But then, when the congregation rose to sing the Gloria Patri and Tanner, at her side, in his ridiculous sport coat, sang forth in a clear, strong voice, unlike her own self-conscious murmur, and when she tried raising her own voice accordingly, As it was in the Beginning, is now and ever shall be, she caught a strange flashing glimpse of a desire, buried somewhere inside her, to belong and to believe in something. She wondered if the desire might always have been there; if it had only been her father, the shame of him, that repelled her from pursuing it. If maybe the fact of the brass cross, its manufacture, wasn’t so dumb. Maybe it was more like amazing that two thousand years after Jesus’s crucifixion people were still filling collection plates to make crosses in his honor.
In a further flash, she saw that Laura did not like Tanner’s churchgoing; that it might be a fault line between them; that she, Becky, if she opened herself to the possibility of belief, might gain an unforeseen advantage; and that it therefore might be wiser, after all, not to put her letter in Tanner’s hand now, since this would suggest that delivering it was the only reason she’d come to church, but instead to keep coming on Sunday mornings.
They shared a hymnal for the singing of “For the Beauty of the Earth,” Becky’s hair touching Tanner’s shoulder as she leaned in, and then Reverend Haefle gave the sermon. During the one year she’d been obliged to attend entire services, Becky had sat still for her father’s sermons, for fear of making other congregants restless with her restlessness, which would have embarrassed her as a Hildebrandt, but Dwight Haefle’s interminable slabs of lyrical abstraction had defeated her. Listening to him now, hoping greater age might bring greater understanding, she followed him only as far as Reinhold Niebuhr before losing herself in admiration of Tanner’s hands. She had to will herself not to touch them. In his jacket and necktie, he looked like a boy dressed up for church by his mother. Haefle had moved on to the importance of humility, not Becky’s favorite subject, though one she would need to work on if she got more serious about religion, and it occurred to her that, for Tanner, leaving his fringed jacket and his Frye boots at home was exactly what Haefle was talking about. All but one hour a week, Tanner’s coolness was beyond question, but he humbled himself for church, and this struck her as extremely dear.
Rising with him to recite the Lord’s Prayer, she might already have been his girlfriend, not to say his wife of many years, and the trespass for which she asked their Father’s forgiveness her theft of him from Laura.
“You’re here,” he said, when the service was over.
“Yeah, everything’s changing. I’m trying new things.”
He was looking at her as if he couldn’t figure her out. This was good.
“I owe you a big debt of gratitude,” she said. “For making me try Crossroads. I’m learning to be more open with my feelings. And—” She faltered, her face hot. He kept looking at her. “Will you be here next Sunday?”
“It’s what I do.”
She nodded, too vigorously, and stood up. “Okay, I’ll see you then.”
On her way out through the parlor, she paused to be noticed by her father, hoping to take some free credit for having come to a service, but he was engaged with Kitty Reynolds and a petite blond woman whom Becky didn’t recognize. Her father was smiling, and the blond woman was apparently a magnet for his eyes. When they flicked up to Becky, his smile faded. When he returned them to the woman, it came back to life.
The message was unmistakable. He’d written her off and moved on. As she left the church, the word asshole popped into her head. Clem had uttered it, blasphemously, but it was new to her. Her growing interest in First Reformed, which ought to have pleased her father, was clearly of less consequence to him than his grudge against Rick Ambrose. And he a Christian minister.
“Yes Tanner was there,” she announced to her mother when she got home, before her mother could annoy her by asking.
“That’s nice,” her mother said. “He’s spoiling Rick Ambrose’s otherwise perfect record of turning young people off church services.”
Becky declined the bait. “I’m sure Tanner would be thrilled to know he has your approval.”
“I imagine he’d rather have yours,” her mother said. “As I’m gathering he does.”
“Not talking about it,” Becky said, leaving the room.
A few days later, she was felled by a cold so bad that she had to call in sick at the Grove and couldn’t go to church on Sunday. As soon as she recovered, she took the new step of hanging out at First Reformed after school, joining the girls outside Ambrose’s office, who kindly explained the stories behind their Crossroads gossip, helping her understand what was funny and what was appalling. When she tired of being the newcomer, she wandered down to the function hall and found a team of three boys, led by her own brother, silk-screening posters for the Christmas concert. In theory, she should have lent a hand, because she needed to start accumulating “hours” toward the Arizona trip—to be eligible for Arizona, you had to perform at least forty hours of service or paid work for the group—but Perry was the one thing about Crossroads she didn’t like. Perry was the brother who was brilliant at everything, including art （the poster design bore the mark of his hand）， but lately the mere sight of him had made her scalp tighten and prickle, as if she were a dog in the presence of the occult; as if she shared a house with a psychopath whose brilliance was undergirded by all manner of dark doings. She knew about some of those doings but not, she suspected, all of them. He looked up from the silk screen, red-handed with Christmas ink, and smirked at her. She turned and fled.