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.”