“I don’t know which would be worse, having to be around her, or her being with that creep. It’s like I hate everyone.”
“Well, it’s good that you’re honest about your feelings. That’s what Crossroads is about. I hope you’ll consider me someone you can open up to.”
For the first time, Larry looked at Russ as if he were more than just a generic dyad partner. “Can I say something weird?”
“Ah?”
“She’s always talking about you. She keeps asking me what I think of you.”
“Yes—well. She and I have the circle together. We’ve gotten to be—friendly.”
“I’m going, Mom, he’s the minister. He’s married.”
“Yes.”
“Sorry—was that weird of me?”
For a moment, Russ considered leveling with Larry, perhaps trying to enlist his aid, but the memory of leveling with Sally Perkins scared him off. The terms of the exercise now obliged him to offer a story of his own, but everything that troubled him pertained somehow to Larry. He obviously couldn’t talk about his marriage, or about Perry’s drug use. Clem’s crazy attempt to join the army was also off-limits, because Larry was proud of his father’s service. On Russ’s desk was a copy of an engineering report on the church sanctuary’s south wall, which was in danger of collapsing. It could be argued that this troubled him.
When their allotted time expired, he sent Larry downstairs and stayed in his office to call Frances; he no longer had anything to lose. As soon as she heard his voice, the line went silent. Sensing that he’d overstepped, he rushed to apologize, but she cut him off. “I’m the one who should apologize.”
“Not at all,” he said. “For whatever reason, I had a bad reaction to the, ah—”
“I know. It was funny how paranoid you got. But it’s not like you could help it, and I totally understand why you ran away. You did the right thing—I was very, very out of line. That’s why I didn’t go to Tuesday circle last week. I was too ashamed of myself.”
“But that’s—why were you ashamed?”
“Um, because I basically tried to jump you? I can blame it on the you-know-what, but it was still completely inappropriate. I’m sorry I put you in that position. I’m in a much clearer place now. I did an honest reckoning, and, well, you don’t have to worry about me. If you can manage to forgive me, I promise it will never happen again.”
Whether the good news here outweighed the bad was hard to judge. His chance with her had been even better than he’d surmised, his blowing of it even more conclusive than he’d feared.
“I hope we can still be friends,” Frances said.
A week later, she called to invite him to an evening with Buckminster Fuller at the Illinois Institute of Technology. No sooner had he accepted, in his capacity as a friend, than she added that this was the kind of evening that Philip hated. “Did I mention I’m seeing him again? I’m trying to be a good girl, but it’s no fun being in an audience with him. He gets all fidgety, like he can’t stand it that people are paying attention to someone else.” Russ was discouraged that she imagined he cared to hear about Philip, encouraged that she complained about him. Reminding himself that she’d been attracted to him enough to try to “jump” him, despite his being married, he dressed for their date in his most flattering shirt and applied, for the first time, some of the cologne that Becky had given him for Christmas, only to find, when Frances picked him up at the parsonage, that Kitty Reynolds was in her car. Frances hadn’t mentioned that Kitty was coming, and Russ, being merely her friend, had no basis for objecting. Nor did he have any great interest in Buckminster Fuller, though he was careful not to fidget in his seat.
A consolation for losing Frances to the surgeon was that she didn’t avoid Russ on their next Tuesday in the city. She now evidently felt safe to ride in his Fury again, to prefer his company to Kitty’s and volunteer to work with him in an old woman’s Morgan Street kitchen, rolling onto its walls a paint color known as Ballerina Pink （wildly overproduced by its maker, now available for pennies） while he painted the edges. It was sad to be considered safe, but he was happy that she still wanted to be with him, happy to see her huddling companionably with Theo Crenshaw, happy to have helped her mend that fence.
The shock was therefore brutal when, on a gray March morning, she came to his church office and announced that she was quitting the Tuesday circle. It might have been the gray light, but she seemed older, more brittle. He invited her to sit down.