Crossroads

“We’re going to skip the prayer tonight,” Ambrose said. “Is that okay with you, Russ?”

The older man nodded meekly. He was weak! weak!

“You’re not listening to us,” Laura Dobrinsky said. “You don’t get it. We’re telling you either he goes or we go.”

There were shouts of agreement, and Clem couldn’t stand it. However ashamed he’d been of his father in Arizona, he couldn’t stand to see a weak person beaten up. He raised his hand and waved it. “Can I say something?”

Immediately all eyes were on him. Ambrose nodded with approval, and Clem stood up unsteadily, his face burning.

“I can’t believe how mean you guys are being,” he said. “You’re going to walk away because you don’t like a two-minute prayer? I’m not into it, either, but I’m not here for prayers. I’m here because we’re a community committed to service to the poor and the downtrodden. And you know what? My dad has been committed to that for longer than anyone here has been alive. He’s more committed than anyone in this room. I think that ought to count for something.”

He sat down again. A girl next to him touched his arm supportively.

“Clem is right,” Ambrose said. “We need to respect each other. If we don’t have the guts to work through this as a group, we don’t deserve to call ourselves a community.”

Sally Perkins was staring at Clem’s father. She seemed to take cruel satisfaction in his inability to look at her. “No,” she said.

“Sally,” Ambrose said.

“Let’s put it to a vote,” she said. “How many people want to stay in this group if he’s in it?”

“We’re absolutely not doing that,” Ambrose said.

“Then I’m leaving.”

She stood up again. More than half the group stood up. Clem’s father’s eyes were wide with pain. “I’d like to say something,” he said. “Hear me out, all right? I’m not sure where all this is coming from—”

Laura Dobrinsky laughed and walked out of the room.

“I’m sorry if I’m not the person you want me to be,” the old man said. “I guess I still have a lot to learn from you guys. I care about this group, deeply. We’ve been doing great work, and I’d like to help us continue to do that. If you want Rick to lead the prayers, or Rick to lead the group, I’m okay with that. But if you care about personal growth, I’d like the chance to experience it myself. I’m asking you to give me that chance.”

Clem experienced a petrification so literal it seemed as if his body might shatter if tapped with a hammer. His father was begging. And not even to any avail. Sally Perkins had walked out, and half the group was following her, crowding the doorway in their eagerness to side with her. The old man watched them with dumb animal bewilderment.

Ambrose, whose position was unenviable, suggested that Russ lead a breathing exercise while he went and reasoned with the defectors. Again the old man nodded submissively. Among the church kids who remained when Ambrose was gone, Clem was surprised to see Tanner Evans.

“I want us all to breathe,” the old man said, a tremor in his voice. “I’m going to lie down—we’re all going to lie down and shut our eyes. All right?”

He was supposed to keep speaking, to lead the group in a visualization, but the only sound was the buzz of the defectors downstairs. As Clem lay in the heat and tried to breathe, his mind went back to Becky: how his father had always wanted her to be his special friend, and had seemed to resent that Clem was also her special friend, had tried to separate her and Clem and have a private relationship with each of them, and how peculiar it was that he’d singled them out, since Becky was popular and Clem could take care of himself. Neither she nor he needed extra attention the way, for example, their younger brother did. Perry was rich in gifts but poor in spirit, and their father, who in public made such a big deal of attending to the poor, found nothing but fault in Perry. And now the same thing had happened in the fellowship. Instead of ministering to the socially needy, his father had tried to separate the popular kids from Ambrose and take them for himself. He wasn’t just weak. He was disgusting—a moral fraud.

Hearing footsteps, Clem sat up and saw his father following Ambrose out of the room. No one was even pretending to do the breathing exercise now. Tanner Evans looked at Clem and shook his head.

“You know what?” Clem said. “I don’t want to talk about it. Can we just not talk about it?”

There were murmurs of relief. His peers understood.

“I’m not quitting the group,” he added. “But I think I might go home now.”

He tottered from the room and down the stairs as if he’d been excused for medical reasons. Back at the parsonage, he went straight to his room and locked the door, picked up an Arthur C. Clarke novel he’d borrowed from the library, and absorbed himself in someone else’s world. Two hours disappeared before he heard a tap on his door.

“Clem?” his father said.

“Go away.”

“May I come in?”

“No. I’m reading.”