Crossroads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is your car?” Becky said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Because he’s Edoardo!”

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