He was chatting with the two widows when they heard a door bang downstairs, a woman’s voice rising in anger. He leaped to his feet and ran down to the community room. Frances, clutching a sheet of newsprint, was shrinking from a young woman he’d never seen before. She was emaciated, filthy-haired. Even halfway across the room, he could smell the liquor on her.
“This my son, you understand me? My son.”
Ronnie was still on his knees with the crayons, swaying.
“Whoa, whoa,” Russ said.
The young woman wheeled around. “You the husband?”
“No, I’m the pastor.”
“Well, you tell whatever she is to stay away from my boy.” She addressed herself again to Frances. “Stay away from my boy, bitch! What you got there anyway?”
Russ stepped between the women. “Miss. Please.”
“What you got there?”
“It’s a drawing,” Frances said. “A nice drawing. Ronnie made it. Didn’t you, Ronnie?”
The drawing in question was a random red scrawl. Ronnie’s mother reached and snatched it from Frances’s hand. “This ain’t your property.”
“No,” Frances said. “I think he made it for you.”
“She still talking to me? Is that what I’m hearing?”
“I think we all need to calm down here,” Russ said.
“She need to get her white ass outta my face and not be messing with my boy.”
“I’m sorry,” Frances said. “He’s so sweet, I was only—”
“Why is she still talking to me?” The mother ripped the drawing into quarters and yanked Ronnie to his feet. “I told you to keep away from these folk. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“Dunno,” Ronnie said.
She slapped him. “You don’t know?”
“Miss,” Russ said, “if you hit the boy again, there’s going to be trouble.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She was heading toward the street door. “Come on, Ronnie. We done here.”
After they were gone, and Frances had broken down in sobs and he’d embraced her, feeling her fear expend itself in shudders, but also noticing how neatly her narrow form fit in his arms, her delicate head in his hand, he was close to tears himself. They should have asked permission. He should have kept a more protective eye on her. He should have insisted that she help the older ladies with the books.
“I don’t know if I’m cut out for this,” she said.
“It was just bad luck. I’ve never seen her before.”
“But I’m afraid of them. And she knew it. And you’re not, and she respected you.”
“It gets easier if you keep showing up.”
She shook her head, not believing him.
When Theo Crenshaw returned from his lunch, Russ was too ashamed to mention the incident. He’d had no plan for him and Frances, no specific fantasy, nothing more than a wish to be near her, and now, in his vanity and error, he’d blown his chance to see her twice a month. He was bad enough to desire a woman who wasn’t his wife, but he was also bad at being bad. How hideously passive a tactic it had been to bring her down to the basement. To imagine that watching him work could make her want him, the way watching her do anything made him want her, was to be the kind of man her kind of woman wouldn’t want. Watching him had bored her, and he deserved the blame for what had followed.
In his Fury, on the slow drive back to New Prospect, she was silent until one of the older widows asked her how her son, Larry, the tenth grader, was liking Crossroads. It was news to Russ that her son had joined the church’s youth group.
“Rick Ambrose must be some kind of genius,” Frances said. “I don’t think there were thirty kids in that group when I was growing up.”
“Were you in it?” the older widow asked.
“Nope. Not enough cute boys. Not any, actually.”
Coming from Frances, the word genius was like acid on Russ’s brain. He should have borne it stoically, but on his bad days he was unable not to do things he would later regret. It was almost as if he did them because he would later regret them. Writhing with retrospective shame, abasing himself in solitude, was how he found his way back to God’s mercy.
“Do you know,” he said, “why the group is named Crossroads? It’s because Rick Ambrose thought kids could relate to the name of a rock song.”
This was a scabrous half-truth. Russ himself had originally proposed the name.
“And so I asked him—I had to ask—if he knew the original Robert Johnson song. And he gives me a blank look. Because to him, you know, music history started with the Beatles. Believe me, I’ve heard the Cream version of ‘Crossroads.’ I know exactly what it is. It’s a bunch of guys from England ripping off an authentic Black American blues master and acting like it’s their music.”