“He’s already been in foster care once. Are you familiar with that system?”
“Not—no. Not really.”
“We’re here to learn,” Russ said—managing, in one breath, to patronize Frances and sound idiotic to Theo.
“You got to go pretty far down the list,” Theo said, “to find the family that will take a boy like Ronnie. That’s going to be a family collecting checks for half a dozen kids—to see any profit, you need volume. And how do you handle half a dozen kids?”
“You lock them in a room,” Russ said, to sound less stupid.
“You lock them all up in a room. You don’t spare the rod.”
“That’s a bad system, I agree,” Frances said.
“Then work on changing it, if you want to try to help. Clarice isn’t all bad, she was just too young when she had Ronnie. When she gets herself together, she takes him to the school in Washington Park. That’s on a good day. On bad days he falls through the cracks. He knows to come here when she’s strung out, and sooner or later she always comes to find him. The problem is the men who give her drugs. She gets lost in that, and the only thing that gets her out of it is mother’s pride. If she didn’t have Ronnie, I reckon she’d be dead by now.”
“I can understand that,” Frances said. “I just want to give him something he might like.”
“That’s right. That’s what you want. What I want is for Clarice not to up and tell Ronnie to keep away from a church where he’s safe.”
“Well, so, let me write her a note. Is there a piece of paper I can write on?”
“Frances,” Russ said.
“She needs to know I’m not trying to take Ronnie away from her. Theo can give her the note with the present.”
Theo made his eyes very wide, suggesting a limit to his patience.
“Look,” Russ said. “This is silly. If you want Ronnie to have colored pens, Theo can take off the wrapping paper and give them to him. I don’t think writing a note is a good idea.”
“I wanted him to have a present to unwrap on Christmas.”
Theo, his limit reached, shook his head and walked away. Russ snatched the gift from Frances and hurried after him, into the sanctuary.
“Do me a favor and take this,” he said, pressing the gift on Theo. “She means well. She really does care about Ronnie. She’s just…”
“I was surprised to see her,” Theo said. “I assumed you were coming with Kitty.”
“Yeah, ah. Change of plan.”
The single fluorescent light burning above the altar, behind an old upright piano and a freestanding organ, seemed to intensify the sanctuary’s chill.
“Your private affairs are none of my business,” Theo said. “But I’d appreciate it if you’d take the log out of your eye and tell her to keep clear of that boy. If she won’t do it, she needs to find someplace else to go with her good intentions. I don’t need that kind of thing here.”
Two years of bridge-building with Theo were in jeopardy. Russ knew exactly why Theo was impatient with Frances. He himself had been impatient with other First Reformed ladies who’d joined the circle, Juanita Fuller, Wilma St. John, June Goya. They’d spoken to people in the neighborhood, including Theo, with a treacly sort of maternal condescension, partly a product of fear, partly racism repackaged in self-flattering form. He’d had to ask each of them to leave the circle, and if Theo had now been complaining about anyone but Frances, Russ would have deferred to him and kicked her out. He did believe that the flavor of Frances’s offense was different, more a matter of high spirits and irreverence. But it was possible that he only believed this because he was falling in love with her.
“I’ll speak to her,” he said.
“All righty,” Theo said. “You get yourself home safe.”
An inch of fresh snow had fallen on the Fury’s windshield. The lightening of its rear load made its handling even more floaty as Russ steered it homeward. Frances was now sitting in normal passenger posture, her feet on the floor, and seemed coldly aggrieved with him.
“I don’t suppose I can ask,” she said, “what the two men had to say about me behind my back.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry,” Russ said. “Theo can be stubborn. Sometimes you just have to defer to how he wants things done.”
“I’m sure the two of you think I’m a dunce, but it wouldn’t have killed him to give Ronnie my present.”