He was mourning his lost chance when God’s providence intervened. Although he sensed its awkwardness for Becky and Perry, he’d attended every Crossroads meeting in the new year. He was technically an adviser, but he’d embraced his inferiority to Rick Ambrose and comported himself like a newcomer, there to participate in exercises and explore his emotions, not to enable young people’s growth in Christ. On the last Sunday night in February, after Ambrose had parted the crowd in the function hall, as if it were the Red Sea, and instructed one half of it to write their names on slips of paper from which the other half would draw partners, Russ unfolded the slip he’d drawn and saw whom God had given him. The name on the slip was Larry Cottrell.
“The instruction here is simple,” Ambrose told the group. “Each of us tells our partner a thing that’s really troubling us—at school, at home, in a relationship. The idea is to be honest, and for our partner to think honestly about how to be helpful. Remember that sometimes the most helpful thing is just to be present and listen without judging.”
Russ had thus far avoided Larry Cottrell, to the point of never looking at him, and Larry seemed neither pleased nor displeased to be his partner—it was just another exercise. As the other dyads dispersed around the church, Russ led him upstairs to his office and asked what was troubling him.
Larry touched his nostrils. “So you know,” he said, “my dad was killed two years ago. We had a picture of him, in his air-force uniform, it was in our upstairs hallway, and then last week it wasn’t there anymore. I asked my mom why she took it down, and she told me … She told me she was tired of looking at it.”
The pimpled half-maturity of Larry’s face, the coarsening of his mother’s features by male hormones, corrected Russ’s notion that her looks were boyish. No boy looked like Frances.
“And then,” he said, “this guy she’s been dating, I mean, she’s probably lonely, but she gets all fluttery when she’s going out with him, and it’s like my dad never existed. He was one of the youngest colonels in the history of the air force … he was my dad—and now she doesn’t even want to see a picture of him?”
Russ was alarmed by the ambiguity of has been dating—whether the verb tense encompassed the present or referred to a period now past.
“So,” he said, “your mother has been, or was, at some point…”
“Yeah, I finally met the guy. She made me and Amy go to lunch with him.”
Russ cleared a sudden dryness from his throat. “When was this?”
“Saturday.”
Ten days after the marijuana experiment.
“It was horrible,” Larry said. “I mean, obviously I’m not going to like him, because he’s not my dad, but he’s so full of himself, he’s bragging about doing surgery for sixteen hours, he’s showing off to the waiter, and he talked to Amy like she was three years old. He’s so full of shit, and my mom’s all fluttery and fake with him.”
Russ cleared his throat again. “And you think this might—be a serious relationship? Your mother and the—surgeon? Is that what’s troubling you?”
“I thought he was out of the picture, and now suddenly everything is ‘Philip’ this and ‘Philip’ that.”
“Since—how long?”
“I don’t know. The last few weeks.”
“And—does your mother know how you feel about him?”
“I said I thought he was a pompous jerk.”
“And—how did she react?”
“She got mad. She said I was being selfish and hadn’t given ‘Philip’ a chance. Which, like—I’m selfish? She was supposed to be an adviser on Spring Trip. She acted all hurt that I didn’t want to be in the same group with her, and now she tells me she isn’t sure she even wants to go. ‘Philip’ wants to take her to some bogus medical conference in Acapulco, that same week.”
Russ’s face was ashen; he could feel it.
“Sometimes I’m almost, like, why did it have to be my dad who died? He was always yelling, but at least he paid attention. My mom doesn’t even care. She only cares about herself.”
There was recognizably a truth in this, but it didn’t bother Russ. He’d had enough of being married to a self-hating caretaker.
“Maybe you should tell her,” he said, “that you want her to come on Spring Trip. Tell her how much it would mean to you.”