Crossroads

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.