shaming that Ambrose and Sally had inflicted on him, because the story hinged on his having admitted to Sally, in a fit of admittedly poor judgment, that he and his wife very rarely made love anymore. This had obviously been a terrible betrayal of Marion. And yet, by a curious alchemy, as the months went by, he came to feel that Marion herself had been the cause of his humiliation, by having become unattractive to him. In the illogic of the alchemy, the more Marion was to blame, the less Sally was. Finally there came a night when Sally appeared to him in a dream, wearing an innocent but breast-accentuating argyle sweater, and meltingly gave him to understand that she preferred him to Ambrose and was ready to be his. Some unsleeping shred of superego steered the dream away from consummation, but he woke up in a state of maximum arousal. Creeping from the bed, his self-awareness attenuated by the darkness of the parsonage, he paid an onanistic visit to the bathroom. Into the sink came concrete substantiation of Sally’s complaint with him. He saw that it had been inside him all along.

Every man seeking salvation had a signature weakness to remind him of his nullity before the Lord and complicate communion with Him. Russ’s own weakness had been revealed to him in 1946, in Arizona, where his susceptibility to female beauty had aggravated a crisis of faith in the religion of his brethren. The image of Marion’s dewy dark eyes, her kiss-inviting mouth, her narrow waist and slender neck and fine-boned wrists, had come buzzing, like a huge and never resting hornet, into the formerly chaste chamber of his soul. Neither the imagined fires of Hell nor the very real prospect of breaking with his brethren could still the buzzing of that hornet. Although the result had been a permanent estrangement from his parents, he’d resolved his spiritual crisis by adopting a less stringent but still legitimate form of Christian faith, and he’d solved the problem of his weakness by lawfully wedding Marion.

Or so it had seemed. In the wake of his taboo-upending dream, he saw that he hadn’t actually overcome his weakness—that he’d merely repressed it from his consciousness. Now the dream had opened his eyes. Now, at forty-five, he saw beauty at every turn—in the forty-year-old women who turned to him with startling friendliness on Pirsig Avenue, the thirty-year-olds he glimpsed in passing cars, the twenty-year-old candy stripers at the hospital. Now he was beset not by a single hornet but by a chaotically swirling swarm of them. Try as he might, he couldn’t shut the windows of his soul against them. And then along came Frances Cottrell.

The afterfeel of her teasing little kick was persisting in his hip as he piloted the Fury through heavy snow on Archer Avenue. Three cars ahead of him, an orange truck was flashing yellow lights and strewing salt, but he had yet to see a snowplow. Frances had fallen silent, and he felt obliged to say something, if only to defuse the charge of her having foot-prodded her pastor in the vicinity of his genitals, but the Fury’s tractionless tires were palpably shimmying. If he got stuck in the snow, significantly delayed, the outing would become a misadventure that Marion, the next time she saw Kitty at church, might naturally remark on and thereby learn that Frances, not Kitty, had come along with him. As if he were one with the Fury, he willed himself to keep a grip. It was vital to avoid hard braking, but the momentum of events was frightening—Perry’s giving drugs to Frances’s son, the painful conversation that Russ was now obliged to have with him, Frances’s invitation to smoke marijuana with her, and the risk that if Russ declined her invitation she would look elsewhere for company on her youth quest; the upsetting fact that she’d already been looking elsewhere, not more than an hour ago. She’d sat chatting away with Rick Ambrose, against whose hipness Russ had abundantly demonstrated he could not contend.

“So, ah,” he said, when he’d safely braked for a stoplight. “You had a good talk with Rick?”

“I did.”

“I don’t suppose he mentioned that he and I are not on speaking terms.”

“No, I already knew that. Everybody knows that.”

So much for his hope that their feud wasn’t universal knowledge.

“Why do you ask?” she said. “Am I not allowed to talk to him if I want to be friends with you?”

“Of course not. You can talk to whoever you like. Just be aware that everything with Rick Ambrose is always about Rick Ambrose. He can be very seductive, and you might think he’s your friend. But you’d better watch your back.”

“Why, Reverend Hildebrandt,” she said with a lilt. “I do believe you’re jealous.”

The traffic light turned green, and he nudged the gas pedal. The rear wheels squealed and fishtailed a little.

“I mean jealous of Crossroads,” she said. “Rick’s got a hundred and fifty kids adoring him every Sunday. You get eight old ladies twice a month. I’d be jealous, too, if I were you.”

“I’m not jealous. There’s nowhere I’d rather be right now than here.”

“That’s nice of you to say.”

“I mean it.”

“Okay. But then why the hard feelings about Rick? I guess it’s none of my business. But if he’s great at what he does and you’re great at what you do—I don’t see the problem.”

Even on a straight stretch of road, the car was subtly bucking, wanting to spin.

“It’s a long story,” Russ said.

“In other words, none of my business.”

Russ’s refusal to forgive Ambrose, which for nearly three years had organized his interior life and received daily support from Marion, seemed silly when he imagined explaining it to Frances. Worse than silly: unattractive. He saw that, to have a chance with her, he might need to let go of his hatred. But his heart didn’t want to. The loss would be huge, would waste a thousand days of nursing his grudge, would render them meaningless in retrospect. There was also the danger that, if he made peace with Ambrose, Frances would feel even freer to admire Ambrose, and that he, Russ, would end up with nothing—neither his righteous pain nor Frances as his private reward for bearing it. He and Ambrose would still be competing, and he would lose the competition.

“Not to be all Mrs. Fix-It,” she said, “but Crossroads has been so good for Larry, and you’ve been so good for me. It seems like there ought to be some solution.”

“Rick doesn’t like me, and I don’t like Rick. It’s just a natural antipathy.”

“But why? Why? It goes against everything you say in your sermons. It goes against what you said to me about turning the other cheek. I can’t stop thinking about that. It’s the reason I wanted to come along with you today.”

The spot on his hip where she’d kicked him was still buzzing. He understood her to be saying that she was attracted to his goodness, and that, in order to do a very bad thing, to break his vows of marriage, he was now required to practice goodness.

“It means a lot to me,” he said. “That you came along today.”

“Oh, pooh. It’s an honor.”

“You mentioned getting involved in Crossroads yourself.” A tremor in his voice betrayed his anxiety. “Were you serious about that?”

“God, you really are jealous.”

Again—again—she prodded his upper leg with her toe.

“My only job,” she said, “is being a mother. I only get to work with you and Kitty twice a month, so, yes, I asked Rick if I could work in Crossroads as an adviser. He didn’t seem too enthusiastic, but they always take a couple of parents on the Arizona trip, and he put me on the list for that.”

“For the spring trip,” Russ said, aghast.

“Yes!”

Arizona was his place. The thought of her being there with Ambrose was atrocious.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I know I shouldn’t try to save the day. But you should be going on those trips yourself. You obviously love the Navajos, you lived there for however many years. If you and Rick could patch things up, we could all be there together. Wouldn’t that be fun? I would love that.”

She bounced on the seat, so lovely in her energy that Russ became confused. Lo, I bring you tidings of great joy—peace on earth among all men. The opposing headlights on Archer Avenue were tightly bunched, in every car a stewing driver. There was nothing of Christmas in the mess the weather was making. The joy of the season was in Frances, in her childlike questioning of the strife between Russ and Ambrose, and a tendril of her joy was reaching into Russ’s hardened heart. Was it possible? Might he finally forgive Rick Ambrose? If his reward on earth were Frances? A week in Arizona in her hopeful, playful, eye-delighting presence? Or maybe more than just a week—maybe half a lifetime? Was she the second chance that God was giving him? The chance to entirely transform his life? To joyfully make love with a joyful woman? He’d been hating himself and Ambrose for a thousand Marion-darkened days, imagining that he was close to God, while all along, every second of every day, a simple turn of his heart toward forgiveness, which was the essence of Christ’s message to the world, the true meaning of Christmas, had been there to be freely chosen.

“I’m going to think about that,” he said.

“Please do,” she said. “There’s no earthly reason you and Rick can’t get along.”

In medieval romances, a lady set her suitor an impossible task to perform, the retrieval of the Grail, the slaying of a dragon. It seemed to Russ that his fair lady, in her hunting cap, was requiring him to slay a dragon in his heart.

Mayor Daley didn’t plow Englewood until the streets of white neighborhoods were cleared to bare pavement. Russ zigzagged through side streets, where the snow was more powdery and gave better traction, and maintained his momentum by rolling through stop signs. By the time the Community of God came into view, the hour was approaching five o’clock. To get home by seven, so that the trip didn’t become a thing that Marion might comment on to Kitty Reynolds, he needed to unload the Fury quickly.

The door to the community center was locked, the light above it off. Russ rang the bell, and they waited in the invisibly falling snow, Frances stamping her feet against the chill, until the light came on and Theo Crenshaw opened the door.

“I’d almost given up on you,” he said to Russ.

“Yeah, pretty serious snow.”

An impression that Russ had had before—that Theo was reluctant to acknowledge Frances’s presence—deepened when Theo turned away and kicked a wooden wedge under the door.

“I’m Frances,” she said brightly. “Remember me?”

Theo nodded without looking at her. He was dressed in a saggy velour pullover and ill-fitting stretch trousers. He seemed immune to the vanity that had led Russ to wear his favorite shirt and his sheepskin coat for Frances. The poignancy of an urban preacher, beloved on Sundays to the women of his congregation but otherwise so very alone in his church, with no support staff, no associate, his annual salary paltry, his primary sustenance spiritual, was especially keen on a raw December evening. Russ thought there might be no one he admired more than Theo, no one he knew more authentically Christian. Theo made him feel as privileged as Rick Ambrose made him feel disadvantaged, and he could imagine how Frances, showing up in her suburban blond loveliness, might be an unwelcome apparition to Theo.

He was pleased to see her pitch right in and hustle boxes into the community center. He hoped that Theo, seeing her cheerful industry, might better acknowledge her in the future. As always, the delivery of food and toys was a straightforward transaction. Russ expected no thanks for the donations, and Theo expected no lingering for sociability. When all the boxes were inside, Theo put his hands on his hips and said, “Good. Some ladies will be here in the morning for anybody who wants to stop by.”

“And we will see you here again on Tuesday,” Russ said. He clapped his hands and turned to Frances. “Shall we?”

He saw that she was holding a small, flat package. It was wrapped in Santa Claus paper and red ribbon.

“Will you do something for me?” she asked Theo. “Will you give this to Ronnie tomorrow? Tell him it’s from the lady he made the drawings with?”

Russ hadn’t seen the package in any of the boxes. She must have had it in her coat pocket. He wished she’d mentioned it to him earlier, because Theo was frowning.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“It’s just a set of Flair pens. They’re great for coloring-books.”

“That’s nice,” Theo said. “Some little boy or girl be happy to get that.”

“No, it’s for Ronnie. I got it specially for him.”

“All well and good. But I think you should put that with the other toys.”

“Why? He’s such a sweet boy—why can’t I give him a little present?”

She seemed innocently surprised, innocently hurt. An instinct to protect her welled up in Russ so strongly, he thought he might really be in love with her.

Theo wasn’t similarly moved. “I was given to understand,” he said, “that you and Ronnie’s mother had some words.”

“It’s a gift,” Frances said.

“I already asked you once to leave that boy be. Now I’m asking you again, politely.”

Frances’s hurt was turning to anger. It was an emotion Russ had never seen in her, and the sight of it turned him on. He imagined her angry at him, the full womanly range of her emotions bared to him, in the kind of spat that lovers sometimes had.

“Why?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

Theo rolled his eyes toward Russ, as if she were his woman to control.

“Frances,” Russ said, moving toward her. “Maybe we should trust Theo on this. We don’t know the situation.”

“What is the situation?”

“The situation,” Theo said, “is that Clarice, the boy’s mother, doesn’t want you talking to him. She came and complained to me about that.”

Frances laughed. “Because why? Because she’s such a perfect mother?”

Her derision, too, was sexually exciting to Russ, but morally it was unattractive. He placed a hand on her shoulder and tried to turn her away. “You and I can talk about this later,” he said.

She shrugged off his hand. “I’m sorry, but how is it right for a boy who should be in a special school, getting special attention—how is it okay for him to be wandering around the neighborhood during school hours, cadging quarters?”

“Frances,” Russ said.

“I appreciate your concern,” Theo said evenly. “But I suggest you head home. It’s a long drive in the snow.”

“We really should be going,” Russ agreed.

Frances now did direct her anger at him. “Does this seem right to you? Why isn’t someone calling social services? Isn’t this something the state should know about?”

“The state?” Theo smiled at Russ as if they were in on a joke. “You think the State of Illinois has a functioning child-protection system?”

“What are you smiling at?” Frances said to Russ. “Did I say something funny?”

He erased his smile. “Not at all. Theo is just saying it’s not a perfect system. It’s understaffed and overwhelmed. We can talk about it in the car.”

Again he tried to steer her toward the door, and again she shed his hand. “I want to know,” she said, “why I can’t give a needy boy one tiny little Christmas present.”

The time on the community center’s wall clock was 5:18. Each passing minute deepened the trouble Russ would be in with Marion, and he knew he should insist that they leave. But again his lady was asking him to perform a difficult task—to side with her against an urban minister with whom he’d painstakingly cultivated a relationship.

“I take your point about the gift,” he said to Theo. “But I’m kind of with Frances here. It doesn’t seem right that Ronnie’s on the street by himself.”

Theo threw him a disappointed look and turned to Frances. “You want to take charge of that boy? You want to take that on? Retarded South Side nine-year-old? You ready for that?”

“No,” she said. “That would be a lot for me to take on. But I can’t help—”

“He’s already been in foster care once. Are you familiar with that system?”

“Not—no. Not really.”

“We’re here to learn,” Russ said—managing, in one breath, to patronize Frances and sound idiotic to Theo.

“You got to go pretty far down the list,” Theo said, “to find the family that will take a boy like Ronnie. That’s going to be a family collecting checks for half a dozen kids—to see any profit, you need volume. And how do you handle half a dozen kids?”

“You lock them in a room,” Russ said, to sound less stupid.

“You lock them all up in a room. You don’t spare the rod.”

“That’s a bad system, I agree,” Frances said.

“Then work on changing it, if you want to try to help. Clarice isn’t all bad, she was just too young when she had Ronnie. When she gets herself together, she takes him to the school in Washington Park. That’s on a good day. On bad days he falls through the cracks. He knows to come here when she’s strung out, and sooner or later she always comes to find him. The problem is the men who give her drugs. She gets lost in that, and the only thing that gets her out of it is mother’s pride. If she didn’t have Ronnie, I reckon she’d be dead by now.”

“I can understand that,” Frances said. “I just want to give him something he might like.”

“That’s right. That’s what you want. What I want is for Clarice not to up and tell Ronnie to keep away from a church where he’s safe.”

“Well, so, let me write her a note. Is there a piece of paper I can write on?”

“Frances,” Russ said.

“She needs to know I’m not trying to take Ronnie away from her. Theo can give her the note with the present.”

Theo made his eyes very wide, suggesting a limit to his patience.

“Look,” Russ said. “This is silly. If you want Ronnie to have colored pens, Theo can take off the wrapping paper and give them to him. I don’t think writing a note is a good idea.”

“I wanted him to have a present to unwrap on Christmas.”

Theo, his limit reached, shook his head and walked away. Russ snatched the gift from Frances and hurried after him, into the sanctuary.

“Do me a favor and take this,” he said, pressing the gift on Theo. “She means well. She really does care about Ronnie. She’s just…”

“I was surprised to see her,” Theo said. “I assumed you were coming with Kitty.”

“Yeah, ah. Change of plan.”

The single fluorescent light burning above the altar, behind an old upright piano and a freestanding organ, seemed to intensify the sanctuary’s chill.

“Your private affairs are none of my business,” Theo said. “But I’d appreciate it if you’d take the log out of your eye and tell her to keep clear of that boy. If she won’t do it, she needs to find someplace else to go with her good intentions. I don’t need that kind of thing here.”

Two years of bridge-building with Theo were in jeopardy. Russ knew exactly why Theo was impatient with Frances. He himself had been impatient with other First Reformed ladies who’d joined the circle, Juanita Fuller, Wilma St. John, June Goya. They’d spoken to people in the neighborhood, including Theo, with a treacly sort of maternal condescension, partly a product of fear, partly racism repackaged in self-flattering form. He’d had to ask each of them to leave the circle, and if Theo had now been complaining about anyone but Frances, Russ would have deferred to him and kicked her out. He did believe that the flavor of Frances’s offense was different, more a matter of high spirits and irreverence. But it was possible that he only believed this because he was falling in love with her.

“I’ll speak to her,” he said.

“All righty,” Theo said. “You get yourself home safe.”

An inch of fresh snow had fallen on the Fury’s windshield. The lightening of its rear load made its handling even more floaty as Russ steered it homeward. Frances was now sitting in normal passenger posture, her feet on the floor, and seemed coldly aggrieved with him.

“I don’t suppose I can ask,” she said, “what the two men had to say about me behind my back.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” Russ said. “Theo can be stubborn. Sometimes you just have to defer to how he wants things done.”

“I’m sure the two of you think I’m a dunce, but it wouldn’t have killed him to give Ronnie my present.”

“Your gesture was lovely. I’m all for it.”

“But apparently there’s just something about me that makes black people hate me.”

“Not at all.”

“I don’t hate them.”

“Of course not. It’s just…” He took a deep breath, for courage. “It might not be a bad idea,” he said, “to step back and think about how you’re coming across. It’s one thing to be in New Prospect, in your own milieu, with people like yourself. You can be as outspoken as you want. You can openly disagree with people, and they’ll take it as a sign of respect. But that kind of spirit comes across differently when you’re a visitor in a Black community.”

“I’m not allowed to disagree with them?”

“No, that’s—”

“Because it’s not like every black person is so perfect. I’m sure they do plenty of disagreeing among themselves.”

“I’m not saying you can’t disagree with Theo Crenshaw. I disagreed with him myself today.”

“I didn’t see much sign of that.”

“I’m talking about an inner attitude. The first thing I do, when I feel myself disagreeing, is acknowledge my own ignorance. Maybe there’s something in Theo’s experience that leads him to think the way he does, something I can’t immediately see. Instead of just shooting from the hip, I stop and ask myself, ‘Why does he feel differently about this than I do?’ And then I listen to his answer. He and I may still disagree, but at least I’ve acknowledged that a Black man’s experience in this country is profoundly different than mine.”

Frances offered no rejoinder, and Russ dared to hope that he was getting through to her. He had selfish reasons to keep her in the Tuesday circle, but they didn’t make his message less sincere.

“You have a good heart, Frances. A wonderful heart. But you can’t really blame Theo for not immediately seeing that. If you want him to trust you, you need to try to cultivate a different attitude. Begin with the assumption that you don’t know anything about being Black. If you make that adjustment, I guarantee he’ll notice the difference.”

She sighed so heavily that the windshield fogged. “I embarrassed you, didn’t I.”

“Not at all.”

“No, I did. I can see that now. I was trying to be Mrs. Fix-It.”

Russ glowed with pride. He, not Theo, had been right about her true nature.

“You didn’t do anything so wrong,” he said. “But the next time you see Theo, it wouldn’t hurt to tell him you’re sorry. A simple heartfelt apology goes a long way. Theo’s a good man, a good Christian. If you change your inner attitude, he’ll know it. It is so important to me, Frances, so very important, that you keep coming on our Tuesdays.”

This was the mildest of allusions to his pride in her, his hopes for a deepening of their intimacy, but he worried that it was still too much; and, indeed, the allusion wasn’t lost on her.

“Why, Reverend Hildebrandt,” she said. “The things you do say.”

Desire surged in him so powerfully, it felt like a premonition of its fulfillment. He thought of the blues recordings he’d left in his office, the excuse they would give him to bring Frances inside the church, the course that events might take in the dark of his office, if he kept up his nerve and didn’t get them back too late. Feeling one with the Fury, he urged it across Fifty-ninth Street, where the snow was heavily furrowed.

The furrows were deeper than he’d judged. They absorbed his momentum and deflected him into a sideways skid. For a very bad moment, neither steering nor braking had any effect. He clutched the wheel helplessly while Frances cried out and the Fury slid backward through the intersection. There was a bump and a bang and a crunch of metal on metal.

Resolved: that goodness is an inverse function of intelligence. First affirmative speaker: Perry Hildebrandt, New Prospect Township High School.

Let’s begin by positing that the essence of goodness is unselfishness: loving others as one loves oneself, performing costly acts of charity, denying oneself pleasures that harm others, and so forth. And then let’s imagine an act of spontaneous kindness to a previously hostile party—to one’s sister, for example—that accords with our posited definition of goodness. If the actor lacks intelligence, we need inquire no further: this person is good. But suppose that the actor is helpless not to calculate the ancillary selfish advantages accruing from his charitable act. Suppose that his mind works so quickly that, even as he’s performing the act, he’s fully aware of these advantages. Is his goodness not thereby fully compromised? Can we designate as “good” an act that he might also have performed through the sheerly selfish calculations of his intellect?

Returning to his room, where Judson was kneeling over the homemade Stratego board, Perry weighed the benefits and costs of taking his sister’s place at the Haefles’ reception. On the credit side were the goodness of this action, the satisfaction of adhering to his new resolution, the unprecedented look of gratitude with which Becky had accepted his offer, and the advancement of his self-interested campaign to secure her silence regarding his earlier bad actions. On the debit side, he now had to attend a reception for clergymen, with Judson.

“Listen, kiddo,” Perry said, sitting down across the board from him. “I need to ask you a favor. How would you feel about going to a party where there aren’t any kids your age?”

“When.”

“As soon as Mom and Dad get home. We’ll go with them.”

Judson’s brow creased. “I thought we were playing the game.”

“We can slide it under my bed. It’ll be there tomorrow.”

“Why do I have to go?”

“Because I have to go. You don’t want to be home alone, do you?”

A brief silence.

“I don’t mind,” Judson said.

“Really? You kind of freaked out, that time in the fall. It wasn’t even at night.”

Judson stared at the game board with an odd little smile, as if the boy who’d freaked out about some noises in the basement, though undeniably him, were an object of faint amusement; as if the shame of that time in the fall, when he’d been left home alone for too long, might pass over him and land somewhere else.

“The snacks will be good,” Perry said. “You can bring your book and find a place to read.”

“Why do you have to go?”

“It’s something I’m doing for Becky.”

Perry waited for the obvious question: Why do a good thing for Becky and not for his little brother? But this wasn’t the way a superior human being’s mind worked.

“Can we finish the game first?”

“Probably not.”

“You promised we’d play tonight.”

“We started it tonight. We’ll finish it tomorrow.”

Absorbing this sophistry, Judson stared at the board. “It’s your move,” he said.

Each player had forty pieces whose identities were concealed to his opponent. The object was to capture your opponent’s flag, via the slaughter of lesser pieces by pieces of greater rank, while avoiding deadly collisions with your opponent’s bombs, which were immotile and removable only by your very low-ranking miners. In classical strategy, you planted your flag at the rear of your forces and surrounded it with bombs, but Judson had apparently now grasped the weakness of this strategy: as soon as your opponent could advance a miner, unscathed, to the protecting bombs, your flag was helpless and the game was over. Observing Judson’s guileless excitement about his new idea, Perry could have pretended to be surprised by it and let him win the game. Instead, anticipating Judson’s more freewheeling placement of bombs, he’d deployed his own miners in more forward positions. It was plausibly good to beat Judson again and again, teaching him to not betray his strategy, forcing him to develop his skills, until he was able to win fair and square. Wouldn’t Judson’s happiness then be all the greater for being hard earned? Or was this merely the rationalization of an intelligent person who selfishly hated losing, even to his little brother?

Becky in her boots had clattered down the stairs, bound for the Crossroads concert, and Perry had defused the third of Judson’s bombs, at the nugatory sacrifice of a miner to a captain, when the telephone rang. He went and picked up on the extension in the parental bedroom.

“Yeah, ah—Perry?” his father said. His voice sounded strained and metallically distorted. There was street noise in the background. “Can I speak to your mother?”

“She’s not here.”

“She already went to the Haefles’?”

“No. I haven’t seen her all day.”

“Ah, okay, so. When you see her, can you tell her not to wait for me? There’s a problem with the car—I’m still in the city. Can you tell her she should just go on without me? It’s important that one of us be there.”

“Sure. But what if she—”

“Thanks, Perry. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.”

With notable haste, his father ended the call. Likewise notable had been the guilty look he’d given Perry some hours earlier, when Perry spotted him and Mrs. Cottrell in the family car.

Perry placed the receiver in its cradle and pondered what to do. Mrs. Cottrell was, without question, a fox—not only in the salacious sense of the word but in her slyness. In his encounters with her since Larry Cottrell had made the dumb mistake of getting high while babysitting, Perry had detected a sharpening of her interest in him, a glint of mischief in her eyes. Larry had sworn to Perry that he hadn’t narked him out, but his mother obviously suspected who’d sold him the dime bag. And now Perry had discovered, by accident, at the corner of Pirsig and Maple, a dangerous liaison between Mrs. Cottrell and the Reverend Father. To be busted by the Reverend now, after forming his resolution and liquidating the asset, would be the height of irony.

Impelled by worry, after watching his father speed away on Pirsig, he’d postponed the rest of his Christmas shopping and walked to the Cottrell residence for a word with Larry. If all Larry’s mother had was a suspicion, and if she happened to voice it to the Reverend, Perry could simply deny everything. The worry was that Larry was weak. If he’d fingered Perry by name, despite swearing that he hadn’t, denials would not avail.

Larry could have been Exhibit A in Becky’s contention that Perry merely used people. For a while, Perry had dodged him at Crossroads meetings and inventively deflected his invitations to hang out. Larry was immature, a squeaker, a newcomer, and thus of scant utility to Perry in his quest to reach the center of Crossroads. But Perry couldn’t baldly reject him without running afoul of Crossroads precepts. One day, after school, Larry attached himself to Perry and Ansel Roder as they made their way to Roder’s house. Roder was in a magnanimous mood that day. Learning that Larry had never tried pot and very much wanted to, he included him in the passing of the bong, whereupon Larry embarrassed Perry. With ear-grating giggles, he offered a running play-by-play of his mind’s reaction to chemical insult, and when Roder finally told him to shut the fuck up he gigglingly explicated his insulted mind’s reaction to it. He giggled, too, when he bumped into Roder’s turntable and harmed the LP that was playing. Roder took Perry aside and said, “I don’t want that kid here again.” Perry was of similar opinion, but Larry, serenely unaware of how uncoolly he’d behaved, proceeded to pester him to be included in future festivities. He was a poignant figure, messed up by the recent death of his father. To sell him drugs would have been a pure kindness if it hadn’t also made rationally self-interested sense: here was a loyal customer, a known quantity, whose mother gave him a handsome allowance. To then smoke with him the pot he bought might likewise have been construable as charity, an act of friendship, if it hadn’t accorded with Perry’s strategic desire to be less dependent on Roder’s generosity, and with certain other benefits. It was proving pleasant to Perry to have an adoring acolyte in Crossroads, pleasant to see his foxy mother up close, in her den, pleasant to exercise his dexterity on the model airplanes that Larry could afford with his allowance, pleasant to dip brushes into the nifty square bottles of paint he’d long coveted at the hobby shop. Not until Larry got himself busted by his mother—semi-deliberately, as a self-destructive way of defying her, Perry suspected—did the costs of their friendship outweigh the benefits. Larry had promised his mother he wouldn’t buy more pot, and Perry, despite having lost him as a customer, was obliged to remain friends with him, lest he be hurt and nark him out.

The Cottrell house was a white brick Colonial, impressively large for a widow and two children. Larry was at home with his kid sister and invited Perry in from the snow.

“We have a problem,” Perry said when they were in Larry’s bedroom. “I just saw your mother with my father.”

“Yeah, they’re doing some church thing in the city.”

“Well, so, I have to ask again. Is our secret safe with you?”

Among Larry’s insecure tics was rubbing the sebaceous nodes around his nose and sniffing his fingertips. Perry, too, enjoyed the smell of his own sebum, but such sniffing was better done privately.

“You understand why I’m asking.”

“You don’t have to be paranoid,” Larry said. “The whole thing’s over, except that I can’t watch TV for another nine days. I’m going to miss the Orange Bowl.”

“No mention of my name, then.”

“I already swore to you. Do you want me to get a Bible?”

“No need. I just hadn’t imagined your mom going into the city with my dad. It was only the two of them. I have a bad feeling that we haven’t heard the last of this.”

“What did you expect? You’re the one who sells dope.”

“Exactly my point. My exposure is potentially far more serious than yours.”

“I’m already the one who got punished.”

“You’re the one who made the mistake, my friend.”

Larry nodded, touching his face again. “What’s in the bag?”

“A present for my brother. Do you want to see it?”

He was glad of the chance to let Larry admire the movie camera, to wind it up and shoot imaginary footage with him, before it became irrevocably Judson’s. After an hour, which was the minimum duration for his visit to pass as a friendly social call, rather than the targeted instrumentality it actually had been, he headed home through snow swirling down from a dark sky. He didn’t think Larry would break, even under renewed pressure, but the irony of getting busted now, when he’d resolved to be a better person, was persuasively vivid to him. He still feared mischief from Mrs. Cottrell, and there was another worrisome loose end. In the days since Becky had annihilated him as a person, in the coat closet at First Reformed, she’d seemed more pissed off with him than ever. He imagined a full-scale family Confrontation in which he insisted on his innocence—with a kind of retroactive honesty, since he’d now forsworn the use and sale of mind-altering substances—only to be undercut by his sister’s denunciation.

What providence it therefore was when, ensconced in his room with Judson, he’d heard Becky crying. His ensuing exchange with her had ended in a warm embrace, a sense of being rewarded for his resolution. This would have been entirely satisfactory if he hadn’t then felt so deliciously relieved of his worry about her. The relief, its selfishness, negated all the goodness he’d displayed, and it cast an unfortunate light on his feeling of being rewarded. Shouldn’t true goodness be its own reward? He wondered if an action, to qualify as authentically good, needed not only to be untainted by self-interest but also to bring no pleasure of any kind.

The parental alarm clock, which he knew to be two minutes slow, showed 6:45. His mother was now so bizarrely late that all bets on her arrival time were off. He considered a good action that would almost certainly bring him no pleasure: going to the Haefles’ without waiting for his mother. The action had only the faintest taint of self-interest, in the form of the credit he might get for ensuring that the Hildebrandt family was represented at the party. This credit would be too feeble to be fungible if he was accused of selling drugs, and so could be discounted.

He wrote a short note to his mother, on the scratch pad by the phone, and went to collect Judson. “Time for a walk in the snow.”

“I thought we were waiting for Mom and Dad.”

“Nope, just you and me, kiddo. We are the Hildebrandts tonight.”

A minor mystery of adulthood was that his parents referred to latex overshoes as rubbers. Even Becky, that vessel of purity, had been seen to suppress a snigger at the word. The parents surely knew its other meaning, and yet they persisted in using it, with a confounding absence of embarrassment: Make sure you wear your rubbers. Though Judson’s rubbers were innocent, Perry was ashamed of his. Ansel Roder and his moneyed friends wore alpine hiking boots in the snow.

It was still coming down heavily when he and Judson ventured out in their rubbers. Judson ran ahead, kicking up sheets and clumps of it, the interruption of Stratego forgotten in the excitement of a winter storm. Watching him fall down and pick himself back up, Perry mourned no longer being small enough that falling didn’t hurt. He no longer even remembered how it felt to have the ground so unthreateningly proximate. Why had he been in such a hurry to grow up? It was as if he’d never experienced the grace of childhood. As he watched his little brother frolic, he felt another downward tug in his mood, stronger than the tug he’d felt while shopping but also less painful, because it was occasioned by a feeling of metempsychosis. More surely than before, he sensed that he was going down, was irredeemably bad in the head, but this time it seemed to matter less, because his soul was connected to Judson’s by love and fraternity, at some mystical level interchangeable, and Judson was a blessed child, literally born on a Sunday, and would always be okay, even if he, Perry, wasn’t.

On the front stoop of the Superior Parsonage, between rows of bushes with Christmas lights dimmed by snow, he crouched to brush off Judson’s parka and help him with the buckles of his rubbers, which were encrusted with ice and difficult to undo.

“I still don’t see why we’re here.”

“Because Dad is stuck in the city and Mom is AWOL.”

“What is AWOL.”

Perry rang the doorbell. “It means absent without leave. Dad said it’s important that the family be here. By process of elimination, that leaves you and me.”

The door was opened by a very large white bunny, Mrs. Haefle, in a red apron embroidered with holly leaves. Perry quickly and cogently explained why he and Judson were there, but Mrs. Haefle seemed slow on the uptake. “Do your parents know you’re here?”

“They were unavoidably detained. I left them a note.”

She looked over her shoulder. “Dwight?”

Reverend Haefle appeared in the doorway. “Perry! Judson! What a nice surprise.”

He ushered them inside and took their coats. Functioning home insulation being a perk of senior ministry, the house was hot and steamy. Clergymen and their spouses filled the living room, obeying the obscure social imperatives of adult life, apparently enjoying themselves. Reverend Haefle led the Hildebrandts into the dining room, which was acridly scented with the combustion of Sterno cans beneath a copper-clad pan of Swedish meatballs, a tray of potatoes in a sauce of cream and onions, and a cauldron of something fumingly alcoholic, with blanched almonds and bloated raisins floating in it. Through the open kitchen door, Perry saw wine jugs and a vodka bottle on a counter.

“Take a plate and load up,” Reverend Haefle said. “Doris’s heritage is Swedish, and she makes a mean meatball—don’t forget the gravy. The potatoes are a dish called Jannson’s Temptation. It wouldn’t be a Swedish Christmas without a lot of heavy cream.”

Judson, though he must have been starving, politely hesitated.

“Don’t hold back, lad. We can use a young appetite. If you’d like some company your own age, our granddaughters are in the basement.”

Thinking of the Crappier Parsonage’s appalling basement, Perry pictured the granddaughters clad in rags and chained to a filthy stone wall. Yes, we keep them in the basement …

“And what is this?” he said, indicating the cauldron.

“That is a Scandinavian Christmas drink for grownups. We call it gløgg.”

Left alone with Judson, who evinced his native moderation by taking three meatballs, a spoon of potatoes, a quantity of raw carrots and broccoli florets, and, from a triple-decker stand laden with homemade cookies, two dry-looking balls dusted with powdered sugar, Perry considered the incredible intensity of the alcohol fumes wafting off the cauldron. It was like sticking his nose in a bottle of rubbing alcohol. There was, he realized only now, some ambiguity in his resolution, some scenarios not explicitly addressed by its terms. To wit: Was he required to abjure alcohol? Perhaps one cup of gløgg, taken on an empty stomach to maximize its clout, might be permissible on a night when he had no other antidote to the sinking of his mood? With an unsteady hand, splashing a little, he ladled the wine-dark substance into a ceramic cup and glanced behind him. No one was watching.

Escaping to the hallway, he took a slurp of the most delicious drink he’d ever tasted. It was clovey and cinnamony, full of vodka. The ordinarily nauseating gastric sourness of wine was overwhelmed by sugar. His face went warm immediately.

“Where am I supposed to go?” Judson said, holding his plate and a fork.

At the end of the hallway, they found stairs leading down to a proper recreation room, shag-carpeted, paneled with knotty pine, and dominated by a pool table. Sprawled on the carpeting, near an empty but usable fireplace, was a pair of girls younger than Perry and older than Judson, playing Yahtzee. Perry as a boy, when asked to play with female strangers, had routinely been paralyzed by self-consciousness. He was impressed by how naturally Judson sat down with the girls and introduced himself. Judson truly was a blessed child, rightly sure that strangers would like him. Or maybe the lure of Yahtzee was so powerful that it simply swept away all shyness.

Somehow, though Perry hadn’t been conscious of drinking, his cup was already empty. He ate two sodden raisins from the bottom, extracting precious liquid. A thin line of spice scum marked the level of his tragically modest initial serving, and as he went back up the stairs he reasoned that, not having taken the entire “one cup” permitted by the loophole in his resolution, he was entitled to a refill. His face was flaming, but he hadn’t achieved a proper buzz yet.

Now standing by the food and drink were two men in lumpy sweaters and priestly black slacks, selecting cookies. Perry sidled up to them and waited. Before he could refill his cup, Mrs. Haefle came swooping toward him.

“Have you had any meatballs?”

Palming the cup against his hip, out of sight, he borrowed a concept from her husband. “Still working up an appetite,” he said.

Unilaterally, as if he were a toddler, or a dog, Mrs. Haefle loaded a plate for him. She was stout and rabbity and meddling, a poor advertisement for Swedish heritage. She handed him enough meatballs and Temptation to thwart formation of a buzz, and he had no choice but to take the plate. With a meddling hand, she turned him away from the fuming cauldron. “The other teenagers are in the sunroom,” she said.

As he walked away, he felt her following him, making sure he conformed to her patronizing wishes. Uninterested in teenagers in the sunroom, he weaved through the living room to a bookcase, set his plate on an end table, selected a volume at random, and pretended to absorb himself in it. Mrs. Haefle had been buttonholed, but she was still monitoring him. Her vigilance reminded him of certain teachers at Lifton Central whose lives were evidently devoid of every pleasure but the sadism of denying younger people pleasure.

Finally the doorbell rang. Mrs. Haefle went to answer it, and Perry darted back to the dining room with his cup. Two white-haired ladies were at the cookie station, but he didn’t know them, had no relationship with them, and brazenly filled his cup with steaming gløgg. Hearing Mrs. Haefle’s voice, as she returned from the coat closet, he escaped through the kitchen and from there to the basement stairs, where he sat down. From below came the rattle of dice in the Yahtzee shaker, the brooklike patter of Judson’s voice.

In no time, again, Perry emptied the cup. As with every illicit substance he’d ever sampled, his thirst for gløgg seemed inordinate, abnormal. It occurred to him that standing on the kitchen counter was a bottle of pure vodka. Since the accounting of what constituted “one cup” was already fubar, he went ahead and crept back into the kitchen, poured several ounces of vodka, and quickly downed it. He left the cup in the sink.

Now in possession of a satisfactory buzz, his spirits rising a little, his resolution affronted but arguably unviolated, he went to test his liquor-holding powers on the clergy in the living room. Beside the neglected fire in the fireplace, two men, one tall and one short, stood side by side as if they’d run out of things to say but hadn’t yet moved on to greener conversational pastures. Perry introduced himself.

The taller man was wearing a red turtleneck beneath a camel-hair blazer. “I’m Adam Walsh, from Trinity Lutheran. This is Rabbi Meyer from Temple Beth-El.”

The rabbi, who had hair only behind his ears, shook Perry’s hand. “Happy Hanukkah.”

In case this was a quip, Perry produced a laugh, perhaps overloud. From the corner of his eye, he could see Mrs. Haefle sourly watching him.

“Is your father here?” Reverend Walsh said.

“No, he’s on a pastoral mission in the city. He got stuck in the snow.”

There ensued talk of snow. Perry had not yet developed the fascination with weather that every adult seemed to have. After voicing his meaningless opinion that the snow was already eight inches deep, he broached the subject of goodness and its relation to intelligence. He’d come to the reception for selfless reasons, but he now saw that he might get not only a free buzz but free advice from, as it were, two professionals.

“I suppose what I’m asking,” he said, “is whether goodness can ever truly be its own reward, or whether, consciously or not, it always serves some personal instrumentality.”

Reverend Walsh and the rabbi exchanged glances in which Perry detected pleasant surprise. It gratified him to upset their expectations of a fifteen-year-old.

“Adam may have a different answer,” the rabbi said, “but in the Jewish faith there is really only one measure of righteousness: Do you celebrate God and obey His commandments?”

“That would suggest,” Perry said, “that goodness and God are essentially synonymous.”

“That is the idea,” the rabbi said. “In biblical times, when God manifested Himself more directly, He could seem like quite the hard-ass—striking people blind for trivial offenses, telling Abraham to kill his son. But the essence of Jewish faith is that God does what He does, and we obey Him.”

“So, in other words, it doesn’t matter what a righteous person’s private thoughts are, so long as he obeys the letter of God’s commandments?”

“And worships Him, yes. Of course, at the level of folk wisdom, a man can be righteous without being a mensch. I’m sure you see this, too, Adam—the pious man who makes everyone around him miserable. That might be more what Perry is asking about.”

“My question,” Perry said, “is whether we can ever escape our selfishness. Even if you bring in God, and make Him the measure of goodness, the person who worships and obeys Him still wants something for himself. He enjoys the feeling of being righteous, or he wants eternal life, or what have you. If you’re smart enough to think about it, there’s always some selfish angle.”

The rabbi smiled. “There may be no way around it, when you put it like that. But we ‘bring in God,’ as you say—for the believer, of course, it’s God who brought us in—to establish a moral order in which your question becomes irrelevant. When obedience is the defining principle, we don’t need to police every little private thought we might have.”

“I think there’s more to Perry’s question, though,” Reverend Walsh said. “I think he’s pointing to sinfulness, which is our fundamental condition. In Christian faith, only one man has ever exemplified perfect goodness, and he was the Son of God. The rest of us can only hope for glimmers of what it’s like to be truly good. When we perform an act of charity, or forgive an enemy, we feel the goodness of Christ in our hearts. We all have an innate capacity to recognize true goodness, but we’re also full of sin, and those two parts of us are constantly at war.”

“Exactly,” Perry said. “How do I know if I’m really being good or if I’m just pursuing a sinful advantage?”

“The answer, I would say, is by listening to your heart. Only your heart can tell you what your true motive is—whether it partakes of Christ. I think my position is similar to Rabbi Meyer’s. The reason we need faith—in our case, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ—is that it gives us a rock-solid basis for evaluating our actions. Only through faith in the perfection of our Savior, only by comparing our actions to his example, only by experiencing his living presence in our hearts, can we hope to be forgiven for the more selfish thoughts we might have. Only faith in Christ redeems us. Without him, we’re lost in a sea of second-guessing our motives.”

Perry was enjoying his ability to converse on the level of men three times his age, enjoying how well he’d calibrated his alcohol intake, enjoying the easy but unslurred flow of his words. But now Mrs. Haefle, as if she’d smelled a pleasure in need of immediate stamping out, was approaching them. He repositioned himself, squaring his back to her.

“I understand what you’re saying,” he said to Reverend Walsh. “But what if a person isn’t able to have faith?”

“Not everyone finds faith overnight. Faith is rarely easy. But if you’ve ever done a good thing, and felt a glow in your heart, then that’s a little message from God. He’s telling you that Christ is in you, and that you have the freedom and capacity to pursue a closer relationship with him. ‘Seek, and ye shall find.’”

“It’s approximately the same if you’re a Jew,” the rabbi said, “although we tend to emphasize that you’re a Jew whether you like it or not. It’s more a matter of God tracking you down than of you finding God.”

“I don’t think our positions are so dissimilar in that respect,” Reverend Walsh said stiffly.

Perry tried to ignore the hovering of Mrs. Haefle at his shoulder.

“But so,” he said, “what if I feel the kind of glow you’re talking about, but it doesn’t lead me to God? What if it’s just one of the feelings that any sentient animal might have? If I never find God, or He never finds me, it sounds like you’re saying that, basically, I’m damned.”

“In principle, I suppose that is the doctrine,” Reverend Walsh said. “But you’re very young, and life is long. There’s a near infinity of moments when you might receive God’s grace. All it takes is one moment.”

“In the meantime,” the rabbi said, “I think it’s enough to be a mensch.”

“Perry?” Mrs. Haefle said, pushing her way in. “I want you to come meet Reverend Walsh’s son Ricky. He’s a junior at Lyons Township.”

Her voice was syrupy. Perry’s irritation was more intense than any feeling of goodness he’d yet experienced. “Excuse me?”

“The young people are in the sunroom.”

“I’m aware of that. We’re in the middle of a conversation here. Is that so hard to grasp?”

Evidently, though it hadn’t slurred his speech, gløgg was very disinhibiting.

“I think we’ve touched on the main points,” Reverend Walsh said. “Is anyone else ready for cookies?”

Perry appealed to the rabbi. “Was I boring you? Did my questions seem childish? Should I be consigned to the sunroom?”

“Not at all,” the rabbi said. “These are important questions.”

With a vindicated gesture, Perry turned to Mrs. Haefle. Open animosity had now replaced her phony sweetness. “Gløgg is not for children,” she said.

“What?”

“I said gløgg is not for children.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you do.”

“Well, I think you should mind your own business.” The disinhibitions of gløgg were an unfolding surprise. “Seriously, do you not have anything better to do than follow me around?”

In proportion to the rising of his voice, the living room was quieting.

“What’s going on?” Reverend Haefle said, looming up.

“Nothing at all,” Perry said. “I was in the midst of an interesting conversation with Rabbi Meyer and Reverend Adams when your wife interrupted us.”

Mrs. Haefle whispered something in her husband’s ear. He nodded gravely.

“So, Perry,” he said. “It was good of you to come. But—”

“But what? It’s time for me to leave? I am not the one at social fault here.”

Reverend Haefle placed a gentle hand on Perry’s shoulder. More roughly than necessary, Perry shook it off. He knew he needed to calm down, but the heat in his head was extraordinary.

“This is what I’m talking about,” he said very loudly. “No matter what I do, it’s always me who’s in the wrong. You’re all saved, but apparently I’m damned. Do you think I enjoy being damned?” A sob of self-pity escaped him. “I’m doing the best I can!”

The living room was now completely quiet. Through tears, he saw twenty pairs of clerical and spousal eyes on him. Among them, near the front door, to his shame and dismay, were his mother’s.

Along streets so muffled she could hear the faint collective hiss of snowflakes landing, and then Pirsig Avenue, where cars with snow-blurred headlights proceeded at a funereal crawl, Becky moved as fast as she could in her long blue coat. She felt late for a date that half an hour ago she hadn’t even meant to keep. She had an urgent need to see Tanner again, to give him a chance to redeem himself. Failing that, she needed to make a show of not caring—to plunge into the concert, let Tanner see that other people valued her, and let him wonder where he stood with her.

Outside First Reformed, three Crossroads sophomores were shoveling snow with a zeal that suggested their work was voluntary. Becky was pleased to be able to greet each of them by name; to be developing the same inclusive popularity in Crossroads that she enjoyed at school. She also knew the names of the girls manning the cash box in the function-hall foyer. The concert wouldn’t start for another half hour, but the hall was filling with alumni and other paying guests, the air already smoky. Amp lights glowed in the shadows of the elevated stage. Current Crossroads members, earning “hours” toward Spring Trip, were lugging crates of pop bottles and arranging tables of desserts and festive breads, whose bakers had likewise earned hours.

Becky was uneasily reminded that she had to start earning some hours herself. Forty were required, she currently had zero, and Spring Trip was only three months away. It wasn’t an attractive thought, but she wished that an exception could be made for her.

Crossing the hall to meet her were Kim Perkins and David Goya, who’d recently become an item. Horsey of face, weirdly thin of hair, David was no one Becky would have liked to kiss, but she could imagine him seeming like a safe harbor to Kim. Previous heavy pot smoking had erased all traces of harm in him.

“The lunatics have taken over the asylum,” he said gravely.

“Yeah,” Becky said. “Is there anybody over twenty-one here?”

“Ambrose is hiding in his office. Otherwise, we appear to be unmonitored.”

“Speaking of which,” Kim said, with a pointed clearing of her throat. Kim had lately gained some pounds, as if to reduce the looks differential between herself and David. Her face was barren of cosmetics and she was wearing bib overalls.

“Yes, maybe you can help us,” David said to Becky. “We’re having a little disagreement. Kim seems to feel that the concert is a public event, not a Crossroads activity. I would argue that it’s clearly a Crossroads activity—just look at the posters. I’m guessing you don’t have a dog in this fight, so I wonder which one of us you agree with.”

“Sorry,” Becky said. “What dog? Which fight?”

“Rule Number Two. No drinking or drugs at a Crossroads activity.”

“Oh.”

“I probably shouldn’t have told you that. It could bias your answer.”

“I don’t know if you smelled it, coming in,” Kim said, “but the alumni are all totally lighting up in the parking lot. Like they’d do for any public concert. Which is what this is.”

“It’s a gathering at the church,” David said. “To raise funds for the group. I rest my case.”

“Gosh, guys.” Becky was happy to be trusted as their arbiter. “I guess I’m kind of with David here.”

“Oh, come on,” Kim said. “It’s Friday night.”

“Thursday night,” David corrected.

“I’m just giving you my opinion,” Becky said.

“Okay, but here’s another question. What if we did some partaking earlier, in the afternoon, not on church property, and we’re still the tiniest bit high when we show up here. Is that against the rules?”

“You’re on a slippery slope,” David said.

“Let Becky answer.”

“I guess it depends,” Becky said, “on what the purpose of the rule is.”

“The purpose of the rule,” David said, “is to not have parents pissed off with Crossroads.”

“I disagree,” Kim said. “I think it’s that you can’t have an authentic witnessing relationship if one of the people is high.”

“But then why forbid sex? Rule Number One. This is clearly about the group’s reputation.”

“No, it’s the same as with drugs. Sex messes with the kind of relationship we’re supposed to be developing at meetings. It’s the wrong kind of intensity.”

“Hmm.”

“It could be for both reasons,” Becky said.

“My point,” Kim said, “is that we’re not doing any activities tonight. We’re not trying to relate to each other. We’re just listening to music. If we happen to smoke a little pot on our way here, when we’re not on church property, what difference does it make?”

David gestured to Becky. “Agree? Disagree?”

Becky smiled.

“I personally am beginning to think Kim’s point has merit,” David said.

Still smiling, Becky looked out across the hall. Through a clearing in the crowd, in a cluster of alumni, she glimpsed the back of a suede jacket. She knew it was Tanner’s because the stumpy one, the Natural Woman, had her arm around him, her wild-haired head against his ribs. It was a posture of secure possession. The smile dropped from Becky’s face.

“I think you should do whatever you want,” she said.

“Permission from Hildebrandt!” Kim exulted.

“Reassuringly untainted by self-interest,” David said. “Or so I presume?”

Tanner’s suede-fringed arm was now around the Natural Woman. Becky saw that coming to the concert had been a bad mistake. She liked Kim and David well enough, but they weren’t core friends of hers. Nobody in Crossroads was. The best she could hope to demonstrate to Tanner was a skin-deep popularity. Fearing a return of tears, she wondered if she should turn around and leave. But Kim and David were looking at her expectantly.

“What?” she said.

“Just wondering,” David said casually, “if you’d care to join us.”

It occurred to her that they were worried about Rule Number Three: Any failure to report a rules violation was itself a rules violation.

“Are you saying you don’t trust me?”

“Not an issue,” Kim said. “You said it yourself—we’re not doing anything wrong.”

“Just extending a friendly offer,” David agreed.

Long ago, Clem had scared Becky off marijuana, telling her that the human brain was an instrument too delicate to mess with chemically, and she’d never been much tempted. But now, although she could see other friendly faces in the function hall, she felt she had only two choices—either leave and go home, or go along with her new friends. Wasn’t safety the enemy? Hadn’t she joined Crossroads to become less fearful? To take new risks? It could hardly be worse than standing and watching Tanner be clutched by Laura Dobrinsky. At least her friends were offering to include her.

“No, sure,” she said to David. “I mean, yes, thank you. I’d like to.”

Her assent was a bigger deal to her than to David. He simply turned to follow Kim, who was already moving toward the fire exit by the stage. Reacting to some invisible signal, two other senior girls, Darra Jernigan and Carol Pinella, peeled away from the crowd and joined her. By the time Becky and David caught up with them, her brain was already feeling altered, by the rush of blood in it.

Beyond the exit door, off a hallway leading to the church’s attic stairs, was a second door, dangerously difficult (from a fire-hazard perspective) to push open against the snow. Outside was a narrow alley, lit only by Chicagoland sky, against a retaining wall that marked the boundary of church property. In a nod to the rules, everyone climbed up onto the snow-covered grass above the wall. Becky stuck close to David, feeling safest with him; he was one of Perry’s best friends.

“For the record,” Kim said to the others, “Hildebrandt gave her okay for this.”

Becky chuckled in a voice she didn’t recognize. “Put it all on me, why don’t you.”

“I think her presence here speaks for itself,” David said. From a neat metal case, he produced a doobie smaller than the ones Becky had seen at parties, and Kim reached over to light it with a Bic. The smell of pot smoke was autumnal. Holding it in, David offered the doobie first to Becky.

“Sorry,” she said, taking it. “How do I do this?”

“Long, slow breath and keep it in,” Kim said kindly.

Becky took a puff, coughed, and tried a deeper breath. It was as if she’d swallowed a burning sword. Smoke was deadly—people died from inhaling it—she wondered if this thought was the first sign of being high or just an ordinary thought, and then if wondering this was itself a sign of being high—but she managed, with watering eyes, to hold it longer than David had held his. After Kim and Darra and Carol had taken their turns, the doobie came back to David, who offered it again to Becky.

“Um,” she said. Her throat was full of scorch. “Is it okay?”

“There’s more where this came from.”

She nodded and filled her lungs again. She was smoking marijuana! Either the drug itself or the excitement of smoking it was flooding the same nerves that kissing Tanner had lit up the night before. Suddenly her life was changing fast. She was being initiated into sensations she’d barely been aware were possible.

When David grabbed her arm, she understood that she was fainting from too conscientiously holding her breath. She let out smoke and took in winter air. What had been a dark alley seemed almost daylit in the whiteness of the sky and snow, as if the darkness had only been her starting to pass out. The taste in her mouth was Octobery. The heat surging in her face and behind her eyes was like molten fudge. She felt walled off by the heavy hot sensation, not at all connected to the other miscreants, who were expertly snapping drags off the dwindling doobie. Which now came back.

Again a foreign-sounding chuckle, hers.

“Okay,” she said. “Why not.”

Her third hit hurt her throat less, not more, than the first two. This had to mean that she was getting high. The molten-fudge sensation seemed to be receding, boiling off through the top of her head, fizzing away through her skin. For a moment, she felt entirely poised, entirely present in a winter wonderland, safe with friends. She wondered what would happen next.

From inside the fire door, right below her, came a shout and a thud. The door swung open and stuck in the snow; and there stood Sally Perkins.

“Aha!” she cried.

A hairy mass in the dimness behind her resolved into the shape of Laura Dobrinsky. Becky violently coughed.

“Jesus Christ, Kim,” Sally said, clambering up onto the retaining wall. “What ever happened to sisters sharing?” She extended a hand to Laura and yanked her up.

“I didn’t see you,” Kim said.

“Ho-ho-ho, right.”

Becky was definitely high. She seemed to be standing next to herself, wondering where to place herself. She took a step backward, away from Laura. Her foot came down in a hole of some sort, which sent her falling back into a snow-laden shrub. The shrub embraced her and held her unsteadily upright.

David had taken out his little case again. “You and Sally have such keen noses,” he observed to Laura, “you could be of service to law enforcement.”

“Not true,” Laura said. “I can only smell the high-grade stuff.”

“Well, isn’t this your lucky day.”

He lit up a second joint and handed it to her.

“Jesus,” Sally said. “Is that Becky Hildebrandt?”

“The very one,” David said.

“My, how the mighty have fallen.”

Laura exhaled smoke, turned toward Becky, and pierced her with a terrifying look.

“Becky’s like her father,” she said. “She doesn’t know when she’s not wanted.”

Becky extricated herself from the shrub and brushed snow off her coat. It seemed important to keep on brushing, down to the last flake, to make herself presentable. Then she found that she’d lost interest in it.

“Hey, Sally,” she said. “Hey, Laura.”

Laura tossed her head and turned away. Now no one was actually looking at Becky, but it seemed as if the entire world were examining her. It seemed as if she’d said the wrong thing and had been somewhere else, not present, in the moments since she’d said it. There was no telling where she’d been or what she’d done there. She only knew that she’d broken the law, poisoned her brain, destroyed her mystique. She wanted to run away and be alone, but if she ran away the others would know she was having a less cool experience than they were, which would be even worse than staying. She needed to be cool, but there wasn’t a particle of coolness in her. She didn’t like being high. In fact, getting high was the most horrible thing she’d ever done to herself. She wished she could undo it, but she could feel that, if anything, she was getting higher. In her mind’s eye, her thoughts were laid out like snacks on a lazy Susan. They weren’t evaporating the way thoughts were supposed to. They just sat there, going round and round, available for second helpings. Why had she had to take a third puff on the doobie? Why even the first? Some evil thing in her, whose presence it now seemed she’d always sensed in herself but done her best to ignore, some vain and greedy and sexual thing rooted in a deeper self-loathing, had seized control of her and made the worst decisions.

But then, unaccountably, came another moment of clarity, another brightening. She saw herself as one of seven young people standing just over the property line of First Reformed. Carol Pinella and Darra Jernigan and Kim Perkins were giggling uncontrollably. David Goya and Laura Dobrinsky were discussing different grades of pot. Sally Perkins, indisputably the prettiest girl in her graduating class, three years ahead of Becky, was staring at Becky with narrowed eyes.

“It was you,” Sally said.

“What?”

“Last night, in Tanner’s van. That was you. Wasn’t it.”

Becky tried to answer, but all she produced was a fatuously guilty grin. It seemed to spread through her entire body. Kim and Carol and Darra were still engaged in their gigglefest, but Tanner’s name had attracted Laura’s attention.

“I saw Tanner last night at the Grove,” Sally explained. “There was somebody in his van with a blanket over her head. She looked totally busted. And you know who it was?”

“The Grove is Becky’s workplace,” David affably remarked.

“It was you,” Sally said.

“I don’t think so,” Becky croaked, aflame with guilt.

“No, I’m sure of it. You were sitting there trying to hide from me.”

There followed a wordless moment. The giggling had stopped.

“You think I’m surprised?” Laura said, her voice flat.

Becky’s gaze had become glued to the stone flank of the church. Everything she was hearing, including I don’t think so, was staying in her head, but in a jumble. She tried to latch on to the words and arrange them in a sequence, but they just spiraled around a central pit of horribleness.

“Hey, you,” Laura said. “Prom Queen. I asked you a question. Do you think I’m surprised?”

The sound of landing snowflakes was oceanic. Every eye was on Becky, even the eyes in the house behind the shrub, the eyes in the trees above it, the eyes in the sky. Anything she could say would be catastrophically revealing.

“What a fucking family,” Laura muttered, jumping down from the ledge.

“Hey, now,” David said. “That’s not cool.”

Some interval of time later, there were still six of them in the snow. Becky found herself consumed by a feeling of intolerable exposure and impending punishment, but each direction she considered turning was the wrong one. Her mind was damaged, she’d messed with its chemistry, and, oh, how she regretted it. She bent forward as if to vomit but instead put her hands on the edge of the ledge and awkwardly, sort of sideways, whoopsie, rolled off it and righted herself. She hurried through the fire door, which Laura Dobrinsky had left wide open.

To her right lurked a hall full of eyes, so she ran up the stairs to the church attic. For a while, in the dark, after the door had fallen shut behind her, she groped along a wall for a light switch, but then she forgot about doing this, only to remember and be struck by having forgotten—it’s because I am horribly stoned. She groped forward sideways, whimpering, an arm stretched out ahead of her. She collided with something sharp and metallic, a music stand, but nothing crashed. In the distance was a glimmer of bluish light. She tried to navigate by it but lost sight of it and questioned its reality. The next thing she encountered was cool and edgeless, extensive, hollow-sounding. It ended in a curving tapered tube. Apparently a hollow horned cow. It proved to be quite an impediment to her progress. An incalculably huge amount of time had passed since she entered the attic, and she had the sudden, clear insight that time couldn’t be measured without light. This seemed to her a crucial realization. She made a mental note to remember it, although she’d already lost her grip on what it meant. If she could just remember the words time can’t be measured without light, she might recapture their meaning later. But into her mind’s eye came an image of quicksand, a hideously vivid image of sand crumbling and sucking itself downward, the instability and insolidity of thinking. Terrified again, she shoved past the hollow cow and thought she was free until it caught her from behind, one of its horns snagging on the pocket of her beautiful merino coat and audibly ripping a seam. Fuck oh fuck oh fuck. She stumbled over a smaller hollow animal, got a lungful of dust, and dropped to her hands and knees. The bluish glimmer had reappeared. It was coming from beneath a door, and she crawled toward it.

Beyond the door, lighted by a round stained-glass window, was a staircase narrowed by stacks of hymnals. She followed it down to a wood-paneled space behind the sanctuary altar. As she pushed open the “secret” door behind the pulpit, she experienced another insight: the sanctuary was a sanctuary. A single warm light illuminated the hanging brass cross, and all the other doors were locked—she knew this.

With a shudder of deliverance, she traversed the altar and sat down in the first row of pews. Safe for the moment, she shut her eyes and surrendered to the waves of awfulness welling up in the blackness of her head. Between each of them was a space for regretting what she’d done and wishing it could be undone. But the waves kept coming. They wore her down until her only recourse was crying.

Please make it stop, please make it stop …

She was praying, but nobody was listening. After the next wave of stonedness, she addressed her plea more specifically.

Please, God. Please make it stop.

There was no answer. When she returned to herself again, she thought she saw the reason why.

I’m sorry, she prayed. God? Please? I’m sorry I did what I did. It was an evil thing and I shouldn’t have done it. If you make it stop, I promise I’ll never do it again. Please, God. Can you help me?

Still no answer.

God? I love you. I love you. Please have mercy on me.

When the next evil wave welled up in her head, she peered down and saw, beneath it, not a bottomless blackness but a kind of golden light. The wave was transparent, the evil insubstantial. The golden light was the real, substantial thing. The more deeply she peered into it, the brighter it got. She saw that she’d been looking outside herself for God, not understanding that God was in her. God was pure goodness, and the goodness had been there all along. She’d glimpsed it in the early morning, in her feeling of goodwill, and then more intensely in Perry’s kindness to her, the glow of forgiveness she’d felt. Goodness was the best thing in the universe, and she was capable of moving toward it—and yet how utterly awful she’d been! Mean to her mother, uncharitable to Perry, competitive with Laura, greedy with her inheritance, sneering with Clem at other people’s faith, conceited, selfish, God-denying, awful. With a sob more like a paroxysm, an ecstasy, she opened her eyes to the cross above the altar.

Christ had died for her sins.

And could she do it? Could she cast aside the evil in her, cast aside her vanity and her fear of other people’s opinions, and humble herself before the Lord? This had always seemed impossible to her, an onerous expectation with no upside. Only now did she understand that it could bring her deeper into the golden light.

She ran up to the cross, dropped to her knees on the altar carpeting, closed her eyes again, and put her hands together prayerfully.

Please, God. Please, Jesus. I’ve been a bad person. I’ve always thought so highly of myself, I’ve wanted popularity, and money, and social standing, and I’ve had so many cruel thoughts about other people. All my life, I’ve been selfish and inconsiderate. I’ve been the most disgusting sinner, and I am so, so sorry. Can you forgive me? If I promise to be a better and more humble person? If I promise to serve you cheerfully? I’ll take the worst kind of jobs to earn hours. I’ll be more loving to my enemies and more open with my family, I’ll share everything I have, I’ll live a clean life and not care what other people think of me, if only you’ll forgive me …

She hoped for a clear answer, Jesus speaking to her in her heart, but there was nothing; the golden light had faded. But she also felt delivered from her stonedness, at peace again. She’d glimpsed the light of God, if only for a moment, and her prayers had been answered.

The public library was a tall-windowed brick building, built in the twenties and seated on a lawn enclosed by dog-proof hedges. It stayed open until nine on weeknights, but it was desolate at the dinner hour, a single librarian holding down the circulation desk amid the silence of books waiting to be wanted.

Into it, through its little-used front door—most patrons arrived by car and parked in the rear—walked a disturbed person stinking of wet gabardine and cigarettes. Her face was shiny, her hair matted with melting snow. She shook herself and stamped her feet on an industrial rug that had been rolled out for the storm. From numberless hours of waiting for her kids to choose their books, she knew exactly where to go. In the reference room, behind the circulation desk, was a cabinet that housed the White Pages of major American cities and minor Illinoisan ones. Tax dollars at work, the phonebooks were all more or less current.

She crouched down in front of them, pulled out the thickest of them, and opened it on the floor. After the Gordons and Gowans, before the many Greens, was a short column of Grants. She was prepared to be disappointed, called back to reason, but her state of mind was so intense that the world seemed likely to fall in line with it. Sure enough, beside a drop of snowmelt that had hit the page and puckered it, was one of the most erotic things she’d ever laid eyes on.

Grant B. 2607 Via Rivera.….….……962–3504

She produced a kind of humming sigh, like the first note of a cello that had sat for decades in an attic. How much a phonebook entry could suggest! The hours and days and years of being B. Grant, alive in a specific house on a specific street, reachable by anyone who knew his dear number. She couldn’t be sure it was Bradley, but there was no reason it couldn’t be. All the weekly visits to the library, all the idle browsing of its shelves, and she’d never once thought to look for him. A key to her heart had been hidden in plain sight.

She took a pencil and a card from a wooden tray, copied the address and the number, and put the card in her coat pocket with her cigarettes. In her rush to escape the dental office, after three-plus hours with Sophie Serafimides, she’d neglected to hand over her twenty-dollar bill. The money, ill-gotten in any case, had come in handy when she passed the town drugstore and recalled a more effective means of losing weight and managing anxiety. She’d procured the means, and now she had a motive, too. In her mind, she’d already lost thirty pounds and was writing a chatty, warm letter to Bradley, letting him know that she was very well, telling him something specific and vivid about each of her four children, tacitly assuring him that she’d made the fullest of recoveries, had built an ordinary good life for herself, was no longer a person he had to be afraid of hearing from. And you? Do you still write poetry? How is Isabelle? How are your boys? They must have families of their own now …

Outside the library’s rear entrance, on a patch of snow made mangy by unevenly scattered salt, she lit another cigarette. It turned out that she’d been wanting one for thirty years. Making her confession to Sophie had rolled the stone from a tomb of emotion, inside which, miraculously intact, she’d found her obsession with Bradley Grant. Describing it to Sophie in proper detail, reliving the sins she’d committed in its grip, had brought her back into contact with its contours, and she’d remembered how perfectly they fit the shape of who she was. If anything, her desire for Bradley felt stronger for the thirty-year rest she’d given it, stronger than any over-flogged sentiment she had for Russ. Bradley had excited her at levels deeper than Russ ever could or ever would, because only with Bradley had she been her entire, crazy, sinning self. Standing in the snow behind the library, inhaling smoke on a cold Midwestern night, she was carried back to rainy Los Angeles. She was a mother of four with a twenty-year-old’s heart.

As she’d recounted to Sophie the events leading up to her destruction of the unborn life in her, the filthy bargain she’d struck with Isabelle Washburn’s former landlord, she’d had a growing sense of dumpling–patient disconnect. She might have imagined her story emerging with much guilty gasping, much reaching for Kleenexes, but confessing her worst sins to a psychiatrist was nothing like her Catholic confessions. There was no terror of God’s judgment on her puny self, no pity for her sweet Lord’s suffering on the cross for what she’d done. With Sophie, a female layperson, a maternal Greek American, she felt more like very naughty. The mental switch she’d flipped as a teenager was still there to be flipped Off. She told her story crisply, her spirits rising with the resurrection of the reckless girl who’d loved Bradley. Sophie’s expression, meanwhile, grew ever sadder, to the point of amusing her. The satisfaction of showing the dumpling how bad she really was recalled the pleasure of taunting her guardian uncle, Roy Collins, with her misbehavior. By the end, as she related how a Los Angeles police officer had been obliged to tackle a raving girl in pouring rain, she went so far as to snicker at the memory.

Perhaps it was the snicker that brought out the dumpling’s frown.

“I’m very sorry for what you went through,” Sophie said. “It explains so much, and it makes me even more impressed with your resilience. But there’s still something I’m not understanding.”

“We both know what that means, don’t we.”

“What does it mean?”

Marion caricatured the therapeutic frown. “You disapprove.”

“By your own account,” Sophie said, unamused, “you were seduced by a married man when you were very young. Then you married a man you weren’t allowed to be yourself with. And now you tell me that you were atrociously abused by a sexual predator. Doesn’t it seem—”

“I knew what I was doing,” Marion said proudly. “In every case. I knew it was wrong, and I did it anyway.”

“I’m sorry—what did you do to Russ?”

“I lied to him. And now he’s lying to me. So what?”

“You offered him your life and he took it. Now he’s tired of it and wants something new.”

“I admit I’m not very happy with Russ at the moment. But you’re way out of line if you’re comparing him to that landlord. Russ is like a little boy.”

“I’m not comparing them. That landlord—”

“And you’re even more out of line if you’re comparing Bradley. Bradley was honorable—he wanted the same thing I did. We fell in love, and he never lied to me. It wasn’t his fault I went crazy.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I hated him when I was falling apart, but as soon as I was sane again I wasn’t angry at him. I was only sorry for what I’d put him through.”

“You felt guilty.”

“Definitely.”

“Why is it that, every time a man injures you, you respond by feeling guilty?”

Marion, flying, was impatient with Sophie’s slowness. “Didn’t I just explain this to you? I’m not a good person. I wanted to kill my baby, and I did it the only way I could. I didn’t even hate that landlord, I was just insanely afraid of him. I mean, yes, he was evil. But I was seeing my own evil nature reflected in him. That’s what made him so frightening.”

Sophie briefly shut her eyes. Evidently the impatience was mutual.

“Try to see what I’m seeing,” she said. “Try to picture a sweet, vulnerable girl not much older than your daughter is now. Think about how frightened and helpless she is. And then imagine a man whose first thought, when he sees a girl like that, is to take out his penis and abuse her. That’s the person you think that girl resembles?”

“Well, I don’t have a penis, so.”

“But your first thought would be to exploit someone vulnerable?”

“You’re forgetting what I did to Bradley’s wife. I went to her house and deliberately hurt her. She was vulnerable, wasn’t she?”

“My understanding is that Bradley was the person you were actually angry with.”