Crossroads

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

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

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

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

“What,” she said.

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

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

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

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

“Nope. Just tired.”

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

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

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

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

“Figure it out,” she said bitterly.

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

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

“Thank you for being sorry.”

“Becky—”

“What.”

“I really like you.”

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

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

“Becky? It’s Jeannie Cross.”

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