But then, four days ago, she’d called him. She’d had a wretched cold, she said, but she couldn’t stop thinking about his words in the car. She didn’t think she had the strength to be like him, but she felt like she’d turned a corner, and Kitty Reynolds had mentioned a Christmas delivery to the South Side. Could she come along with them for that?
Russ would have been content to rejoice merely as her pastor, her enabler, if Frances hadn’t then asked if he might loan her some of his blues recordings.
“Our turntable plays 78s,” she said. “I’m thinking, if I’m going to do this, I should try to understand their culture better.”
He winced at the phrase their culture, but even he was not so bad at being bad as not to know what sharing music signified. He went up to the unheatable third floor of his hulking church-provided house and spent a good hour on his knees, selecting and reselecting 78s, trying to guess which ten of them together were likeliest to inspire feelings like the ones he already had for her. His connection with God had vanished, but this wasn’t a worry for now. The worry was Kitty Reynolds. It was imperative that he have Frances all to himself, but Kitty was sharp and he was bad at lying. Any ruse he tried, like telling her to meet him at three and then departing with Frances at two thirty, was bound to raise Kitty’s suspicions. He saw that he had no choice but to level with her, sort of, and say that Frances had suffered a small trauma in the city, and that he needed to be alone with her when she bravely revisited the scene of it.
“It sounds to me,” Kitty had said when he called her, “like you fell down on the job.”
“You’re right. I did. And now I need to try and regain her trust. It’s encouraging that she wants to go back, but it’s still very delicate.”
“And she’s a cute one, and it’s Christmastime. If it were anyone but you, Russ, I might be worried about your motives.”
He’d wondered about Kitty’s implication—whether she considered him uniquely good and trustworthy, or uniquely unsexed and unmanly and unthreatening. Either way, the effect had been to make his impending date with Frances feel more thrillingly illicit. In anticipation of it, he’d smuggled out of his house and into the church his final selection of blues records and a grimy old coat, a sheepskin thing from Arizona, that he hoped might lend him a bit of an edge. In Arizona, he’d had an edge, and, fairly or not, he believed that what had dulled it was his marriage. When Marion, after his humiliation, had loyally undertaken to hate Rick Ambrose, calling him that charlatan, Russ had snapped at her—lashed out—and declared that Rick was many things but not a charlatan, the simple fact was that he, Russ, had lost his edge and couldn’t relate to young people anymore. He flagellated himself and resented Marion for interfering with the pleasure of it. His subsequent daily shame, whether of walking past Ambrose’s office or taking a craven detour to avoid it, had connected him to the sufferings of Christ. It was a torment that nourished him in his faith, whereas the too-gentle touch of Marion’s hand on his arm, when she tried to comfort him, was a torment without spiritual upside.
From his office, as the hour finally approached two thirty, the page in his typewriter still blank, he could hear the afterschool influx of Crossroads teenagers buzzing around the honeypot of Ambrose, the pounding of running footsteps, the shouting of swear words that Mr. Fuck-Piss-Shit encouraged by using them incessantly himself. More than a hundred and twenty kids now belonged to Crossroads, among them two of Russ’s own children; and it was a measure of how focused he’d been on Frances, how mad with anticipation of their date, that only now, as he stood up from his desk and pulled on the sheepskin coat, did he consider that he and she might run into his son Perry.
Bad criminals overlook obvious things. Relations with his daughter, Becky, had been strained ever since she’d joined Crossroads, gratuitously, in October, but at least she was aware of how deeply she’d wounded him by joining, and he rarely saw her at the church after school. Perry, however, knew nothing of tact. Perry, whose IQ had been measured at 160, saw too much and smirked too much at what he saw. Perry was fully capable of chatting up Frances, his manner seemingly forthright and respectful but somehow neither, and he would definitely notice the sheepskin coat.
Russ could have used the detour to the parking lot, but the man who resorted to it wasn’t the man he meant to be today. He squared his shoulders, deliberately forgot to take the blues recordings, so that he and Frances would have a reason to return to his office after dark, and stepped into a dense bank of smoke from the cigarettes of a dozen kids camped out in the hallway. There was no immediate sign of Perry. One chubby, apple-cheeked girl was splayed out happily on the laps of three boys on the saggy old divan that someone, over Russ’s quiet objections to Dwight Haefle （the hallway was a fire escape route）， had dragged in for kids waiting their turn to be confronted by Ambrose, with brutal but loving honesty, in the privacy of his office.