“I understand that.”
“Really? I’m not sure Laura does. She’s so gifted, but she doesn’t care about being a professional. If it were up to me, we’d be doing three or four gigs a week. Blues, jazz, Top Forty, whatever. Putting in the hours, developing an audience. The only thing bar owners care about is making money, and Laura hates that. If somebody asked her to do Peggy Lee, she’d just laugh in their face. But me…”
“You’re more ambitious,” Becky suggested.
“Maybe. Laura’s got a lot going on, she’s working the crisis hotline, she’s got her women’s group. For me, it’s enough to work on my music and try to feel closer to God. You know, I really like going to church. I like seeing you here.”
“I like seeing you, too.”
“Truly? I was starting to worry that you didn’t.”
She looked into his eyes, wordlessly telling him he had nothing to fear. God only knew what might have happened if they hadn’t heard footsteps in the vestry, the reverberant bang of metal. Dwight Haefle, no longer in his robe, had popped the release on one of the sanctuary doors. “You don’t have to leave,” he told them. “The doors open from the inside.”
But Tanner was already on his feet, and Becky stood up, too. Their moment had been too fragile to be reassembled now. As they left the sanctuary, he told her how Danny Dickman and Toby Isner and Topper Morgan had smoked grass and drunk whiskey in the sanctuary on the night before the third Arizona trip, and how Ambrose, in the church parking lot, beside the idling and fully loaded trip buses, had led the group in reaming out the miscreants and debating whether they should be barred from the trip. The confrontation had lasted two hours. Topper Morgan had cried so violently he burst a blood vessel in his eye. And the church had started locking the sanctuary doors.
Becky went home frustrated by her failure to get a clear statement on Tanner and Laura. She needed to be more than just his experiment. She was, admittedly, inexperienced in love, but her pride and her ethics and her basic sense of tidiness insisted that, before she consented to be added, Laura be explicitly subtracted. The only useful nugget she’d gleaned in this regard was that Tanner still lived with his parents. Since he wasn’t shacked up with Laura, there was no decisive action he could take. But this made a formal renunciation all the more necessary. She considered this requirement absolute, and so it was with a confusing sense of self-betrayal, of observing a person she morally disapproved of and didn’t understand but nevertheless was, that she let Tanner kiss her before he’d satisfied it.
At the Grove, five nights after their seemingly crucial conversation in the sanctuary, she’d seen Laura Dobrinsky standing on tiptoes to press her face to Tanner’s, and him letting himself be nuzzled, a contented smile on his face. Becky had felt stabbed in the gut. She’d fled to a bathroom stall and shed her first tears on account of a man. In her ensuing misery, she’d skipped both Sunday service and Crossroads, which she felt had failed to warn her that the risk in risk-taking was stabbing pain, and dragged herself through the last days of school before vacation.
And then, last night, she’d subbed at the Grove. It wasn’t her usual night. When Tanner walked into the restaurant, alone, it shouldn’t have been with the expectation of finding her there. Assuming it was just wretched luck, she asked a veteran waitress, Maria, to take his table. She could feel him looking at her, but she didn’t look at him, not once, until the last of the other diners were leaving. He was slouched low, the picture of composure, an emptied dessert plate on his table. He waved her over.
“What,” she said.
“Are you okay? I looked for you in church on Sunday.”
“I didn’t go. I’m not sure I’m into it anymore.”
A taste from childhood was in her throat, a horrible self-spiting taste that she couldn’t help wanting more of.
“Becky,” he said. “Did I do something? You seem pissed off with me.”
“Nope. Just tired.”
“I called your house. Your mom said you were here.”
There was no law against just walking away. She walked away.
“Hey, come on,” Tanner said, jumping up to pursue her. “I came here to see you. I thought we were friends. If you’re pissed off with me, you could at least tell me why.”
Maria was watching them from the table she was wiping down. Becky continued on into the kitchen, but Tanner wasn’t afraid of the kitchen. She turned on her heel.