Rabbit At Rest

II. PA

SUN AND MOON, rise and fall: the well-worn wheels of nature that in Florida impinge where beach meets sea are in Pennsylvania mufed, softened, sedimented over, clothed in the profoundly accustomed. In the Penn Park quarter-acre that Janice and Harry acquired a decade ago, there is, over toward the neighboring house built of clinker bricks, a weeping cherry tree, and he likes to be back when it blossoms, around April tenth. By then, too, baseball has come north – Schmidt this year hitting two home runs in the first two games, squelching all talk that he was through and lawns are sending up tufts of garlic. The magnolias and quince are in bloom, and the forsythia is out, its glad cool yellow calling from every yard like a sudden declaration of the secret sap that runs through everybody's lives. A red haze of budding fills the maples along the curbs and runs through the woods that still exist, here and there, ever more thinly, on the edge of developments old and new.

His first days back, Rabbit likes to drive around, freshening his memory and hurting himself with the pieces of his old self that cling to almost every corner ofthe Brewer area. The streets where he was a kid are still there, though the trolley cars no longer run. The iron bridges, the railroad yards rust inside the noose of bypasses that now encircles the city. The license plates still have an orange keystone in the middle, but now say You've Got a Friend in Pennsylvania, which he always found sappy, and sappier still those imitation plates that can be bolted on the front bumper and say You've Got a Friend in JESUS. The covers of telephone directories boast The UnCommonwealth of Pennsylvania. Behind the wheel of his car, he gravitates to Mt. Judge, the town where he was born and raised, on the opposite side of Brewer from Penn Park. In this fortresslike sandstone church with its mismatching new wing, the Mt. Judge Evangelical Lutheran, he was baptized and confirmed, in a shirt that chafed his neck like it had been starched in lye, and here, further along Central, in front of a candy store now a photocopying shop, he first felt himself in love, with Margaret Schoelkopf in her pigtails and hightop shoes. His heart had felt numb and swollen above the sidewalk squares like one of those zeppelins you used to see in the sky, the squares of cement like city blocks far beneath his floating childish heart. Every other house in this homely borough holds the ghost of someone he once knew who now is gone. Empty to him as seashells in a collector's cabinet, these plain domiciles with their brick-pillared porches and dim front parlors don't change much; even the slummier row houses such as he and Janice lived in on Wilbur Avenue when they were first married are just the same in shape, climbing the hill like a staircase, though those dismal old asphalt sidings the tints of bruise and dung have given way to more festive substances imitating rough-hewn stone or wooden clapboards, thicker on some facades than others, so there is a little step up and down at the edges as your eye moves along the row. Harry always forgets, what is so hard to picture in flat Florida, the speckled busyness, the antic jammed architecture, the distant blue hilliness forcing in the foreground the gabled houses to climb and cling on the high sides of streets, the spiky retaining walls and sharp slopes crowned by a barberry hedge or tulip bed, slopes planted more and more no longer in lawn but ground cover like ivy or juniper that you don't have to mow once a week with those old-fashioned reel mowers. Some people would rig their mowers with a rope on the handle so they could let it slither clattering down and then pull it back up. Rabbit smiles in his car, remembering those wooden-handled old mowers and that longdead Methodist neighbor of theirs on Jackson Road Mom used to feud with about mowing the two-foot strip of grass between the cement walks that ran along the foundation walls of their houses. The old Methodist couple had bought the house from the Zims when they moved to Cleveland. Carolyn Zim had been so pretty – like Shirley Temple only without the dimple, more of a Deanna Durbin sultriness, on this little girl's body – that Mr. and Mrs. fought all the time, Mom said, Mrs. being jealous. He used to wait by his window for a glimpse in the soft evening of Carolyn undressing for bed, across the little air space. His room: he can almost remember the wallpaper, its extra-yellowed look above the radiator, the varnished shelf where his teddy bears sat, the bushel basket his Tinker Toy spokes and hubs and his rubber soldiers and lead airplanes lived in. There was a taste, oilclothy, or like hot windowsill paint, or the vanilla and nutmeg when Mom baked a cake, to that room he can almost taste again, but not quite, it moves into the shadows, it slips behind the silver-painted radiator with its spines imprinted with scrolling designs in blurred low relief.

Brewer, too, that torpid hive, speaks to him of himself, of his past grown awesomely deep, so that things he remembers personally, V-E day or the Sunday Truman declared war on North Korea, are history now, which most of the people in the world know about only from books. Brewer was his boyhood city, the only city he knew. It still excites him to be among its plain flowerpot-colored blocks, its brick factories and row housing and great grim churches all mixed together, everything heavy and solid and built with an outmoded decorative zeal. The all but abandoned downtown, wide Weiser Street which he can remember lit up and as crowded as a fairgrounds in Christmas season, has become a patchwork of rubble and parking lots and a few new glass-skinned buildings, stabs at renewal mostly occupied by banks and government agencies, the stores refusing to come back in from the malls on Brewer's outskirts. The old Baghdad, once one of a half-dozen first-run movie theaters along Weiser, now stands between two vacant lots, its Arab-style tiles all stripped away and its marquee, that last advertised triple-X double features, peeling and rusting and holding the letters ELP and on the line below that SAV ME scrambled remnant of an appeal for historic restoration. The movie palaces of his boyhood, packed with sweet odors and dark velvet, murmurs and giggles and held hands, were history. HELP SAVE ME. There had been a kind of Moorish fountain in the lobby, colored lights playing on the agitated water. The music store, Chords 'n' Records, that Ollie Fosnacht used to run twenty years ago a few doors up from the Baghdad, and that then became Fidelity Audio, is still a store, called now The Light Fantastic, selling running shoes, two whole windows of them. Must be a market for them among the minorities. Mug and run.

In Rabbit's limited experience, the more improvements they've loaded onto running shoes, the more supporting pads and power wedges and scientifically designed six-ply soles and so on, the stiffer and less comfortable they've become: as bad as shoes. And those running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric. green so tight they show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to display. Ollie Fosnacht's estranged wife Peggy died about eight years ago, of breast cancer that had metastasized. Rabbit reflects that she was the first woman he has slept with who has died, has actually bitten the bullet. Then realizes this is not true. There was Jill. He used to fuck Jill that crazy summer, though he could tell she didn't much like it. Too young to like it. And maybe that whore in Texas who with a curious drawling courtesy made him an unvirgin is dead now too. They don't have long lives, with the hours, the booze, the beatings.

And the drugs that most of them are into, and AIDS. But, then, who does live forever? We all take a beating. Must be the way they figure, it's sooner or later. They're just like us only more so. These guys in prison now who bite the guards to give them AIDS with their saliva. We're turning into mad dogs -the human race is one big swamp of viruses.

Back from the hollow center of Brewer, in the tight brick rows built a century ago when the great mills now abandoned or turned into factory outlet stores still smoked and vibrated, spinning textiles and casting steel, life goes on as lively as ever, though in a darker shade. He likes cruising these streets. In April at least they brim with innocent energy. Four leggy young blacks cluster about a bicycle being repaired. A Hispanic girl in the late-afternoon slant of sun steps out of her narrow slice of a house in high silk heels and a lilac-colored party dress and a diagonal purple sash and at her waist a great cloth rose: she is a flower, the moment says, and a swarm ofboys has gathered, jostling, bumbling, all dressed in steelgray windbreakers and green Army pants, a gang uniform of sorts, Harry supposes. In Brewer people still use the streets, they sit out on their steps and little porches in an expectant way you never see in Deleon. And the Pennsylvania row houses take a simple square approach to shelter, not so different from those cities of aligned cereal boxes the teacher had you set up with cut-out doors and crayoned-on windows in first grade; it makes Harry happy after his winter in Florida with its condominiums interwoven with golf courses, its tile-roofed towers of time-shared apartments, its villages that aren't villages, its thousand real-estate angles and prettifications of the flimsy.

In the slate-gray two-door Celica he and Janice lock into their garage when they take the pearl-gray Canny wagon south in the fall, he feels safe gliding along and attracts not too many stares, though in the tough section near the tracks, on the rounded corner step of a boarded-up tavern, a little rounded dark girl in a sweatshirt sits in the lap of a boy already barechested though the spring air is still chilly, and alternately kisses him with a languid and determined open mouth and gazes insolently at the cars streaming by. The half-naked boy is too stoned to stare, perhaps, but she gives Harry a look through the Celica's side window that would wipe him away if it could. Fuck her. Fuck him, her eyes say. She seemed to sense what he was doing, rolling by, trying to steal a little life for himself out of the south Brewer scene, all these lives that are young and rising like sap where his is old and sinking.

There has been a lot of living in these tired streets. The old row houses have been repainted, residinged, updated with aluminum awnings and ironwork railings themselves grown old. They are slots still being filled, with street numbers the builders set in stained-glass fanlights above the doors. The blocks were built solid, there would never be any renumbering. Once he lived in one of these – number 326, the number of his hospital room reminded him – with Ruth, and used to shop for quick necessities at that corner store there, now called ROSA'S GROCERIES (Tienda de Comestibles), and stare out the window at the rose window of a limestone church now become the PAL Community Center / Centro Comunidad. The city is quicker than he remembers it, faster on the shuffle, as the blocks flicker by, and buildings that he felt when a boy were widely spaced now appear adjacent. The coughdrop factory, the skyscraper courthouse, the Y where he tried to take swimming lessons and caught pneumonia instead, coming out into the winter streets with wet hair, are all around corners from one another, and close to the post office with its strange long empty lobby, busy and lighted only at one end where a grate or two is up, and to the Ben Franklin, a proud gilded downtown hotel now a Ramada Motor Inn. There his class, Mt. Judge '51, had its senior prom, he in a summer tux and Mary Ann in a lavender satin strapless gown whose crinoline petticoats gave them so much trouble in the car afterward they had to laugh, her round white thighs lost in all those rustling folds and hems, Easter eggs in a papery nest, her underpants damp from all the dancing, a spongy cotton pillow, stuffed with her moss, a powerful moist musk scent, Mary Ann the first woman whose smell he made his own, all of her his own, every crevice, every mood, before he went off to do his two years in the Army and she without a word of warning married somebody else. Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner. Whenever he went out with Mary Ann, knowing she was his to harvest in the warm car, the blue family Plymouth, he felt like a winner, offhand, calm, his life set at an irresistible forward slant.

Two blocks toward the mountain from the Ben Franklin, under Eisenhower Avenue where it lifts up in a wooden-railed hump to pass over, the laborers of old hand-dug a great trench to bring the railroad tracks into the city, tracks disused now, and the cut, walled in limestone, a pit for tossing beer cans and soda bottles down into, whole garbage bags even, mattresses; Brewer was always a tough town, a railroad town, these blocks along the tracks full of tough men, bleary hoboes who'd offer to blow you for a quarter, sooty hotels where card games went on for days, bars whose front windows were cracked from the vibration of the trains going past, the mile-long trains of coal cars pulling right across Weiser, stopping all traffic, like the time he and Ruth waited for one to pass, the neon lights of a long-gone Chinese restaurant flickering in her many-colored hair.

These red-painted bricks, these imitation gray stones, have seen heartbreaking things but don't know it. A block or two toward the mountain from Ruth's old street – Summer Street it was, though they had lived there in spring, summer spelled their end Rabbit is suddenly driving in a white tunnel, trees on both sides of the street in white blossoms, the trees young and oval in shape and blending one into the other like clouds, the sky's high blue above tingeing the topmost blossoms as it does the daytime moon. And up top where there is most light the leaves are beginning to unfold, shiny and small and heart-shaped, as he knows because he is moved enough to pull the Celica to the curb and park and get out and pull off a single leaf to study, as if it will be a clue to all this glory. Along the sidewalk in this radiant long grove shadowy people push baby carriages and stand conversing by their steps as if oblivious of the beauty suspended above them, enclosing them, already shedding a confetti of petals: they are in Heaven. He wants to ask one of them the name of these trees, and how they came to be planted here in these hard brick blocks of Brewer, luxuriant as the ficus trees that line the avenues of Naples down in Florida, but feels shy in their gaze toward him, himself a shadow in this filtered tunnel light of blossoms, a visitor, an intruder from the past, and figures they would not know anyway, or if they did know would think him too strange for asking.

But Janice knows. When he describes this experience to her, she says, "Those are these Bradford pear trees the city is planting everywhere the old elms and buttonwoods are dying off. It blossoms but doesn't bear any fruit, and is very hardy in city conditions. It doesn't mind carbon dioxide or any of that."

"Why have I never seen them before?"

"You have, Harry, I'm sure. They've been putting them in for ten years now at least. There've been articles in the paper. One of the girls over at the club's husband is on the Improvement Commission."

"I never saw anything like it. It broke me all up."

She is busy re-establishing them in the Penn Park house, cleaning away the winter's cobwebs and polishing the Koerner silver her mother left her, and she moves away from him impatiently. "You've seen, it's just you see differently now."

Since his heart attack, she means. Since nearly dying. He faintly feels with Janice now like one of the dead they used to say came back and watched over the survivors, living with them invisibly like the mice in the walls. She often doesn't seem to hear him, or take him quite seriously. She goes off across Brewer to visit Nelson and Pru and their children in Mt. Judge, or to remake acquaintance with her female buddies over at the Flying Eagle Country Club, where the clay tennis courts are being rolled and readied and the golf course is already green and receiving play. And she is looking for a job. He thought she had been kidding after seeing Working Girl, but no, the women her age almost all do something now – one of her tennis buddies is a physical therapist with muscles in her arms and shoulders like you wouldn't believe, and another, Dons Eberhardt, who used to be Doris Kaufmann, has become a diamond expert and takes the bus over to New York practically every week and carries hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of gems back and forth, and a third woman she knows works in the booming new field of de-asbestosizing homes and buildings like factories and schools. It seems there's no end of old asbestos to ferret out. Janice thinks she might go into real estate. A friend of a friend works mostly on weekends and makes over fifty thousand a year in commissions.

Harry asks her, "Why not go over and help Nelson run the lot? Something's going flooey over there."

"That's no fun, hiring myself. And you know how sensitive Nelson is at the idea of us interfering."

"Yeah – why is that?"

Janice has all the answers, now that she is back with her female crowd of know-it-alls over at the Flying Eagle. "Because he's grown up in the shadow of a dominating father."

"I'm not dominating. I'm a pushover, if you ask me."

"You are to him. Psychologically dominating. You're certainly a lot taller. And were a wonderful athlete."

"Were is right. A wonderful athlete whose doctors say he has to ride a golf cart and not do anything more violent than brisk walking."

"And you don't do it, Harry. I haven't seen you walk further than to the car and back."

"I've been doing some gardening."

"If you can call it that."

He likes to get out into their yard toward the end of the day and break off last year's dead flower stalks and bone-white old poke plants and burn them in a fire kindled on the day's newspaper, the Brewer Standard. The lawn needed a mowing badly when they arrived and the bulb beds should have been uncovered in March. The snowdrops and crocuses came and went while they were in Florida; the hyacinths are at their peak and the tulips up but still with pointy green heads. Rabbit feels peace at the moment of the day when the light dims and the weeping cherry glows in the dusk, its florets like small pink bachelor buttons and the whole droop-branched womanly forgiving shape of it gathering to itself a neon pallor as the shadows lengthen and dampen; the earth's revolution advances a bit more and the scraps of sunlight linger longer under the April sky with its jet trails and icy horsetails, just a few golden rags caught in the shaggy forsythia over toward the neighboring mansion built of thin yellow bricks, and the struggling hemlock, and the tallest of the rhododendrons by the palisade fence you see from the kitchen window. Janice put up a bird feeder in the hemlock a few falls ago, even though Doris Kaufmann or some other busybody told her it was cruel to birds to put up a feeder when you weren't there in the winter, a plastic sphere tilted like Saturn, and he fills it with sunflower seed when he thinks of it. Putting up bird feeders was the sort of thing her mother used to do but would never have occurred to Janice when they were younger and old Bessie was still alive. Our genes keep unfolding as long as we five. Harry tastes in his teeth a sourness that offended him on his father's breath. Poor Pop. His face yellowed like a dried apricot at the end. Bessie had the feeders all on wires and poles in her Joseph Street back yard to frustrate the squirrels. The copper beech by their old bedroom, with the nuts that would pop on their own all night, attracted the squirrels, she would say, making her lap and setting her hands on her knees as if God had cooked up squirrels just to bedevil her. Harry had liked Bessie, though she screwed him in her will. Never forgave him for that time in '59. Died of diabetes and its circulatory complications the day after Princess Di gave birth to little Prince William, the last living thing Bessie was interested in, would there be a future king of England? – that and the Hinckley trial, she thought they should hang the boy on the steps of the Capitol, right there in the sunshine, letting him off as insane was a scandal. The old lady was terrified of having her legs amputated at the end the way her own mother had. Harry can even remember Bessie's mother's name. Hannah. Hannah Koerner. Hard to believe he will ever be as dead as Hannah Koerner.

Before the April evening falls, the birds, big and little, that the feeder attracts flutter and hop to take a drink or splash their feathers in the blue-bottomed cement pond some earlier owner of this little place, this snug limestone cottage tucked in among the bigger Penn Park homes, created. The cement pool is cracked but still holds water. Like himself, Rabbit thinks, turning toward his house with its lit windows that seem as far away and yet as strangely close as his parents' house used to when he was a kid playing Twentyone or Horse with Mim and the other children of the neighborhood out at the backboard on the garage in the alley behind their long narrow yard on Jackson Road. Then as now, waking from twilit daydreams, he discovered himself nearer a shining presence than he thought, near enough for it to cast a golden shadow ahead of his steps across the yard; then it was his future, now it is his past.

During those spring months with Ruth on Summer Street, he used to wonder what it would be like to run to the end of the street, straight as far as the eye could see. In the thirty years since, he has often driven this way, to Brewer's northwestern edge and beyond, where the highway with its motels (Economy Lodge, Coronet, Safe Haven) melts into farmland and signs pointing the way to Harrisburg and Pittsburgh begin to appear. One by one the farms and their stone buildings, the bank bams put together with pegs and beams and the farmhouses built square to the compass with walls two feet thick, are going under to real-estate developments. Two miles beyond the pike to Maiden Springs, where the Murketts used to live before they got divorced, there is a fairly new development called Arrowdale after the old Arrowhead Farm that was sold off by the nieces and nephews of the old spinster who lived there so many years and had wanted to leave it to some television evangelist as a kind of salvation park, a holy-roller retreat, but whose lawyers kept talking her out of it. Rabbit as these recent years have gone by has watched the bulldozed land lose its raw look and the trees and bushes grow up so it almost seems houses have always been here. The streets curve, as they did in the Murketts' development, but the houses are more ordinary – ranch houses and split levels with sides of aluminum clapboards and fronts of brick varied by flagstone porchlets and unfunctional patches of masonry facing. Cement walks traverse small front yards with azaleas not quite in bloom beneath the picture windows. Bark mulch abounds, and matching porch furniture, and a tyrannical neatness absent in the older more blue-collar towns like Mt. Judge and West Brewer.

Ronnie and Thelma Harrison moved to one of these modest new houses when their three boys grew up and went off. Alex, the oldest, is an electronics engineer somewhere south of San Francisco; the middle boy, Georgie, who had had reading problems in school, is trying to be a dancer and musician in New York City; and their youngest, Ron junior, has stayed in the county, as a part-time construction worker, though he put in two years of college at Lehigh. Thelma doesn't complain about her sons or her house, though to Harry they seem disappointing, disappointingly ordinary, for a woman of Thelma's intelligence and, in his experience of her, passion.

Thelma's disease, systemic lupus erythematosus, has cost a fortune over the years, even with the benefits from Ronnie's insurance company's health plan. And it has meant that she has not been able to go back to teaching elementary school when her boys were gone, as she had hoped. Her health has been too erratic; it has kept her at home, where Harry could usually find her. This noon when he called from a pay phone in Brewer he expected her to answer and she did. He asked ifhe might drive over and she said he might. She didn't sound happy to hear from him, but not distressed either: resigned, merely. He leaves the Celica out front at the curving curb, though usually over the years she opened the garage for him and closed the door electronically from within the kitchen, to hide the evidence. But now that he is as sick as if not sicker than she, he doesn't know how much they still have to conceal. The neighborhood is empty during the midday, until the buses bring the children home from school. A single whining engine is at work somewhere out of sight in Arrowdale, and the air holds a pervasive vibration and hum of traffic from the Maiden Springs Pike. Also out of sight, some birds are chirping, raucous in their nesting frenzy, though the development is skimpy on trees. A robin hops on the bit of lawn beside Thelma's cement walk, and thrashes into the air as Harry approaches. He doesn't remember robins as seeming such big fierce birds; this one looked the size of a crow. He climbs two flagstone steps and crosses a little porch; Thelma opens the front door before he can ring the bell.

She seems smaller, and her hair grayer. Her prim, rather plain face always had a sallow tinge, and this jaundice has deepened, he can observe through the makeup she uses to soften her butterfly rash, a reddening the disease has placed like a soreness across her nose and beneath her eyes. Nevertheless, her deeply known presence stirs him. They lightly kiss, when she has closed the door, a long light-blocking green shade pulled down over its central pane of bevelled glass. Her lips are cool, and faintly greasy. She stays a time within his embrace, as if expecting something more to happen, her body relaxed against his in unspeakable confession.

"You're thin," she says, drawing at last away.

"A little less fat," he tells her. "I've a long way to go before I satisfy the doctors and Janice." It seems only natural to mention Janice, though he had to make his tongue do it. Thelma knows the score, and did from the start. The whole affair was her idea, though he grew used to it over the years, and built it in. Her walk as she moves away from him into the living room seems stiff, a bit of a waddle; arthritis is part of the lupus.

"Janice," she repeats. "How is Wonder Woman?" Once he confided that he called Janice that and Thelma has never forgotten. Women don't forget, especially what you wish they would.

"Oh, no different. She keeps busy in Florida with all these different groups, she's kind of the baby of our condo, and a shiksa besides. You'd hardly know her, she's so on the ball. Her tennis is terrific, the people who play tell me." He is getting too enthusiastic, he realizes. "But we were happy to leave. It got cold. March was miserable. At least up here you expect it and have the clothes."

"You never told us about your heart attack." That "us" is a little payback for his mentioning Janice right off: You trail your spouses after you like shadows, right into bed; they becloud the sheets.

"It didn't seem worth bragging about."

"We heard about it from little Ron, who knows a boy who knows Nelson. The kiddie network. Imagine how I felt, learning about it that way. My lover nearly dies and never tells me."

"How would we, I, whoever, tell you? It's not the kind of thing they have cards for in the drugstore."

In recent years he and Janice have seen less and less of the Harrisons. Rabbit and Ron were Mt. Judge boys together and played on the high-school basketball varsities that, coached by Marty Tothero, were league champions for two out of their three years in senior high. But he has never liked Ronnie: loudmouthed, pushy, physically crude, always playing with himself in the locker room, flicking towels, giving redbellies, terrorizing the JVs. Women don't mind this kind of prick as much as Harry does. Part of Thelma's fascination for him has been that she could stand the guy, put up with his sexual tricks and remain outwardly such a prim, plain schoolteacher-type. Not really plain: with her clothes off her body is somehow better than her clothes have led you to expect. The first time they ever slept together, her breasts seemed like a girl's in Playboy – nipples like perfect little doorbells.

"What can I offer you?" Thelma asks. "Coffee. A beer?"

"Both are no-nos for the new me. Do you have anything like a Diet Coke or Pepsi?" He remembers Judy's little quavering voice singing Coke is it on that long zigzag ride into shore.

"Sure. We don't drink much any more ourselves, now that we've resigned from the Flying Eagle."

"You ever coming back?"

"I don't think so. We heard the fees went up again, as you maybe didn't notice, you're so rich, plus the assessment for repairs to the two greens close to the road that are always being vandalized. Even three years ago Ronnie figured it was costing him over eighty dollars a round, it wasn't worth it. There's a whole new younger crowd out at the Eagle now that dominates everything. They've changed the tone. It's gotten too yuppie."

"Too bad. I miss playing with old Ronnie."

"Why? You can't stand him, Harry."

"I like beating him."

Thelma nods, as if acknowledging her own contribution to Harry's beating Ronnie. But she can't help it, she loves this man, his soft pale bemusement and cool hard heart, his uncircumcised prick, his offhand style, and in her slow dying has not denied herself the pleasure of expressing this love, as much as Harry has been able to bear it. She has kept her strongest feelings contained, and the affair has enriched her transactions with God, giving her something to feel sinful about, to discuss with Him. It seems to explain her lupus, if she's an adulteress. It makes it easier on Him, if she deserves to be punished.

She goes into the kitchen for the soft drinks. Rabbit roams quietly in the living room; in preparation for his visit she has pulled not only the narrow shade on the front door but the wide one on the picture window. He pities the room – its darkness as if even weak windowlight would penetrate her skin and accelerate the destruction of her cells, its hushed funereal fussiness. Wild though she can be, with a streak of defiance as though daring to be damned, Thelma maintains a conventional local decor. Stuffed flowered chairs with broad wooden arms, plush chocolate-brown sofa with needlepointed scatter pillows and yellowing lace antimacassars, varnished little knickknack stands and taborets, a footstool on which an old watermill is depicted, symmetrical lamps whose porcelain bases show English hunting dogs in gilded ovals, an oppressively patterned muddy neo-Colonial wallpaper, and on every flat surface, fringed runners and semi-precious glass and porcelain elves and parrots and framed photographs of babies and graduating sons and small plates and kettles of hammered copper and pewter, objects to dust around but never to rearrange. This front room, but for the television set hulking in its walnut cabinet with its powdery gray-green face wearing a toupee of doilies and doodads, could have come out of Harry's adolescence, when he was gingerly paying calls on girls whose mothers came forward from the kitchen, drying their hands on their aprons, to greet him in motionless stuffed rooms such as this. The houses he has kept with Janice have had in comparison a dishevelled, gappy quality that has nevertheless given him room to breathe. This room is so finished, he feels in it he should be dead. It smells of all the insurance policies Ron sold to buy its furnishings.

"So tell me about it," Thelma says, returning with a round painted tray holding along with the two tall glasses of sparkling dark soft drink two matching small bowls of nuts. She sets the tray down on a glass-topped coffee table like an empty long picture frame.

He tells her, "For one thing, I'm not supposed to have stuff like that – salted nuts. Macadamia nuts yet! The worst thing for me, and they cost a fortune. Thel, you're wicked."

He has embarrassed her; her jaundiced skin tries to blush. Her basically thin face today looks swollen, perhaps from the cortisone she takes. "Ronnie buys them. They just happened to be around. Don't eat them if you can't, Harry. I didn't know. I don't know how to act with you, it's been so long."

"A couple won't kill me," he reassures her, and to be polite takes a few macadamia nuts into his fingers. Nuggets, they are like small lightweight nuggets with a fur of salt. He especially loves the way, when he holds one in his mouth a few seconds and then gently works it between his crowned molars, it breaks into two halves, the surface of the fissure as smooth to the tongue as glass, as baby skin. "And cashews, too," he says. "The second-worst thing for me. Dry-roasted yet."

"I seem to remember you like dry-roasted."

"There's a lot I bet you seem to remember," he says, taking a tasteless sip of his Diet Coke. First they take the cocaine out, then the caffeine, and now the sugar. He settles back with a small handful of cashews; dry-roasted, they have a little acid sting to them, the tang of poison that he likes. He has taken the rocking chair, painted black with stencilled red designs and a red-and-yellow flat pillow tied in place, to sit in, and she the plush brown sofa, not sinking into it but perching on the edge, her knees together and touching the raised edge of the coffee table. They have made love on that sofa, which was not long enough to stretch out on but long enough if both parties kept their knees bent. In a way he preferred it to one of the beds, since she seemed to feel guiltier and less free with herself in a real bed, a bed her family used, and her unease would spread to him. Moving the table, he could kneel beside the sofa and have the perfect angle for kissing her cunt. On and on, deeper into her darkness where things began to shudder and respond, it got to be an end in itself. He loved it when she would clamp his face between her damp thighs like a nut in a nutcracker and come. He wondered if a man ever got his neck broken that way.

A shadow has crossed Thelma's face, a flinching as if he has consigned her to merely remembering, to the sealed and unrepeatable past like the photographs on the silent television set. But he had meant it more comfortably, settling in his rocker opposite the one person who for these last ten years has given him nothing but what he needed. Sex. Soul food.

"You too," she says, her eyes lowered to the items on the tray, which she hasn't touched, "have things to remember, I hope."

"I just was. Remembering. You seem sad," he says, accusing, for his presence should make her glad, in spite of all.

"You don't seem quite you yet. You seem – more careful."

"Jesus, you'd be too. I'll have some more macadamia nuts, if that'll please you." He eats them one by one and between bouts of chewing and feeling their furry nuggets part so smoothly in his mouth tells her about his heart attack – the boat, the Gulf, little Judy, the lying on the beach feeling like a jellyfish, the hospital, the doctors, their advice, his attempts to follow it. "They're dying to cut into me and do a bypass. But there's this less radical option they can do first and I'm supposed to see a guy up here at St. Joseph's about having it done this spring. It's called an angioplasty. There's a balloon on the end of a catheter a yard long at least they thread up into your heart from a cut they make just under your groin, the artery there. I had it done kind of in Florida but instead of a balloon it was a bunch of dyes they put in to see what my poor old ticker actually looked like. It's a funny experience: it doesn't exactly hurt but you feel very funny, demoralized like, while it's being done and terrible for days afterward. When they put the dye in, your chest goes hot like you're in an oven. Deep, it feels too deep. Like having a baby but then no baby, just a lot of computerized bad news about your coronary arteries. Still, it beats open-heart, where they saw through your sternum for starters" – he touches the center of his chest and thinks of Thelma's breasts, their nipples so perfect to suck, waiting behind her blouse, waiting for him to make his move – "and then run all your blood through a machine for hours. I mean, that machine is you, for the time being. It stops, you die. A guy I play golf with down there had a quadruple and a valve replacement and a pacemaker while they were at it and he says he's never been the same, it was like a truck ran over him and then backed up. His swing, too, is terrible; he's never got it back. But enough, huh? What about you? How's your health?"

"How do I look?" She sips the Coke but leaves all the nuts in their twin bowls for him. The pattern imitates sampler stitch, squarish flowers in blue and pink.

"Good to me," he lies. "A little pale and puffy but we all do at the end of winter."

"I'm losing it, Harry," Thelma tells him, looking up until he meets her eyes. Eyes muddier than Pru's but also what they call hazel, eyes that have seen him all over, that know him as well as a woman's can. A wife fumbles around with you in the dark; a mistress you meet in broad daylight, right on the sofa. She used to tease him about his prick wearing a bonnet, with the foreskin still on. "My kidneys are worse and the steroid dose can't go any higher. I'm so anemic I can hardly drag around the house to do the work and have to take naps every afternoon – you're right in the middle of my nap time, as a matter of fact." He makes an instinctive motion, tightening his hands on the chair arms to pull himself up, and her voice lifts toward anger. "No. Don't go. Don't you dare. For God's sake. I don't see you at all for nearly six months and then you're up here a week before you bother to call."

"Thelma, she's around, I can't just wander off. I was getting reacclimated. I have to take it more easy on myself now."

"You've never loved me, Harry. You just loved the fact that I loved you. I'm not complaining. It's what I deserve. You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it. Look at my hands. I used to have pretty hands. At least I thought they were pretty. Now half the fingers – look at them! Deformed. I couldn't even get my wedding ring off if I tried now."

He looks, leaning forward so the rocker tips under him, to examine her extended hands. The knuckles are swollen and shiny, and some of the segments with the fingernails go off at a slight angle, but he wouldn't have noticed without her calling his attention to it. "You don't want to get your wedding ring off" he tells her. "As I remember, you and Ronnie are stuck together with glue. You even eat the glue sometimes, I seem to remember your telling me."

Her hands have made Thelma angry and he is fighting back, as if she blames her hands on him. She says, "You always minded that, that I was a wife to Ronnie, along with serving you whenever it suited. But who were you to mind that, stuck fast to Janice and her money? I never tried to take you away from her, though it would have been easy at times."

"Would it?" He rocks back. "I don't know, something about that little mutt still gets to me. She won't give up. She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it. Now she's got the idea she wants to be a working girl. She's signed up at the Penn State annex over on Pine Street for those courses you have to take to get a real-estate broker's license. At Mt. Judge High I don't think she ever got over a C, even in home ec. Come to think of it, I bet she flunked home ec., the only girl in the history of the school."

Thelma grudgingly smiles; her sallow face lights up in her shadowy living room. "Good for her," she says. "If I had my health, I'd be getting out myself. This being a homemaker – they sold us a bill of goods, back there in home ec."

"How is Ronnie, by the way?"

"The same," she says, with a note of that languid, plaintive music the women of the county inject into their saga of their stoic days. "Not hustling so hard for the new customers now, coasting along on the old. He's out from under the children's educations, so his only financial burden is me and the doctor bills. Not that he wouldn't be willing to pay for little Ron to finish up at Lehigh if he wanted; it's been a disappointment, his becoming a kind of hippie the way he has. The funny thing was he was the cleverest of the three at school. Things just came too easy to him, I guess."

Harry has heard this before. Thelma's voice is dutiful and deliberately calm, issuing small family talk when both know that what she wants to discuss is her old issue, that flared up a minute ago, ofwhether he loves her or not, or why at least he doesn't need her as much as she does him. But their relationship at the very start, the Caribbean night they first slept together, was established with her in pursuit of him, and all the years since, of hidden meetings, of wise decisions to end it and thrilling abject collapses back into sex, have not disrupted the fundamental pattern of her giving and his taking, of her fearing their end more than he, and clinging, and disliking herself for clinging, and wanting to punish him for her dislike, and him shrugging and continuing to bask in the sun of her love, that rises every day whether he is there or not. He can't believe it, quite, and has to keep testing her.

"These kids," he says, taking a bluff tone as if they are making small talk in public instead of enjoying this stolen intimacy behind drawn shades in Arrowdale, "they break your heart. You ought to see Nelson when he's down there in Florida and has to live with me a little. The poor kid was jumping out of his skin."

Thelma makes an annoyed motion with her hands. "Harry, you're not actually God, it just feels that way to you. Do you really think Nelson was jumpy because of you?"

"Why else?"

She knows something. She hesitates, but cannot resist, perhaps, a bit of revenge for his taking her always for granted, for his being in Pennsylvania a week before calling. "You must know about Nelson. My boys say he's a cocaine addict. They've all used it, that generation, but Nelson they tell me is really hooked. As they say, the drug runs him, instead of him just using the drug."

Harry has rocked back as far as the rocker will take him without his shoes leaving the rug and remains in that position so long that Thelma becomes anxious, knowing that this man isn't sound inside and can have a heart attack. At last he rocks forward again and, gazing at her thoughtfully, says, "That explains a lot." He fishes in the side pocket of his tweedy gray sports coat for a small brown bottle and deftly spills a single tiny pill into his hand and puts it in his mouth, under his tongue. There is a certain habituated daintiness in the gesture. "Coke takes money, doesn't it?" he asks Thelma. "I mean, you can go through hundreds. Thousands."

She regrets her telling him, now that the satisfaction is past of shocking him, of waking him up to her existence once again. She is still at heart too much a schoolteacher; she enjoys administering a lesson. "I can't believe Janice doesn't know and hasn't discussed it with you, or that Nelson's wife hasn't come to you both."

"Pru's pretty close-mouthed," he says. "I don't see them that much. Even when we're all in the county, it's on opposite sides of Brewer. Janice is over there at her mother's old place a fair amount, but not me. She owns it, I don't."

"Harry, don't look so stunned. It's all just rumor, and really is his business, his and his family's. We all do things our parents wouldn't approve of, and they know it, and don't want to know, if you follow me. Oh, Harry, damn it! Now I've made you sad, when I'm dying to make you happy. Why don't you like me to make you happy? Why have you always fought it?"

"I haven't. I haven't fought it, Thel. We've had great times. It's just, we've never been exactly set up for a lot of happiness, and now -"

"Now, dear?"

"Now I know how you've been feeling all these years."

She wants for him to explain, but he can't he is suddenly aficted by tact. She prompts, "Mortal?"

"Yeah. Close to it. I mean, things wearing thin so you sort of look right through them."

"Including me."

"Not you. Cut it out, making me jump through this same fucking hoop all the time. Why do you think I'm here?"

"To make love. To screw me. Go ahead. I mean come ahead. Why do you think I answered the door?" She has leaned forward across the table, her knees white where they press against the edge, and her face has taken on that melting crazy look women get at the decision to go with it, to fuck in spite of all, which frightens him now because it suggests a willing slide down into death.

"Wait. Thel. Let's think about this." On cue, the nitroglycerin has worked its way through and he gets that tingle. He sits back, suppressing it. "I'm supposed to avoid excitement."

She asks, amused somehow by the need to negotiate, "Have you made love with Janice?"

"Once or twice maybe. I kind of forget. You know, it's like brushing your teeth at night, you forget if you did or didn't."

She takes this in, and decides to tease him. "I made up Alex's old bed for us."

"You didn't use to like to use real beds."

"I've become very liberated," she says, smiling, extracting what pleasure she can out of his evasions.

He is tempted, picturing Thelma in bed naked, her tallowy willing body, her breasts that have nursed three boy babies and two men at least but look virginal and rosy like a baby's thumbtips, not bumply and chewed and dark like Janice's, her buttocks glassy in texture and not finely gritty like Janice's, her pubic hair reddish and skimpy enough to see the slit through unlike Janice's opaque thick bush, and her shameless and matter-of-fact mouth, Thelma's, her frank humorous hunger, amused at being caught in the trap of lust over and over, not holding it against him all these years of off and on, in and out. But then he thinks of Ronnie who knows where that obnoxious prick's prick has been, Rabbit can't believe he's as faithful as Thelma thinks he is, not from the way he used to carry on in the locker room, not from the way he was screwing Ruth before Harry was, and cashing in Cindy that time in the Caribbean – and of AIDS. That virus too small to imagine travelling through our fluids, even a drop or two of saliva or cunt slime, and unlocking our antibodies with its little picks, so that our insides lose their balance and we topple into pneumonia, into starvation. Love and death, they can't be pried apart any more. But he can't tell Thelma that. It would be spitting in her wide-open face.

On her own she sees he isn't up to it. She asks, "Another Coke?" He has drunk it all, he sees, and consumed without thinking both the little bowls of fatty, sodium-soaked nuts.

"No. I ought to run. But let me sit here a little longer. Being with you is such a relief."

"Why? It seems I make claims, like all the others."

A little lightning of pain flickers across his chest, narrowing his scope of breath. Claims lie heavy around him, squeezing. Now a sexually unsatisfied mistress, another burden. But he lies, "No you don't. You've been all gravy, Thel. I know it's cost you, but you've been terrific."

"Harry, please. Don't sound so maudlin. You're still young. What? Fifty-five? Not even above the speed limit."

"Fifty-six two months ago. That's not old for some guys – not for a stocky little plug-ugly like Ronnie, he'll go forever. But if you're the height I am and been overweight as long, the heart gets tired of lugging it all around." He has developed, he realizes, an image of his heart as an unwilling captive inside his chest, a galley slave or one of those blinded horses that turn a mill wheel. He feels that Thelma is looking at him in a new way – clinically, with a detached appraising look far distant from the melting crazy look. He has forfeited something by not fucking her: he has lost full rank, and she is moving him out, without even knowing it. Fair enough. With her lupus, he moved her out a long while ago. If Thelma had been healthy, why wouldn't he have left Janice for her in this last decade? Instead he used all the holes she had and then hustled back into whatever model Toyota he was driving that year and back to Janice in her stubborn, stupid health. What was there about Janice? It must be religious, their tie, it made so little other sense.

Two ailing old friends, he and Thelma sit for half an hour, talking symptoms and children, catching up on the fate of common acquaintances – Peggy Fosnacht dead, Ollie down in New Orleans she heard, Cindy Murkett fat and unhappy working in a boutique in the new mall out near Oriole, Webb married for the fourth time to a woman in her twenties and moved from that fancy modern house in Brewer Heights with all his home carpentry to an old stone farmhouse in the south of the county, near Galilee, that he has totally renovated.

"That Webb. Anything he wants to do, he does. He really knows how to live."

"Not really. I was never as impressed with him as you and Janice were. I always thought he was a smartass know-it-all."

"You think Janice was impressed?"

Thelma is slightly flustered, and avoids his eye. "Well, there was that one night at least. She didn't complain, did she?"

"Neither did I," he says gallantly, though what he chiefly remembers is how tired he was the next morning, and how weird golf seemed, with impossible jungle and deep coral caves just off the fairway. Janice got Webb, and Ronnie sweet Cindy. Thelma told Harry that night she had loved him for years.

She nods in sarcastic acknowledgment of the compliment, and says, returning to an earlier point in their conversation, "About being mortal – I suppose it affects different people different ways, but for me there's never been a thinning out. Being alive, no matter how sick I feel, feels absolute. You're absolutely alive and when you're not you'll be absolutely something else. Do you and Janice ever go to church?"

Not too surprised, since Thelma has always been religious in her way, it goes with her conventional decor and secretive sexiness, he answers, "Rarely, actually. The churches down there have this folksy Southern thing. And most of our friends happen to be Jewish."

"Ronnie and I go every Sunday now. One of these new denominations that goes back to fundamentals. You know – we're lost, and we're saved."

"Oh yeah?" These marginal sects depress Harry. At least the moldy old denominations have some history to them.

"I believe it, sometimes," she says. "It helps the panic, when you think of all the things you'll never do that you always thought vaguely you might. Like go to Portugal, or get a master's degree."

"Well, you did some things. You did Ronnie, and me, me up brown I'd say, and you did raise three sons. You might get to Portugal yet. They say it's cheap, relatively. The only country over there I've ever wanted to go to is Tibet. I can't believe I won't make it. Or never be a test pilot, like I wanted to when I was ten. As you say, I still think I'm God."

"I didn't mean that unkindly. It's charming, Harry."

"Except maybe to Nelson."

"Even to him. He wouldn't want you any different."

"Here's a question for you, Thel. You're smart. What ever happened to the Dalai Lama?"

In her clinical appraising mood, nothing should surprise her, but Thelma laughs. "He's still around, isn't he? In fact, hasn't he been in the news a little, now that the Tibetans are rioting again? Why, Harry? Have you become a devotee of his? Is that why you don't go to church?"

He stands, not liking being teased about this. "I've always kind of identified with him. He's about my age, I like to keep track of the guy. I have a gut feeling this'll be his year." As he stands there, the rocking chair on the rebound taps his calves and his medications make him feel lightheaded. "Thanks for the nuts," he says. "There's a lot we could still say."

She stands too, stiffly fighting the plushy grip of the sofa, and with her arthritic waddle steps around the table, and places her body next to his, her face at his lapel. She looks up at him with that presumptuous solemnity of women you have fucked. She urges him, "Believe in God, darling. It helps."

He squirms, inside. "I don't not believe."

"That's not quite enough, I fear. Harry, darling." She likes the sound of "darling." "Before you go, let me see him at least."

"See who?"

"Him, Harry. You. With his bonnet."

Thelma kneels, there in her frilled and stagnant dim living room, and unzips his fly. He feels the clinical cool touch of her fingers and sees the gray hairs on the top of her head, radiating from her parting; his heart races in expectation of her warm mouth as in the old days.

But she just says, "Just lovely," and tucks it back, half hard, into his jockey shorts, and rezips his fly and struggles to her feet. She is a bit breathless, as if from a task of housework. He embraces her and this time it is he who clings.

"The reason I haven't left Janice and never can now," he confesses, suddenly near tears, maudlin as she said, "is, without her, I'm shit. I'm unemployable. I'm too old. All I can be from here on in is her husband."

He expects sympathy, but perhaps his mention of Janice is one too many. Thelma goes dead, somehow, in his arms. "I don't know," she says.

"About what?"

"About your coming here again."

"Oh let me," he begs, perversely feeling at last in tune with this encounter and excited by her. "Without you, I don't have a life."

"Maybe Nature is trying to tell us something. We're too old to keep being foolish."

"Never, Thelma. Not you and me."

"You don't seem to want me."

"I want you, I just don't want Ronnie's little bugs."

She pushes at his chest to free herself. "There's nothing wrong with Ronnie. He's as safe and clean as I am."

"Yeah, well, that goes without saying, the way you two carry on. That's what I'm afraid of. I tell you, Thelma, you don't know him. He's a madman. You can't see it, because you're his loyal wife."

"Harry, I think we've reached a point where the more we say, the worse it'll get. Sex isn't what it used to be, you're right about that. We must all be more careful. You be careful. Keep brushing your teeth, and I'll brush mine."

It isn't until he is out on Thelma's curved walk, the door with its pulled curtain and bevelled glass shut behind him, that he catches her allusion to toothbrushing. Another slam at him and Janice. You can't say anything honest to women, they have minds like the FBI. The robin is still there, on the little lawn. Maybe it's sick, all these animals around us have their diseases too, their histories of plague. It gives Rabbit a beady eye and hops a bit away in Thelma's waxy April grass but disdains to take wing. Robin, hop. The bold yellow of dandelions has come this week to join that of daffodils and forsythia. Telltale. Flowers attracting bees as we attract each other. Our signals. Smells. If only he were back in her house he'd fuck her despite all the danger. Instead he finds safety inside his gray Celica; as he glides away the stillness of Arrowdale is broken by the return of the lumbering yellow school buses, and their release, at every corner of the curved streets, of shrilly yelling children.

THE TOYOTA TOUCH, a big blue banner says in the display windows of Springer Motors over on Route 111. 36 Months / 36,000 Miles • Limited Warranty on All New Models, a lesser poster proclaims, and another All-New CRESSIDAS • Powerful New 3.0-Liter Engine • 190 Horsepower • 4-Speed Electronically Controlled Overdrive Transmission • New Safety Shift Lock. Nelson isn't in, to Harry's considerable relief. The day is a desultory Tuesday and the two salesmen on the floor are both young men he doesn't know, and who don't know him. Changes have been made since last November. Nelson has had the office area repainted in brighter colors, pinks and greens like a Chinese tea-house, and has taken down the old blown-up photos of Harry in his glory days as a basketball star, with the headlines calling him "Rabbit."

"Mr. Angstrom left for lunch around one o'clock and said he might not be back this afternoon," a pudgy salesman tells him. Jake and Rudy used to have their desks out in the open along the wall, in the direction of the disco club that failed and when the Seventies went out became an appliance-rental center. One of Nelson's bright ideas was to take these desks away and line the opposite wall with cubicles, like booths in a restaurant. Maybe it creates more salesman-customer intimacy at the ticklish moment of signing the forms but the arrangement seems remote from general business operations and exposed to the noise of the service garage. In this direction, and behind toward the river and Brewer, lies the scruffy unpaved area of the lot Harry has always thought of for some reason as Paraguay, which in reality just got rid of its old dictator with the German name, Harry read in the papers recently.

"Yeah, well," he tells this fat stranger, "I'm a Mr. Angstrom too. Who is here, who knows anything?" He doesn't mean to sound rude but Thelma's revelation has upset him; he can feel his heart racing and his stomach struggling to digest the two bowls of nuts.

Another young salesman, a thinner one, comes toward them, out of a booth at the Paraguay end, and he sees it's not a man; her hair being pulled back tight from her ears and her wearing a tan trench coat to go out onto the lot to a customer fooled him. It's a female. A female car salesman. Like in that Toyota commercial, only white. He tries to control his face, so his chauvinism doesn't show.

"I'm Elvira Ollenbach, Mr. Angstrom," she says, and gives him a hard handshake that, after Thelma's pasty cold touch a half-hour ago, feels hot. "I'd know you were Nelson's dad even without the pictures he keeps on his wall. You look just like him, especially around the mouth."

Is this chick kidding him? She is a thin taut young woman, overexercised the way so many of them are now, with deep bony eyesockets and a deep no-curves voice and thin lips painted a pale luminous pink like reflecting tape and a neck so slender it makes her jaws look wide, coming to points under the lobes of her exposed white ears, which stick out. She wears gold earrings shaped like snail shells. He says to her, "I guess you've come onto the job since I was last here."

"Just since January," she says. "But before that I was three years with Datsun out on Route 819."

"How do you like it, selling cars?"

"I like it very much," Elvira Ollenbach says, and no more. She doesn't smile much, and her eyes are a little insistent.

He puts himself on the line, telling her, "You don't think of it usually as a woman's game."

She shows a little life. "I know, isn't that strange, when it's really such a natural? The women who come in don't feel so intimidated, and the men aren't so afraid to show their ignorance as they would be with another man. I love it. My dad loved cars and I guess I take after him."

"It all makes sense," he admits. "I don't know why it's been so long in coming. Women sales reps, I mean. How's business been?"

"It's been a good spring, so far. People love the Camry, and of course the Corolla plugs right along, but we've had surprisingly good luck with the luxury models, compared to what we hear from other dealers. Brewer's economy is looking up, after all these years. The dead industries have been shaken out, and the new ones, the little specialty and high-tech plants, have been coming in, and of course the factory outlets have had a fabulous reception. They're the key to the whole revival."

"Super. How about the used end of it? That been slow?"

Her deeply set eyes – shadowy, like Nelson's, but not sullen and hurt – glance up in some puzzlement. "Why no, not at all. One of the reasons Nelson had for hiring a new rep was he wanted to devote more of his own attention to the used cars, and not wholesale so many of them out. There was a man who used to do it, with a Greek name -"

"Stavros. Charlie Stavros."

"Exactly. And ever since he retired Nelson feels the used cars have been on automatic pilot. Nelson's philosophy is that unless you cater to the lower-income young or minority buyer with a buy they can manage you've lost a potential customer for a new upscale model five or ten years down the road."

"Sounds right." She seems awfully full of Nelson, this girl. Girl, she may be thirty or more for all he can tell, everybody under forty looks like a kid to him.

The pudgy salesman, the one who's a man – a nice familiar Italian type, Brewer is still producing a few, with husky voices, hairy wrists, and with old-fashioned haircuts close above the ears – feels obliged to put his two cents in. "Nelson's really been making the used cars jump. Ads in the Standard, prices on the windshield knocked lower every two or three days, discounts for cash. Some people swing by every day to see what's up for grabs." He has an anxious way of standing too close and hurrying his words; his cheeks could use a shave and his breath a Cert or two. Garlic, they use it on everything.

"Discounts for cash, huh?" Harry says. "Where is Nelson, anyway?"

"He told us he needed to unwind," Elvira says. "He wanted to get away from the calls."

"Calls?"

"Some man keeps calling him," Elvira says. Her voice drops. "He sounds kind of foreign." Harry is getting the impression she isn't as smart as she seemed at first impression. Her insistent eyes catch a hint of this thought, for she self-protectively adds, "I probably shouldn't be saying a thing, but seeing as you're his father…"

"Sounds like a dissatisfied customer," Rabbit says, to help her out of it.

"Toyota doesn't get many of those," the other salesman crowds in. "Year after year, they put out the lowest-maintenance machines on the road, with a repair-free longevity that's absolutely unbelievable."

"Don't sell me, I'm sold," Harry tells him.

"I get enthusiastic. My name's Benny Leone, by the way, Mr. Angstrom. Benny for Benedict. A pleasure to see you over here. The way Nelson tells us, you've washed your hands of the car business and glad of it."

"I'm semi-retired." Do they know, he wonders, that Janice legally owns it all? He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.

Benny says, "You get all kinds of kooky calls in this business. Nelson shouldn't let it bug him."

"Nelson takes everything too seriously," Elvira adds. "I tell him, Don't let things get to you, but he can't help it. He's one of those guys so uptight he squeaks."

"He was always a very caring boy," Harry tells them. "Who else is here, besides you two? Talk about automatic pilot -"

"There's Jeremy," Benny says, "who comes in generally Wednesdays through Saturdays."

"And Lyle's here," Elvira says, and glances sideways to where a couple in bleached jeans are wandering in the glinting sea of Toyotas.

"I thought Lyle was sick," Harry says.

"He says he's in remission," Benny says, his face getting a careful look, as maybe Harry's did when he was trying not to appear a chauvinist in Elvira's eyes. She for her part has suddenly moved, in her spring trench coat, toward the bright outdoors, where the pair of potential buyers browse.

"Glad to hear it," Harry says, feeling less constrained and ceremonious talking to Benny alone. "I didn't think there was any remission from his disease."

"Not in the long run." The man's voice has gone huskier, a touch gangsterish, as if the woman's presence had constrained him too.

Harry jerks his head curtly toward the outdoors. "How's she doing really?"

Benny moves an inch even closer and confides, "She gets 'em to a certain point, then gets rigid and lets the deal slip away. Like she's afraid the rest of us will say she's too soft."

Harry nods. "Like women are always the stingiest tippers. Money spooks 'em. Still," he says, loyal to the changing times and his son's innovations, "I think it's a good idea. Like lady ministers. They have a people touch."

"Yeah," the jowly small man cautiously allows. "Gives the place a little zing. A little something different."

"Where is Lyle, did you say?" He wonders how much these two are concealing from him, protecting Nelson. He was aware of eye signals between them as they talked. A maze of secrets, this agency he built up in his own image since 1975, when old man Springer suddenly popped, one summer day, like an overheated thermometer. A lot of hidden stress in the auto business. Chancy, yet you have a ton of steady overhead.

"He was in Nelson's office ten minutes ago."

"Doesn't he use Mildred's?" Harry explains, "Mildred Kroust was the bookkeeper for years here, when you were just a kid." In terms of Springer Motors he has become a historian. He can remember when that appliance-rental place up the road had a big sign saying D I S C O remade from a Mr. Peanut in spats and top hat brandishing his stick in neon.

But Benny seems to know all he wants to. He says, "That's a kind of conference room now. There's a couch in there if anybody needs all of a sudden to take a nap. Lyle used to, but now he works mostly at home, what with his illness."

"How long has he had it?"

Benny gets that careful look again, and says, "At least a year. That HIV virus can be inside you for five or ten before you know it." His voice goes huskier, he comes closer still. "A couple of the mechanics quit when Nelson brought him in as accountant in his condition, but you got to hand it to Nelson, he told them go ahead, quit, if they wanted to be superstitious. He spelled out how you can't get it from casual contact and told them take it or leave it."

"How'd Manny go for that?"

"Manny? Oh yeah, Mr. Manning in Service. As I understand it, that was the reason he left finally. He'd been shopping, I hear, at other agencies, but at his age it's hard to make a jump."

"You said it," Harry says. "Hey, looks like another customer out there, you better help Elvira out."

"Let 'em look, is my motto. If they're serious, they'll come in. Elvira tries too hard."

Rabbit walks across the display floor, past the performance board and the Parts window and the crash-barred door that leads into the garage, to the green doorway, set in old random-grooved Masonite now painted a dusty rose, of what used to be his office. Elvira was right; the photographic blowups of his basketball headlines and halftone newspaper cuts haven't been tossed out but are up on Nelson's walls, where the kid has to look at them every day. Also on the walls are the Kiwanis and Rotary plaques and a citation from the Greater Brewer Chamber of Commerce and a President's Touch Award that Toyota gave the agency a few years ago and a Playboy calendar, the girl for this month dressed up as a bare-assed Easter bunny, which Harry isn't so sure strikes quite the right note but at least says the whole agency hasn't gone queer.

Lyle stands up at Nelson's desk before Harry is in the room. He is very thin. He wears a thick red sweater under his gray suit. He extends a skeletal bluish hand and an unexpectedly broad smile, his teeth enormous in his shrunken face. "Hello, Mr. Angstrom. I bet you don't remember me."

But he does look dimly familiar, like somebody you played basketball against forty years ago. His skull is very narrow, the crewcut hair so evenly blond it looks dyed; the accountant's half-glasses on his nose are of thin gold wire. He is so pale, light seems to be coming through his skin. Squinting, Harry takes the offered hand in a brief shake and tries not to think of those little HIVs, intricate as tiny spaceships, slithering off onto his palm and up his wrist and arm into the sweat pores of his armpit and burrowing into his bloodstream there. He wipes his palm on the side of his jacket and hopes it looks like he's patting his pocket.

Lyle tells him, "I used to work in Fiscal Alternatives on Weiser Street when you and your wife would come and trade gold and silver."

Harry laughs, remembering. "We damn near broke our backs, lugging one load of silver dollars up the street to the fucking bank."

"You were smart," Lyle says. "You got out in time. I was impressed."

This last remark seems a touch impertinent, but Harry says amiably, "Dumb luck. That place still functioning?"

"In a very restricted way," Lyle says, overemphasizing, for Harry's money, the "very." It seems if you're a fag you have to exaggerate everything, to bring it all up to normal pitch. "The whole metals boom was a fad, really. They're very depressed now."

"It was a nifty little place. That beauty who used to do the actual buying and selling. I could never figure out how she could run the computer with those long fingernails."

"Oh, Marcia. She committed suicide."

Rabbit is stunned. She had seemed so angelic in her way. "She did? Why?"

"Oh, the usual. Personal problems," Lyle says, flicking them away with the back of his transparent hand. In Rabbit's eyes globules of blurred light move around Lyle's margins, like E.T. in the movie. "Nothing to do with the metals slump. She was just the front, the money behind it came out of Philadelphia."

As Lyle talks airily, Harry can hear his intakes of breath, a slight panting that goes with the bluish shadows at the temples, the sense of him having come from space and about to go back to space. This guy's even worse off than 1 am, Rabbit thinks, and likes him for it. He sees no signs of the Kaposi's spots, though, just a general radiant aura of a body resisting life, refusing sustenance, refusing to go along with its own system. There is a sweetish-rotten smell, like when you open the door of the unused refrigerator in a vacation place, or maybe Rabbit imagines it. Lyle suddenly, limply, sits down, as if standing has been too much effort.

Harry takes the chair across the desk, where the customers usually sit, begging for easier terms. "Lyle," Harry begins. "I'd like to inspect the books. Bank statements, receipts, payments, loans, inventory, the works."

"Why on earth why?" Lyle's eyes, as the rest of his face wastes away, stand out, more in the round than healthy people's eyes. He sits erect, one fleshless forearm for support laid in its gray sleeve parallel to the edge of Nelson's desk. Either to conserve his energy or protect the truth, he has set himself to give minimal answers.

"Oh, human curiosity. Frankly, there's something fishy about the statements I've been getting in Florida." Harry hesitates, but can't see that being specific would do any harm at this point. He still has the hope that everything can be explained away, that he can go back to not thinking about the lot. "There aren't enough used-car sales, proportionally."

"There aren't?"

"You could argue it's a variable, and with the good economy under Reagan people can afford to buy new; but in my years here there's always been a certain proportion, things average out over the course of a couple months, and that hasn't been happening in the statements since November. In fact, it's been getting weirder."

"Weirder."

"Funnier. Phonier. Whatever. When can I see the books? I'm no accountant; I want Mildred Kroust to go over them with me."

Lyle makes an effort and shifts his arm off the desk and rests both hands out of sight, on his lap. Harry is reminded by the way he moves of the ghostly slowness of the languid dead floppy bodies at Buchenwald being moved around in the post-war newsreels. Naked, loose-jointed, their laps in plain view, talk about obscene, here was something so obscene they had to show it to us so we'd believe it. Lyle tells Harry, "I keep a lot of the data at home, in my computer."

"We have a computer system here. Top of the line, an IBM. I remember our installing it."

"Mine's compatible. A little Apple that does everything."

"I bet it does. You know, frankly, just because you're sick and have to stay home a lot's no reason the Springer Motors accounts should be scattered all over Diamond County. I want them here. I want them here tomorrow."

This is the first acknowledgment either has made that Lyle is sick, that Lyle is dying. The boy stiffens, and his lips puff out a little. He smiles, that skeleton-generous grin. "I can only show the books to authorized persons," he says.

"I'm authorized. Who could be more authorized than me? I used to run the place. That's my picture all over the walls."

Lyle's eyelids, with lashes darker than his hair, lower over those bulging eyes. He blinks several times, and tries to be delicate, to keep the courtesies between them. "My understanding from Nelson is that his mother owns the company."

"Yeah, but I'm her husband. Half of what's hers is mine."

"In some circumstances, perhaps, and perhaps in some states. But not, I think, in Pennsylvania. If you wish to consult a lawyer -" His breathing is becoming difficult; it is almost a mercy for Harry to interrupt.

"I don't need to consult any lawyer. All I need is to have my wife call you and tell you to show me the books. Me and Mildred. I want her in on this."

"Miss Kroust, I believe, resides now in a nursing home. The Dengler Home in Penn Park."

"Good. That's five minutes from my house. I'll pick her up and come back here tomorrow. Let's set a time."

Lyle's lids lower again, and he awkwardly replaces his arm on the desktop. "When and if I receive your wife's authorization, and Nelson's go-ahead -"

"You're not going to get that. Nelson's the problem here, not the solution."

"I say, even if, I would need some days to pull all the figures together."

"Why is that? The books should be up-to-date. What's going on here with you guys?"

Surprisingly, Lyle says nothing. Perhaps the struggle for breath is too much. It is all so wearying. His hollow temples look bluer. Harry's heart is racing and his chest twingeing but he resists the impulse to pop another Nitrostat, he doesn't want to become an addict. He slumps down lower in the customer's chair, as if negotiations for now have gone as far as they can go. He tries another topic. "Tell me about it, Lyle. How does it feel?"

"What feel?"

"Being so close to, you know, the barn. The reason I ask, I had a touch of heart trouble down in Florida and still can't get used to it, how close I came. I mean, most of the time it seems unreal, I'm me, and all around me everything is piddling along as normal, and then suddenly at night, when I wake up needing to take a leak, or in the middle of a TV show that's sillier than hell, it hits me, and wow. The bottom falls right out. I want to crawl back into my parents but they're dead already."

Lyle's puffy lips tremble, or seem to, as he puzzles out this new turn the conversation has taken. "You come to terns with it," he says. "Everybody dies."

"But some sooner than others, huh?"

A spasm of indignation animates Lyle. "They're developing new drugs. All the time. The French. The Chinese. Trichosanthin. TIBO derivatives. Eventually the FDA will have to let them in, even if they are a bunch of Reaganite fascist homophobes who wouldn't mind seeing us all dead. It's a question of hanging on. I have hope."

"Well, great. More power to you. But medicine can only do so much. That's what I'm learning, the hard way. You know, Lyle, it's not as though I'd never thought about death, or never had people near to me die, but I never, you could say, had the real taste of it in my mouth. I mean, it's not kidding. It wants it all." He wants that pill. He wonders if Nelson keeps a roll of Life Savers in the desk the way he himself used to. Just something to put in your mouth when you get nervous. Harry finds that every time he thinks of his death it makes him want to eat – that's why he hasn't lost more weight.

This other man's attempt to open him up has made Lyle more erect behind the desk, more hostile. He stares at Harry with those eroded-around eyes, beneath eyebrows the same metallic blond as his hair. "One good thing about it," he offers, "is you become harder to frighten. By minor things. By threats like yours, for example."

"I'm not making any threats, Lyle, I'm just trying to find out what the fuck is going on. I'm beginning to think this company is being ripped off. If I'm wrong and it's all on the up and up, you've nothing to be frightened of." Poor guy, he's biting the bullet, and less than half Harry's age. At his age, what was Harry doing? Setting type the old-fashioned way, and dreaming about ass. Ass, one way or another, does us in: membrane's too thin, those little HIVs sneak right through. Black box of nothingness, is what it felt like with Thelma. Funny appetite, for a steady diet. Being queer isn't all roses.

Lyle moves his anns around again with that brittle caution. His body has become a collection of dead sticks. "Don't make allegations, Mr. Angstrom, you wouldn't want to defend in court."

"Well, is it an allegation or a fact that you refuse to let me and an impartial accountant examine your books?"

"Mildred's not impartial. She's furious at me for replacing her. She's furious because I and my computer can do in a few hours what took her all week."

"Mildred's an honest old soul."

"Mildred's senile."

"Mildred's not the point here. The point is you're defying me to protect my son."

"I'm not defying you, Mr. Angstrom

"You can call me Harry."

"I'm not defying you, sir. I'm just telling you I can't accept orders from you. I have to get them from Nelson or Mrs. Angstrom."

"You'll get 'em. Sir." A smiling provocative hovering in Lyle's expression goads Harry to ask, "Do you doubt it?"

"I'll be waiting to hear," Lyle says.

"Listen. You may know about a lot of things I don't but you don't know shit about marriage. My wife will do what I tell her to. Ask her to. In a business like this we're absolutely one."

"We'll see," Lyle says. "My parents were married, as a matter of fact. I was raised in a marriage. I know a lot about marriage."

"Didn't do you much good."

"It showed me something to avoid," Lyle says, and smiles as broadly, as guilelessly, as when Harry came in. All teeth. Now Harry does recall him from the old days at Fiscal Alternatives – the stacks of gold and silver, and flawless cool Marcia with her long red nails. Poor beauty, did herself in. She and Monroe. Rabbit admits to himself the peculiar charm queers have, a boyish lightness, a rising above all that female muck, where life breeds.

"How's Slim?" Harry asks, rising from the chair. "Nelson used to talk a lot about Slim."

"Slim," Lyle says, too weak or rude to stand, "died. Before Christmas."

"Sorry to hear it," Harry lies. He holds out his hand over the desk to be shaken and the other man hesitates to take it, as if fearing contamination. Feverish loose-jointed bones: Rabbit gives them a squeeze and says, "Tell Nelson if you ever see him I like the new decor. Kind of a boutique look. Cute. Goes with the new sales rep. You hang loose, Lyle. Hope China comes through for you. We'll be in touch."

On the radio on the way home, he hears that Mike Schmidt, who exactly two years ago, on April 18, 1987, slugged his five hundredth home run, against the Pittsburgh Pirates in Three Rivers Stadium, is closing in on Richie Ashburn's total of 2,217 hits to become the hittingest Phillie ever. Rabbit remembers Ashburn. One of the Whiz Kids who beat the Dodgers for the pennant the fall Rabbit became a high-school senior. Curt Simmons, Del Ennis, Dick Sisler in center, Andy Semmick behind the plate. Beat the Dodgers the last game of the season, then lost to the Yankees four straight. In 1950 Rabbit was seventeen and had led the county B league with 817 points his junior season. Remembering these statistics helps settle his agitated mood, stirred up by seeing Thelma and Lyle, a mood of stirred-up unsatisfied desire at whose fringes licks the depressing idea that nothing matters very much, we'll all soon be dead.

Janice's idea of a low-sodium diet for him is to get these frozen dinners in plastic pouches called Low-Cal. Most of this precooked chicken and beef is full of chemicals so it doesn't go bad on the shelf. To work it all through his system he usually has a second beer. Janice is distracted these days, full of excitement about taking real-estate courses at the Penn State extension. "I'm not sure I totally understand it, though the woman at the office over on Pine Street – hasn't that neighborhood gone downhill, since you and your father used to work at Verity! – she was very patient with my questions. The classes meet three hours a week for ten weeks, and there are two required and four electives to get this certificate, but I don't think you need the certificate to take the licensing exam, which for a salesperson – that's what I'd be – is given monthly and for a broker, which maybe I'd try to be later, only quarterly. But the gist of it is I could begin with two this April and then take two more from July to September and if all goes well get my license in September and start selling, strictly on a commission basis at first, for this firm that Doris Eberhardt's new brother-in-law is one of the partners in. She says she's told him about me and he's interested. It's in your favor evidently to be middle-aged, the clients assume you're experienced."

"Honey, why do you need to do this? You have the lot."

"I don't have the lot. Nelson has the lot."

"Does he? I dropped over there today and he wasn't there, just these kids he's hired. One fag, one wop, and a skirt."

"Harry. Now who's sounding prejudiced?"

He doesn't push ahead with his story, he wants to save it for when they both can focus. After dinner Janice likes to watch Jeopardy! even though she never knows any of the answers, and then the Phillies are playing the Mets on Channel 11. The little stone house with its fractional number on Franklin Drive draws darkling about them, just them, in the evening as the gradual Northern dusk (in Florida the sun just suddenly shuts down, and the moon takes over) seeps into the still-bare trees, quelling the birdsong, and a lemon tinge of sky in the west beyond the craggy chimneys of the big clinker-brick house deepens to an incendiary orange and then the crimson of last embers. Another few weeks, the trees will leaf in, and there won't be any sunset to see from the lozenge-pane windows of his den, when he turns his eyes aside from watching the television screen.

In the third inning, with two men on, Schmidt hits a home run, his fourth of the young season and the five hundred fortysixth of his career. It puts the Phils ahead five to zero, and Rabbit starts switching channels, finding no basketball playoffs, only Matlock and The Wonder Years. Much as Janice irritates him when she's with him, when she isn't in the room with him, or when he can't hear her knocking around in the kitchen or upstairs above his head, he grows uneasy. He switches off the set and goes looking for her, full of his troubling news as once he was full of gold Krugerrands.

She is already in one of her nighties, upstairs, and those infuriating Florida sandals that go f lip-flop as she walks around when he is still trying to sleep in the morning. Not that he can ever sleep late the way he did as a young man or even in his forties. He wakes around six with a little start and ever since his heart attack there is a gnawing in his stomach whose cause he can't locate until he realizes it is the terror of being trapped inside his perishing body, like being in a prison cell with a madman who might decide to kill him at any moment. She is paddling back and forth, flop-flop, carrying small stacks of folded cloth, laundry she has brought up the back stairs; one square stack he recognizes as folded handkerchiefs, another, less trim, as his jockey shorts with their slowly slackening elastic waists, a third as her own underthings, which still excite him, not so much when they are on her as when empty and laundry-clean. He doesn't know how to begin. He throws his big body across the bed diagonally and lets the nubbles ofits bedspread rub his face. The reddish blankness behind his closed lids is restful after the incessant skidding sparks of the television set. "Harry, is anything the matter?" Janice's voice sounds alarmed. His fragility gives him a new hold over her.

He rolls over and can't help smiling at the lumpy figure she cuts in her nightie. She looks not so different from how Judy looks in hers and not very much larger. Her scant bangs don't quite hide her high forehead, its Florida tan dulling, and her tired eyes look focused elsewhere. He begins, "There's something going wrong over at the lot. When I was over there today I asked to see the books and this fag with AIDS Nelson has put in as bookkeeper instead of Mildred told me he couldn't show them to me unless you authorized it. You're the boss, according to him."

The tip of her little tongue creeps out and presses on her upper lip. "That was silly," she says.

"I thought so, but I kept my cool. Poor guy, he's just covering up for Nelson."

"Covering up for Nelson why?"

"Well" – Harry sighs heavily, and arranges himself on the bed like an odalisque, with a hippy twist to his body – "you really want to hear this?"

"Of course." But she keeps moving around the room with her little stacks.

"I have a new theory. I think Nelson takes cocaine, and that's why he's so shifty and jumpy, and kind of paranoid."

Janice moves carefully to the bureau, flop and then flop, carrying what Harry recognizes as her salmon-colored running suit with the blue sleeves and stripes, which she never wears on the street around here, where the middle-aged are more careful about looking ridiculous. "Who told you this?" she asks.

He squirms on the bed, pulling up his legs and pushing off his suede shoes so as not to dirty the bedspread of white dotted Swiss.

"Nobody told me," he says. "I just put two and two together. Cocaine's everywhere and these yuppie baby boomers Nelson's age are just the ones who use it. It takes money. Lots of money, to maintain a real habit. Doesn't Pru keep complaining about all these bills they can't pay?"

Janice comes close to the bed and stands; he sees through her cotton nightie shadows of her nipples and her pubic hair. From his angle she looks strangely enormous, and in his diagonal position he undergoes one of those surges of lightheadedness as when he stands up too fast; it is not clear who is upright and who is not. Her body has kept the hard neatness it had when they were kids working at Kroll's but underneath her chin there are ugly folds that ramify into her neck. She was determined not to get fat like her mother but age catches you anyway. Janice says carefully, "Most young couples have bills they can't pay."

He sits up, to shake the lightness in his head, and because her body is there puts his arms around her hips. On second thought he reaches under her nightie and cups his hands around her solid, slightly gritty buttocks. He says, looking up past her breasts to her face, "The worst of it is, honey, I think he's been bleeding the company. I think he's been stealing and Lyle has been helping him, that's why they let Mildred go."

Her buttocks under his hands tense; he feels them squeeze together and become more spherical, with the tension of a basketball a few pounds under regulation pressure. A watery glimmer of arousal winks below his waist. Her blurred eyes look down upon him with somber concentration, the skin of her face sagging downward from the bone. He nuzzles one breast and closes his eyes again, smelling the faintly sweaty cotton, hiding from her intent downward eyes. Her voice asks, "What evidence do you have?"

This irritates him. She is dumb. "That's what I was saying. I asked to look at the accounts and bank statements today and they wouldn't let me, unless you authorized it. All you have to do is call up this Lyle."

He hears in her chest a curious stillness, and feels in her body a tension of restraint. Her nightie is transparent but she is opaque. "If you did see these figures," she asks, "would you know enough to understand them?"

He flicks her nipple with his tongue through the cotton. The glimmer below has grown to a steady glow, a swelling warmth. "Maybe not altogether," he says. "But even the monthly statements we got in Florida didn't look quite right to me. I'd take Mildred with me, and if she's too far gone – he said she's senile and over at Dengler's – I think we should hire somebody, a professional accountant in Brewer. You could call our lawyer for who he'd recommend. This may be something we have to bring the cops in on eventually." A nice April shower has started up outdoors, kindled by the slow sunset.

Her body has stiffened and jerked back an inch. "Harry! Your own son!"

"Well," he says, irritated again, "his own mother. Stealing from his own mother."

"We don't know anything for sure," Janice tells him. "It's only your theory."

"What else could Lyle have been hiding today? Now they'll have the wind up so we should start moving or they'll shred everything like Ollie North."

Now Janice is getting agitated, backing out ofhis arms and rubbing the back of one hand with the other, standing in the center of the carpet. He sees that the sex isn't going to happen, the first time in weeks he's really had the urge. Damn that Nelson. She says, "I think I should talk to Nelson first."

"You should? Why not we?"

"According to Lyle, I'm the only one who counts."

This hurts. "You're too soft on Nelson. He can do anything he wants with you."

"Oh, Harry, it used to be so awful, that time I ran off with Charlie! Nelson was only twelve, he'd come over on his bicycle all the way into Eisenhower Avenue and he'd stand there for an hour across the street, looking up at our windows, and a couple of times I saw him and I hid, I hid behind the curtain and let him just stand there until he got exhausted and rode away." Staring over Harry's head, seeing her little boy across the street, so patient and puzzled and hopeful, her dark eyes fill with tears.

"Well, hell," Rabbit says, "nobody asked him to go over there spying on you. 1 was taking care of him."

"With that poor crazy girl and perfectly hideous black man you were. It's just dumb luck the house didn't bum down with Nelson in it too."

"I would have got him out. If I'd been there I would have got them all out."

"You don't know," she says, "you don't know what you would have done. And you don't know now what the real story is, it's all just your suspicions, somebody's been poisoning your mind against Nelson. I bet it was Thelma."

"Thelma? We never see her anymore, we ought to have the Harrisons over sometime."

"Pfaa!" She spits this refusal, he has to admire her fury, the animal way it fluffs out her hair. "Over my dead body."

"Just a thought." This is not a good topic. He reverts: "I don't know what the real story is, but you do, huh? What has Nelson told you?"

She pinches her mouth shut so she seems to have no lips at all, like Ma Springer used to look. "Nothing really," she lies.

"Nothing really. Well O.K. then. You know more than I do. Good luck. It's you he's ripping off. It's your father's company he and his queer buddies are taking down the tube."

"Nelson wouldn't steal from the company."

"Honey, you don't understand the power of drugs. Read the papers. Read People, Richard Pryor tells all. Just the other day they pulled Yogi Berra's kid in. People who are into coke will kill their grandmother for a fix. It used to be heroin was the bottom of the barrel but crack makes heroin look mild."

"Nelson doesn't do crack. Much."

"Oh. Who says?"

She almost tells him, but gets frightened. "Nobody. I just know my own son. And from what Pru lets drop."

"Pru talks, does she? What does she say?"

"She's miserable. And the children too. Little Roy acts very odd, you must have noticed. Judy has nightmares. Ifit weren't for the children, Pru confessed to me, she would have left Nelson long ago."

Harry feels evaded. "Let's keep to the subject. Pru's got her problems, you've got yours. You better get your man-child out of Springer Motors fast."

"I'll talk to him, Harry. I don't want you to say a word."

"Why the fuck not? What's the fucking harm if I do?"

"You'll come on too strong. You'll drive him deeper into himself. He – he takes you too seriously."

"But not you?"

"He's sure of me. He knows I love him."

"And I don't?" His eyes water at the thought. The shower outside has already lifted, leaving a trickle in the gutters.

"You do, Harry, but there's something else too. You're another man. Men have this territorial thing. You think of the lot as yours. He thinks of it as his."

"It'll be his some day, if he's not in jail. I was looking at him down in Florida and there suddenly came into my mind the word criminal. Something about the shape ofhis head. I hate the way he's going bald. He'll look like Ronnie Harrison."

"Will you promise to let me talk to him and you do nothing?"

"You'll just let him weasel out." But in fact he has no desire to confront Nelson himself.

She knows this. She says, "No I won't, I promise." She stops rubbing the back of one hand with the fingers of the other and moves back toward him, flop flop, as he sits on the bed. She rests her fingers above his ears and by the short hairs there pulls him softly toward her. "I do like the way you want to defend me," she says.

He yields to her insistent tug and rests his face on her chest again. Her nightie has a damp spot on it where he diddled her nipple with his tongue. Her nipples are chewed-looking, less perfect, realer than Thelma's. Being little, Janice's tits have kept their tilt pretty much, that perky upward thrust through those Forties angora sweaters in the high-school halls. Through the cotton her body gives off a smell, a stirred-up smoky smell. "What's in it for me?" he asks, his mouth against the wet cloth.

"Oh, a present," she says.

"When do I get it?"

"Pretty soon."

"With the mouth?"

"We'll see." She pushes his face back from her smoky warm body and with her fingers poking under his jaws makes him look up at her. "But if you say another single word about Nelson, I'll stop, and you won't get any present."

His face feels hot and his heart is racing but in a steady sweet way, contained in his rib cage the way his hard-on is contained in his pants, sweetly packed with blood; he is pleased that the Vasotec may make him lightheaded but leaves him enough blood pressure for one of these unscheduled, once in a while. "O.K., not a word," Rabbit promises, becoming efficient. "I'll quick go to the bathroom and brush my teeth and stuff and you turn off the lights. And somebody ought to take the phone off the hook. Downstairs, so we don't hear the squawking."

Strange phone calls have been coming through. Grainy voices with that rich timbre peculiar to black males ask if Nelson Angstrom is there. Harry or Janice responds that Nelson does not live here, that this is the home of his parents. "Well I ain't had no luck at the number he give me for a home number and at the place he works this here secretary always say the man is out."

"Would you like to leave a message?"

A pause. "You just tell him Julius called." Or Luther.

` Julius?"

"That's right."

"And what's it about, Julius? You want to say?"

"He'll know what it's about. You just tell him Julius called." Or Perry. Or Dave.

Or the caller would hang up without leaving a name. Or would have a thin, faintly foreign, precise way of speaking, and once wanted to speak not to Nelson but with Harry. "I am regretful to bother you, sir, but this son you have leaves me no recourse but to inform you in person."

"To inform me of what?"

"To inform you that your son has incurred serious debts and gentlemen to which I am associated, against any advice which I attempt to give them, talk of doing physical harm."

"Physical harm to Nelson?"

"Or even to certain of his near and dear. This is sorry to say and I do apologize, but these are not perhaps such gentlemen. I myself am merely the bearer of bad tidings. Do not rest the blame with me." The voice seemed to be drawing closer to the telephone mouthpiece, closer to Harry's ear, growing plaintively sincere, attempting to strike up a conspiracy, to become Harry's friend and ally. The familiar room, the den with its frost-faced TV and two silvery-pink wing chairs and bookshelves holding a smattering mostly of history books and on the upper shelves some china knickknacks (fairies under toadstools, cherubic bald monks, baby robins in a nest of porcelain straws) that used to be in Ma Springer's breakfront, all this respectable furniture changes quality, becomes murky and fluid and useless, at the insertion of this menacing plaintive voice into his ear, a voice with a heart of sorts, with an understandable human mission, an unpleasant duty to do, calling out of an extensive slippery underground: just so, the balmy blue air above the Gulf of Mexico changed for him, as if a filter had been slipped over his eyes, when the Sunfish tipped over.

Rabbit asks, treading water, "How did Nelson incur these debts?"

The voice likes getting his own words back. "He incurred them, sir, in pursuit of his satisfactions, and that is within his privileges, but he or someone on his behalf must pay. My associates have been assured that you are a very excellent father."

"Not so hot, actually. Whajou say your name was?"

"I did not say, señor. I did not give myself a name. It is the name of Angstrom that is of concern. My associates are eager to settle with anyone of that excellent name." This man, it occurred to Harry, loves the English language, as an instrument full of promise, of unexplored resources.

"My son," Harry tells him, "is an adult and his finances have nothing to do with me."

"That is your word? Your very final word?"

"It is. Listen, I live half the year in Florida and come back and -'

But the caller has hung up, leaving Harry with the sensation that the walls of his solid little limestone house are as thin as diet crackers, that the wall-to-wall carpet under his feet is soaked with water, that a pipe has burst and there is no plumber to call.

He turns to his old friend and associate Charlie Stavros, retired from being Springer Motors' Senior Sales Representative and moved from his old place on Eisenhower Avenue to a new condominium development on the far north side of the city, where the railroad had sold off an old freight yard, twenty acres of it, it's amazing what the railroads owned in their heyday. Harry isn't sure he can find the place and suggests they have lunch at Johnny Frye's downtown; Johnny Frye's Chophouse was the original name for this restaurant on Weiser Square, which became the Café Barcelona in the Seventies and then the Crépe House later in the decade and now has changed hands again and calls itself Salad Binge, explaining in signs outside Your Local Lo-Cal Eatery and Creative Soups and Organic Fresh-Food Health Dishes, to attract the health-minded yuppies who work in the glass-skinned office building that has risen across from Kroll's, which still stands empty, its huge display windows whitewashed from the inside and its bare windowless side toward the mountain exposed in rough-mortared brick above the rubbly parking lot that extends up to the old Baghdad. ELP. SAV ME.

The downtown is mostly parking space now but the strange thing is that the space is all full. Though there is little to shop at downtown any more, except for some discount drugstores and a McCrory's five and dime that still peddles parakeet food and plastic barrettes to old people who haven't changed clothes since 1942, the number of trim youngish professionals in lightweight suits and tight linen skirts has ballooned; they work in the banks and insurance companies and state and federal agencies and there is no end of them somehow. On a sunny day they fill the woodsy park the city planners -not local, a fancy architectural firm that came in and won the competition with their design and then flew back to Atlanta – have made out of Weiser Square, where the squeaking, sparking trolley cars used to line up for passengers. They bask, these young paper-pushers, beside the abstract cement fountains, reading The Wall Street Journal with their coats off and neatly folded on the anodized, vandal-proof benches beside them. The women of this race especially fascinate Harry; they wear running shoes instead of high heels but their legs are encased in sheer pantyhose and their faces adorned by big round glasses that give them a comical sexy look, as if their boobs are being echoed above in hard hornrims and coated plastic. They look like Goldie Hawns conditioned by Jane Fonda. The style these days gives them all wide mannish shoulders, and their hips have been pared and hardened by exercise bicycles and those ass-hugging pants that mold around every muscle like electric-colored paint. These women seem visitors from a slimmed-down future where sex is just another exercise and we all live in sealed cubicles and communicate through computers.

You would have thought Charlie would be dead by now. But these Mediterranean types don't even seem to get gray and paunchy. They hit a plateau around fifty that doesn't change until they drop off of it suddenly somewhere in their eighties. They use their bodies up neatly, like mopping up a dinner plate with bread. Charlie had rheumatic fever as a kid but, though carrying a heart murmur inside him and subject to angina, he hasn't ever had an episode as severe as Harry's down in the Gulf. "How the fuck do you do it, Charlie?" Rabbit asks him.

"You learn to avoid aggravation," Charlie tells him. "If anything looks to be aggravating, walk away from it. Things over at the lot had got to be aggravating, so I walked away. Christ, am I glad to be away from Toyotas! First thing I did was buy myself an old-fashioned American boat, an Olds Toronado. Soft shocks, single-finger steering, guzzles gas, I'm crazy about it. Five-liter V-8, tomato red with a white padded half-roof."

"Sounds great. You park it close by?"

"I tried and couldn't. Circled up around Spring Street twice and finally gave up and left it in a lot up past the old Baghdad and took a bus the three blocks down. So it costs a few pennies. Avoid aggravation, champ."

"I still don't understand it. Downtown Brewer's supposed to be dead and there's nowhere to park. Where are all the cars coming from?"

"They breed," Charlie explains. "These cars get pregnant as teenagers and go on welfare. They don't give a damn."

One of the things Harry has always enjoyed about Charlie is the man's feel for the big picture; the two of them used to stand by the display window over at the lot on dull mornings and rehash the day's news. Rabbit has never gotten over the idea that the news is going to mean something to him. As they seat themselves at one of the tile-topped tables that remain from the days when this was the Café Barcelona, he says, "How about Schmidt last night?" Against the Pirates in Three Rivers Stadium, the Phillies' veteran third baseman had doubled twice and surpassed Richie Ashburn's team record for total hits.

"This is still spring," Charlie tells him. "Wait till the pitchers' arms warm up. Schmidt'll wilt. He's old, not compared to you and me but in the game he's in he's old, and there's no hiding from the young pitchers over the long season."

Harry finds it salutary, to have his admiration for Schmidt checked. You can't live through these athletes, they don't know you exist. For them, only the other players exist. They go to the ballpark and there's thirty thousand there and a big bumbly roar when their names are announced and that's all of you they need. "Does it seem to you," he asks Charlie, "there's a lot of disasters lately? That Pan Am plane blowing up, and then those soccer fans in England the other day getting crushed, and now this gun exploding on the battleship for no apparent reason."

"Apparent's the key word," Charlie says. "Everything has some little tiny reason, even when we can't see it. A little spark somewhere, a little crack in the metal. Also, champ, look at the odds. How many people in the world now, five billion? With the world jammed up like it is the wonder is more of us aren't trampled to death. There's a crush on, and it's not going to get better."

Rabbit's heart dips, thinking that from Nelson's point of view he himself is a big part of the crowding. That time he screamed outside the burning house at 26 Vista Crescent, I'll kill you. He didn't mean it. A spark, a crack in metal. A tiny flaw. When you die you do the world a favor.

Charlie is frowning down into the menu, which is enormous, printed in photocopy in green ink on rough flecked acid-free paper. The things they can do with Xerox now. Who still uses a place like Verity Press? First letterpress went, then photo-offset. Charlie no longer wears thick squarish hornrims that set a dark bar across his eyebrows but gold aviator frames that hold his thick lavender-tinted lenses to his nose like fingers pinching a wineglass. Charlie used to be thickset but age has whittled him so his Greek bones show – the high pinched arch to his nose, the wide slanting brow below his dark hairline. His sideburns are gray but he is shaving them shorter. Studying the menu, he chuckles. "Beefsteak Salad," he reads. "Pork Kabob Salad. What kind of salads are those?"

When the waitress comes, Charlie kids her about it. "What's with all this high-cal high-fat meat?" he asks. "You giving us a beefsteak with a little lettuce on the side?"

"The meat is shoelaced and worked in," the waitress says. She is tall and almost pretty, with her hair bleached and trained up in a fluffy Mohawk, and a row of little earrings all around the edge of one ear, and dark dusty-rosy spots rouged behind her eyes. Her tongue has some trouble in her mouth and it's cute, the earnest, deliberate way her lips move. "They found there was a call for these, you know, heartier ingredients."

So underneath everything, Rabbit thinks, it's still Johnny Frye's Chophouse. "Tell me about the Macadamia and Bacon Salad," he says.

"It's one of people's favorites," she says. "The bacon is crisp and in, like, flakes. Most of the fat has been pressed out of it. Also there's alfalfa sprouts, and some radishes and cucumber sliced real thin, and a couple kinds of lettuce, I forget the different names, and I don't know what all else, maybe some chuba – that's dried sardines."

"Sounds good," Rabbit says, before it doesn't and he has to choose again.

Charlie points out, "Nuts and bacon aren't exactly what the doctor ordered."

"You heard her, the fat's been squeezed out. Anyway a little bit can't kill you. It's more a matter of internal balance. Come on, Charlie. Loosen up."

"What's in the Seaweed Special?" Charlie asks the waitress, because both men like to hear her talk.

"Oh, hijiki of course, and wakame, and dulse and agar in with a lot of chickpeas and lentils, and leafy greens, it's wonderful if you're going macrobiotic seriously and don't mind that slightly bitter taste, you know, that seaweed tends to have."

"You've done talked me out of it, Jennifer," Charlie says, reading her name stitched onto the bodice of the lime-green jumper they wear for a uniform at Salad Binge. "I'll take the Spinach and Crab."

"For salad dressing, we have Russian, Roquefort, Italian, Creamy Italian, Poppyseed, Thousand Island, Oil and Vinegar, and Japanese."

"What's in the Japanese?" Harry asks, not just to see her lips curl and pucker around the little difficulty in her mouth, but because the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?

"Oh, I could ask in the kitchen if you really care, but umeboshi, I think, and tamari, of course – we don't use that commercial soy sauce – and sesame oil, and rice vinegar." Her eyes harden as she senses that these men are flirtatiously wasting her time. Feeling apologetic, they both order Creamy Italian and settle to each other.

It has been a long time, their rapport has grown rusty. Charlie does seem older, drier, when you look. The thin gold aviator frames take out of his face a lot of that masculine certainty that must have appealed to Janice twenty years ago. "Cute kid," Charlie says, arranging the silver around his plate more neatly, square to the edges of the paper placemat.

"Whatever happened to Melanie?" Rabbit asks him. Ten years ago, they had sat in this same restaurant and Melanie, a friend of Nelson's and Pru's living at the time at Ma Springer's house, had been their waitress. Then she became Charlie's girlfriend, old as he was, relatively. At least they went to Florida together. One of the things maybe that had made Florida seem attractive. But no bimbo there had offered herself to Harry. The only flickers he got were from women his own age, who looked ancient.

"She became a doctor," Charlie says. "A gastroenterologist, to be exact, in Portland, Oregon. That's where her father wound up, you'll recall."

"Just barely. He was a kind of late-blooming hippie, wasn't he?" "He settled down with the third wife and has been a big support to Melanie. It was her mother, actually, who was flipping out, back in Mill Valley. Alcohol. Guys. Drugs."

The last word hurts Harry's stomach. "How come you know all this?"

Charlie shrugs minimally, but cannot quite suppress his little smile of pride. "We keep in touch. I was there for her when she needed a push. I told her, `Go for it.' She still had a bit of that poor-little-me-I'm-only-a-girl thing. I gave her the boost she needed. I told her to go out there where her dad was living with his squaw and kick ass."

"Me you tell avoid aggravation, her you told to go for it."

"Different cases. Different ages. You her age, I'd tell you, `Go for it.' I'll still tell you. As long as you avoid aggravation."

"Charlie, I have a problem."

"That's news?"

"A couple of 'em, actually. For one, I ought to do something about my heart. I just can't keep drifting along waiting for my next MI."

"You're losing me, champ."

"You know. Myocardial infarction. Heart attack. I was lucky to get away with the one I did have. The docs tell me I ought to have an open-heart, a multiple bypass."

"Go for it."

"Sure. Easy for you to say. People die having those things. I notice you never had one."

"But I did. In '87. December, you were in Florida. They replaced two valves. Aortic and mitral. When you have rheumatic fever as a kid, it's the valves that go. They don't close right. That's what gives you the heart murmur, blood running the wrong way."

Rabbit can hardly bear these images, all these details inside him, valves and slippages and crusts on the pipe. "What'd they replace them with?"

"Pig heart valves. The choice is that or a mechanical valve, a trap with a ball. With the mechanical, you click all the time. I didn't want to click if I could help it. They say it keeps you awake."

"Pig valves." Rabbit tries to hide his revulsion. "Was it terrible? They split your chest open and ran your blood through a machine?"

"Piece of cake. You're knocked out cold. What's wrong with running your blood through a machine? What else you think you are, champ?"

A God-made one-of-a-kind with an immortal soul breathed in. A vehicle of grace. A battlefield of good and evil. An apprentice angel. All those things they tried to teach you in Sunday school, or really didn't try very hard to teach you, just let them drift in out of the pamphlets, back there in that church basement buried deeper in his mind than an air-raid shelter.

"You're just a soft machine," Charlie maintains, and lifts his squarish hands, with their white cuffs and rectangular gold links, to let Jennifer set his salad before him. He saw her coming with eyes in the back of his head. She circles the table gingerly – these men are doing something to her, she doesn't know what – and puts in front of Harry a bacon-flecked green mound bigger than a big breast. It looks rich, and more than he should eat. The tall awkward girl with her strange white rooster-comb trembling in the air still hovers, the roundnesses in her green uniform pressing on Rabbit's awareness as he sits at the square tiled table trying to frame his dilemmas.

"Is there anything more I can get you gentlemen?" Jennifer asks, her lips gently struggling to articulate. It's not a lisp she has, quite; it's like her tongue is too big. "Something to drink?"

Charlie asks her for a Perrier with lime. She says that San Pellegrino is what they have. He says it's all the same to him. Fancy water is fancy water.

Harry after an internal struggle asks what kinds of beer they have. Jennifer sighs, feeling they are putting her on, and recites, "Schlitz, Miller, Miller Lite, Bud, Bud Light, Michelob, Lowenbrau, Corona, Coors, Coors Light, and Ballantine ale on draft." All these names have an added magic from being tumbled a bit in her mouth. Not looking Charlie in the eye, Harry opts for a Mick. Jennifer nods unsmiling and goes away. If she doesn't want to excite middle-aged men, she shouldn't wear all those earrings and go so heavy on the makeup.

"Piece of cake, you were saying," he says to Charlie.

"They freeze you. You don't know a thing."

"Guy I know down in Florida, not much older than we are, had an open-heart and he says it was hell, the recuperation took forever, and furthermore he doesn't look so great even so. He swings a golf club like a cripple."

Charlie does one of his tidy small shrugs. "You got to have the basics to work with. Maybe the guy was too far gone. But you, you're in good shape. Could lose a few pounds, but you're young – what, Fifty-five?"

"Wish I was. Fifty-six last February."

"That's young, Champ. I'm getting there myself." Charlie is Janice's age.

"The way I'm going l'll be happy to hit sixty. I look at all these old crocks down in Florida, shrivelled-up mummies toddling right into their nineties in their shorts and orthopedic sneakers, perky as bejesus, and I want to ask 'em, `What makes you so great? How did you do it?' "

"A day at a time," Charlie suggests. "One day at a time, and don't look down." Harry can tell he's getting bored with issuing reassurances, but Charlie's all he's got, now that he and Thelma are on hold. He's embarrassed to call her, now that he can't seem to deliver. He says:

"There's this other thing they can do now. An angioplasty. They cut open an artery in your groin -"

"Hey. I'm eating."

"- and poke it up all the way to your heart, would you believe. Then they pop out this balloon in the narrow place of the coronary artery and blow the damn thing up. Not with air, with saltwater somehow. It cracks the plaque. It stretches the artery back to the way it was."

"With a lot of luck it does," Charlie says. "And a year later you're back in the same boat, plugged up with macadamia nuts and beer yet."

Beer has come on the end of Jennifer's lean arm, in a frosted glass mug, golden and foam-topped and sizzling with its own excited bubbles. "If I can't have a single beer now and then, I'd just as soon be dead," Harry lies. He sips, and with a bent forefinger wipes the foam from under his nose. That gesture of Nelson's. He wonders when she fucks how protective Jennifer has to be of that wobbly Mohawk. Some punk girls, he's read, put safety pins through their nipples.

"Coronary bypass is what you want," Charlie is telling him. "These balloons, they can only do one artery at a time. Bypass grafts, they can do four, five, six once they get in there. Whaddeyou care if they pull open your rib cage? You won't be there. You'll be way out of it, dreaming away. Actually, you don't dream. It's too deep for that. It's a big nothing, like being dead."

"I don't want it," Harry hears himself say sharply. He softens this to, "Not yet anyway." Charlie's word pull has upset him, made it too real, the physical exertion, pulling open these resistant bone gates so his spirit will fly out and men in pale-green masks will fish in this soupy red puddle with their hooks and clamps and bright knives. Once on television watching by mistake over Janice's shoulder one of these PBS programs on childbirth – they wouldn't put such raunchy stuff on the networks – he saw them start to cut open a woman's belly for a Caesarean. The knife in the rubber-gloved hand made a straight line and on either side yellow fat curled up and away like two strips of foam rubber. This woman's abdomen, with a baby inside, was lined in a material, just like foam rubber. "Down in Florida," he says, "I had a catheterization" – the word makes trouble in his mouth, as if he's become the waitress – "and it wasn't so bad, more boring than anything else. You're wide awake, and then they put like this big bowl over your chest to see what's going on inside. Where the dye is being pumped through, it's hot, so hot you can hardly stand it." He feels he's disappointing Charlie, being so cowardly about bypasses, and to deepen his contact with the frowning, chewing other man confides, "The worst thing of it, Charlie, is I feel half dead already. This waitress is the first girl I've wanted to fuck for months."

"Boobs," Charlie says. "Great boobs. On a skinny body. That's sexy. Like Bo Derek after her implant."

"Her hair is what gets me. Tall as she is, she adds six inches with that hairdo."

"Tall isn't bad. The tall ones don't get the play the cute little short ones do, and do more for you. Also, being skinny has its advantages, there's not all that fat to come between you and the clitoris."

This may be more male bonding than Rabbit needs. He says, "But all those earrings, don't they look painful? And is it true some punk girls -"

Charlie interrupts impatiently, "Pain is where it's at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill."

"When I came back this spring, I went driving around the city, all the sections. Some of these Hispanics were practically screwing on the street."

"Drugs," Charlie says. "They don't know what they're doing four-fifths of the time."

"Did you see in the Standard, some spic truck driver from West Miami was caught over near Maiden Springs with they estimate seventy-five million dollars' worth of cocaine, five hundred kilos packed in orange crates marked `Fragile'?"

"They can't stop dope," Charlie says, aligning his knife and fork on the edge of his empty plate, "as long as people are willing to pay a fortune for it."

"The guy was a Cuban refugee evidently, one of those we let in."

"These countries go Communist, they let us have all their crooks and crackpots." Charlie's tone is level and authoritative, but Harry feels he's losing him. It's not quite like the old days, when they had all day to kill, over in the showroom. Charlie has finished his Spinach and Crab and Rabbit has barely made a dent in his own heaping salad, he's so anxious to get advice. He gets a slippery forkful into his mouth and finds among the oily lettuce and alfalfa sprouts a whole macadamia nut, and delicately splits it with his teeth, so his tongue feels the texture of the fissure, miraculously smooth, like a young woman's body, like a marble tabletop.

When he swallows, he gets out, "That's the other thing preying on my mind. I think Nelson is into cocaine."

Charlie nods and says, "So I hear." He picks up the fork he's just aligned and reaches over with it toward Harry's big breast of bacon-garnished greenery. "Let me help you out with all that, champ."

"You've heard he's into cocaine?"

"Mm. Yeah. He's like his granddad, jumpy. He needs crutches. I never found the kid easy to deal with."

"Me neither," Harry says eagerly, and it comes tumbling out. "I went over there last week to have it out with him about cocaine, I'd just got wind of it, and he was off somewhere, he usually is, but this accountant he's hired, a guy dying of AIDS would you believe, was there and when I asked to look at the books just about gave me the up-yours sign and said I had to get Janice's sayso. And she, the dumb mutt, doesn't want to give it. I think she's scared ofwhat she'll find out. Her own kid robbing her blind. The used sales are down, the monthly stat sheets have been looking fishy to me for months."

"You'd know. Doesn't sound good," Charlie agrees, reaching again with his fork. A macadamia nut – each one nowadays costs about a quarter – escapes in Harry's direction and only his quick reflexes prevent it from falling into his lap and staining with salad oil the russet slacks he took out of the cleaner's bag and put on for the first time today, the first spring day that's felt really warm. The sudden motion gives him a burning pang behind his rib cage. That evil child is still playing with matches in there.

He tries to ignore the pain and goes on, "And now we get these phone calls at funny hours, guys with funny voices asking for Nelson or even telling me they want money."

"They play rough," Charlie says. "Dope is big business." He reaches once more.

"Hey, leave me something. How do you stay so skinny? So what shall I do?"

"Maybe Janice should talk to Nelson."

"That's just what I told her."

"Well then."

"But the bitch won't. At least she hasn't so far that I know of."

"This is good," Charlie says, "this health stuff, but it's all like Chinese food, it doesn't fill you up."

"So what did you say your verdict was?"

"Sometimes, between a husband and wife, all the history gets in the way. Want me to sound old Jan Jan out, see where's she's coming from?"

Harry hesitates hardly at all before saying, "Charlie, if you could, that would be super."

"Would you gentlemen like some dessert?"

Jennifer has materialized. Turning his head in surprise at the sound of her sweetly impeded voice, Harry sees, inches from his eyes, that Charlie as usual is right: great boobs, gawky and selfhating as the rest of her is. Her parents must have put a lot of protein, a lot of Cheenos and vitamin-enriched bread, into those boobs. In his fragile freighted mood they seem two more burdens on his brain. The stretched chest of her green jumper lifts as she takes in breath to say, "Today our special is a cheesecake made from low-fat goat's milk topped with delicious creamed gooseberries."

Rabbit, his eyebrows still raised by the waitress's breasts, looks over at Charlie. "Whaddeyou think?"

Charlie shrugs unhelpfully. "It's your funeral."

The phone is ringing, ringing, like thrilling cold water poured into the mossy warm crevices of his dream. He was dreaming of snuggling into something, of having found an aperture that just fit. The phone is on Janice's side; he gropes for it across her stubbornly sleeping body and, with a throat dry from mouthbreathing, croaks, "Hello?" The bedside clock seems to have only one hand until he figures out it's ten minutes after two. He expects one of those men's voices and tells himself they should take the phone off the hook downstairs whenever they go to bed. His heart's pounding seems to fill the dark room to its corners, suffocatingly.

A tremulous young woman's voice says, "Harry? It's Pru.

Forgive me for waking you up, but I -" Shame, fear trip her voice into silence. She feels exposed.

"Yeah, go on," he urges softly.

"I'm desperate. Nelson has gone crazy, he's already hit me and I'm afraid he'll start in on the children!"

"Really?" he says stupidly. "Nelson wouldn't do that." But people do it, it's in the papers, all the time.

"Who on earth is it?" Janice asks irritably, yanked from her own dreams. "Tell them you have no money. Just hang up."

Pru is sobbing, on the end of the line, "… can't stand it any more… it's been such hell… for years."

"Yeah, yeah," Harry says, still feeling stupid. "Here's Janice," he says, and passes the hot potato into her fumbling hand, out from under the covers. His sudden window into Pru, the hot bright unhappy heart of her, felt illicit. He switches on his bedside light, as if that will help clear this all up. The white jacket of the history book he is still trying to get through, with its clipper ship in an oval of cloud and sea, leaps up shiny under the pleated lampshade. Since he began reading the book last Christmas afternoon, the author herself has died, putting a kind of blight on the book. Yet he feels it would be bad luck never to finish it.

"Yes," Janice is saying into the phone, at wide intervals. "Yes. Did he really? Yes." She says, "We'll be right over. Stay away from him. What about going into Judy's room with her and locking yourselves in? Mother had a bolt put on the door, it must be still there."

Still Pru's voice crackles on, like an acid eating into the night's silence, the peace that had been in the room ten minutes before. Bits of his interrupted dream come back to him. A visit to some anticipated place, on a vehicle like a trolley car, yes, it had been an old-time trolley car, the tight weave of cane seats, he had forgotten how they looked, the way they smelled warmed by the sun, and the porcelain loops to hang from, the porcelain buttons to press, the dusty wire grates at the windows, the air and light coming in, on old-fashioned straw hats, the women with paper flowers in theirs, all heading somewhere gay, an amusement park, a fair, who was with him? There had been a companion, a date, on the seat beside him, but he can't come up with her face. The tunnel of love. The trolley car turned into something carrying them, him, into a cozy tunnel of love. It fit.

"Could the neighbors help?"

More crackling, more sobbing. Rabbit gives Janice the "cut" signal you see on TV – a finger across the throat – and gets out of bed. The aroma of his old body lifts toward him as he rests his bare feet on the carpet, a stale meaty cheesy scent. Their bedroom in the limestone house has pale-beige Antron broadloom; a houseful of unpatterned wall-to-wall seemed snug and modern to him when they ordered it all, but in their ten years of living here certain spots -inside the front door, the hall outside the door down to the cellar, the bedroom on either side of the bed – have collected dirt from shoes and sweat from feet and turned a gray no rug shampoo could remove, a grimy big fingerprint your life has left. Patterned carpets like people had when he was a boy – angular flowers and vines and mazes he would follow with his eyes until he felt lost in a jungle – swallowed the dirt somehow, and then the housewives up and down Jackson Road would beat it out of them this time of year, on their back-yard clotheslines, making little swirling clouds in the cool April air, disappearing into the dust of the world. He collects clean underwear and socks from the bureau and then is a bit stumped, what to wear to an assault. Formal, or rough and ready? Harry's brain is skidding along like a surfer on the pumping of his heart.

"Hi honey," Janice is saying in another tone, high-pitched and grandmotherly. "Don't be scared. We all love you. Your daddy loves you, yes he does, very much. Grandpa and I are coming right over. You must let us get dressed now so we can do that. It'll take just twenty minutes, honey. We'll hurry, yes. You be good till then and do whatever your mother says." She hangs up and stares at Harry from beneath her skimpy rumpled bangs. "My God," she says. "He punched Pru in the face and smashed up everything in the bathroom when he couldn't find some cocaine he thought he hid in there that he wanted."

"He wants, he wants," Harry says.

"He told her we're all stealing from him."

"Ha," Harry says, meaning it's the reverse.

Janice says, "How can you laugh when it's your own son?"

Who is this woman, this little nut-hard woman, to chasten him? Yet he feels chastened. He doesn't answer but instead says in a measured, mature manner, "Well, it's probably good this is coming to a head, if we all survive it. It gets it out in the open at least."

She puts on what she never wears in the daylight up north, her salmon running suit with the powder-blue sleeves and stripe. He opts for a pair of pressed chinos fresh from the drawer and the khaki shirt he puts on to do light yard chores, and his oldest jacket, a green wide-wale corduroy with leather buttons: kind of a casual Saturday-afternoon look. Retirement has made them both more clothes-conscious than before; in Florida, the retirees play dress-up every day, as if they've become their own paper dolls.

They take the slate-gray Celica, the more Batmobilelike and steely car, on this desperate mission in the dead of the night. Along the stilled curving streets of Penn Park, the oaks are just budding but the maples are filling in, no longer red in tint but dense with translucent tender new leaves. The houses have an upstairs night light on here and there, or a back-porch light to keep cats and raccoons away from the garbage, but only the streetlamps compete with the moon. The trimmed large bushes of the groomed yards, the yews and arborvitae and rhododendrons, look alert by night, like jungle creatures come to the waterhole to drink and caught in a camera's flash. It seems strange to think that while we sleep these bushes are awake, exhaling oxygen, growing; they do not sleep. Stars do not sleep, but above the housetops and trees crowns shine in a cold arching dusty sprinkle. Why do we sleep? What do we rejoin? His dream, the way it fit him all around. At certain angles the lit asphalt feels in the corners of his eyes like snow. Penn Park becomes West Brewer and a car or two is still awake and moving on blanched deserted Penn Boulevard, an extension of Weiser with a supermarket parking lot on one side and on the other a low brick row of shops from the Thirties, little narrow stores selling buttons and bridal gowns and pastry and Zipf Chocolates and Sony TVs and hobby kits to make model airplanes with – they still manufacture and sell those in this era when all the kids are supposedly couch potatoes and all the planes are these wallowing wide-body jets with black noses like panda bears, not sleek killing machines like Zeros, Messerschmitts, Spitfires, Mustangs. Funny to think that with all that world-war effort manufacturers still had the O.K. to make those little models, keeping up morale in the kiddie set. All the shops are asleep. A flower shop shows a violet growing light, and a pet store a dimly lit aquarium. The cars parked along the curbs display a range of unearthly colors, no longer red and blue and cream but cindery lunar shades, like nothing you can see or even imagine by daylight.

Harry pops a nitroglycerin pill and tells Janice accusingly, "The doctors say I should avoid aggravation."

"It wasn't me who woke us up at two in the morning, it was your daughter-in-law."

"Yeah, because your precious son was beating up on her."

"According to her," Janice states. "We haven't heard Nelson's side of it."

The underside of his tongue bums. "What makes you think he has a side? What're you saying, you think she's lying? Why would she lie? Why would she call us up at two in the morning to lie?"

"She has her agenda, as people say. He was a good bet for her when she got herself pregnant but now that he's in a little trouble he's not such a good bet and if she's going to get herself another man she better move fast because her looks won't last forever."

He laughs, in applause. "You've got it all figured out." Discreetly, distantly, his asshole tingles, from the pill. "She is good-looking, isn't she? Still."

"To some men she would seem so. The kind that don't mind big tough women. What I never liked about her, though, was she makes Nelson look short."

"He is short," Harry says. "Beats me why. My parents were both tall. My whole family's always been tall."

Janice considers in silence her responsibility for Nelson's shortness.

There are any number of ways to get to Mt. Judge through Brewer but tonight, the streets all but deserted and the stoplights blinking yellow, he opts for the most direct, going straight over the Running Horse Bridge, that once he and Jill walked over in moonlight though not so late at night as this, straight up Weiser past the comer building that used to house JIMBO's Friendly LOUNGE until trouble with the police finally closed it and that now has been painted pastel condo colors and remodelled into a set of offices for yuppie lawyers and financial advisers, past Schoenbaum Funeral Directors with its stately building of white brick on the left and the shoeshine parlor that sells New York papers and hot roasted peanuts, the best peanuts in town, still selling them all those years since he was a kid not much older than Judy now. His idea then of the big time was to take the trolley around the mountain and come into downtown Brewer on a Saturday morning and buy a dime bag of peanuts still warm from the roaster and walk all around cracking them and letting the shells fall where they would, at his feet on the sidewalks of Weiser Square. Once an old bum grumbled at him for littering; even the bums had a civic conscience then. Now the old downtown is ghostly, hollow in lunar colors and closed to traffic at Fifth Street, where the little forest planted by the city planners from Atlanta to make a pedestrian mall looms with ghostly branches under the intense blue lights installed to discourage muggings and sex and drug transactions beneath these trees which grow taller every year and make the downtown gloomier. Rabbit turns left on Fifth, past the post office and the Ramada Inn that used to be the Ben Franklin with its grand ballroom, which always makes him think of Mary Ann and her crinolines and the fragrance between her legs, and over to Eisenhower Avenue, above number 1204 where Janice hid out with Charlie that time, and takes an obtuse-angled turn right, heading up through the Hispanic section, which used to be German working-class, across Winter, Spring, and Summer streets with the blinding lights and occasional moving shadow, spics out looking for some kind of a deal, the nights still a little cool to bring out all the street trash, to Locust Boulevard and the front of Brewer High School, a Latin-inscribed Depression monument, ambitious for the common good like something Communists would put up, the whole country close to Communism in the Thirties, people not so selfish then, built the year Harry was born, 1933, and going to outlast him it looks like. Of pale-yellow brick and granite quoins, it clings to the greening mountainside like a grand apparition.

"What do you think she meant," he asks Janice, " `gone crazy'? How crazy can you go from cocaine?"

"Doris Kaufmann, I mean Eberhardt, has a brother-in-law whose stepson by his wife's first marriage had to go to a detox center out near the middle of the state. He got to be paranoid and thought Hitler was still alive and had agents everywhere to get just him. He was Jewish."

"Did he beat up his wife and children?"

"He didn't have a wife, I think. We don't know for sure Nelson's threatened the children."

"Pru said he did."

"Pru was very upset. It's the money I think upsets her, more than anything."

"It doesn't upset you?"

"Not as much as it seems to you and Pru. Money isn't something I worry about, Harry. Daddy always said, `If I don't have two nickels to rub together, I'll rub two pennies.' He had faith he could always make enough, and he did, and I guess I inherited his philosophy."

"Is that the reason you keep letting Nelson get away with murder?"

Janice sighs and sounds more than ever like her mother, Bessie Koerner Springer, who lived her whole life overweight, without a lick of exercise except housework, sitting in her big house with its shades down to protect the curtains and upholstery from sunlight and sighing about the pains in her legs. "Harry, what can I do, seriously? It's not as if he's still a child, he's thirty-two."

"You could fire him from the lot, for starters."

"Yes, and shall I fire him as my son, too – tell him I'm sorry, but he hasn't worked out? He's my father's grandson, don't forget. Daddy built that lot up out of nothing and he would have wanted Nelson to run it, run it even if he runs it into the ground."

"Really?" Such a ruinous vision startles him. Having money makes people reckless. Bet a million. Junk bonds. "Couldn't you fire him provisionally, until he shapes up?"

Janice's tone has the bite of impatience, of fatigue. "All this is so easy for you to say – you're just sore since Lyle told you I was the real boss, you're trying to make me suffer for it. You do it, you do whatever you think should be done at the lot and tell them I said you should. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of you and Nelson fighting your old wars through me."

Streetlights flicker more swiftly on his hands as the Celica moves more rapidly through the city park, above the tennis courts and the World War II tank painted a thick green to forestall rust, repainted so often they've lost the exact military green Harry remembers. What did they call it? Olive drab. He feels under the barrage of streetlights bombarded, and Brewer seems empty of life like those bombed-out German cities after the war. "They wouldn't believe me," he tells her spitefully, "they'd still come to you. And I'm like you," he tells her more gently, "scared of what I'll stir up."

After the park there is a stoplight that says red, and a locally famous old turreted house roofed in round fishscale slate shingles, and then a shopping mall where the cineplex sign advertises SEE YOU DREAM TEAM SAY ANYTHING OUT OF CONTROL. Then they're on 422 and a territory bred into their bones, streets they crossed and recrossed in all seasons as children, Central, Jackson, Joseph, the hydrants and mailboxes of the borough of Mt. Judge like buttons fastening down their lives, their real lives, everything drained of color at this nadir of the night, the streets under the burning blue mercury lights looking rounded like bread-loaves and crusted with snow, the brick-pillared porches treacherous emplacements up behind their little flat laps oflawn and tulip bed. Number 89 Joseph, the Springers' big stucco house where when Rabbit was courting Janice in his old Nash he used to hate to come because it made his own family's semi-detached house on Jackson Road look poor, has all its lights ablaze, like a ship going down amid the silent darkened treetops and roof peaks of the town. The huge spreading copper-beech tree on the left side where Harry and Janice's bedroom used to be, a tree so dense the sun never shone in and its beech nuts popping kept Harry awake all fall, is gone, leaving that side bare, its windows exposed and on fire. Nelson had it cut down. Dad, it was eating up the whole house. You couldn't keep paint on the woodwork on that side, it was so damp. The lawn wouldn't even grow. Harry couldn't argue, and couldn't tell the boy that the sound of the rain in that great beech had been the most religious experience of his life. That, and hitting a pure golf shot.

They park outside, under the maples that are shedding chartreuse fuzz and sticky stuff this time of year. He always hates that about parking here. He'll get the car washed Monday.

Pru has been watching for their arrival. She pulls the door open as their feet hit the porch, as if there's an electric eye. Like Thelma the other week. Judy is with her, in some fuzzy Oshkosh B'Gosh pajamas that are too small for her. The child's feet look surprisingly long and white and bony, with the inches of exposed ankle.

"Where's Roy?" Harry asks instantly.

"Nelson's putting him in bed," Pru says, with a wry downward tug of one side of her mouth, a kind of apology.

"To bed?" Harry says. "You trust him with the kid?"

She says, "Oh yes. He's calmed down since I called. I think he shocked himself, hitting me so hard. It did him good." In the illumination of the front hall they can see the pink welt along one cheekbone, the lopsided puffiness of her upper lip, the redness around her eyes as if rubbed and rubbed with a scouring pad. She is wearing that quilted shorty morning-glory bathrobe but not as in Florida over bare legs; under it she has on a long blue nightgown. But you can see the outline of her legs through the thin cloth, like fish moving through murky water. Fake-fur-lined bedroom slippers clothe her feet, so he can't check out her toenail polish.

"Hey, is this some kind of false alarm?" Harry asks.

"When you see Nelson I don't think you'll think so," Pru tells him, and turns to the other woman. ` Janice, I've had it. I want out. I've kept the lid on as long as I can and now I've had it!" And the eyes that have scoured their lids with tears begin to water again, and she embraces the older woman before Janice has quite straightened out from bending down to kiss and hug Judy hello.

Harry's guts give a tug: he can feel Pru's attempt to make a sweeping connection; he can feel his wife's resistance. Pru was raised a Catholic, showy, given to big gestures, and Janice a tight little Protestant. The embrace breaks up quickly.

Judy takes Harry's fingertips. When he stoops to peck her on the cheek, her hair gets in his eye. The little girl giggles and says in his ear, "Daddy thinks ants are crawling all over him."

"He's always feeling itchy," Pru says, sensing that her attempt to sweep Janice into her escape plan has failed, she must do some more selling of the situation. "That's the coke. They call it formication. His neurotransmitters are fucked up. Ask me anything, I know it all. I've been going to Narc-Anon in Brewer for a year now.

"Huh," Rabbit says, not quite liking her tough tone. "And what else do they tell you?"

She looks straight at him, her green eyes glaring with tears and shock, and manages that smile of hers, downtwisted at the corner. Her upper lip being puffy gives it a sad strangeness tonight. "They tell you it's not your problem, the addicts can only do it themselves. But that still leaves it your problem."

"What happened here tonight, exactly?" he asks. He has to keep speaking up. He feels Janice pulling back, distancing herself irritatingly, like that time they took the kids to jungle Gardens in the Camry.

Judy doesn't find her grandparents as much fun as usual and leaves Harry's side to go lean against her mother, pressing her carrot-colored head back against Pru's belly. Pru protectively encircles the child's throat with a downy freckled forearm. Now two pairs of greenish eyes stare, as if Harry and Janice are not the rescue squad but hostile invaders.

Pru's voice sounds tough and weary. "The usual sort of garbage. He came home after one and I asked him where he'd been and he told me none of my business and I guess I didn't take it as docilely as usual because he said if I was going to be that way he needed a hit to calm his nerves, and when the coke wasn't in the bathroom where he thought he hid it in an aspirin bottle he smashed things up and when I didn't like that he came out after me and started slugging me all over the place."

Judy says, "It woke me up. Mommy came into my room to get away and Daddy's face was all funny, like he wasn't really seeing anything."

Harry asks, "Did he have a knife or anything?"

Pru's eyebrows knit crossly at the suggestion. "Nelson would never go for a knife. He can't stand blood and never helps in the kitchen. He wouldn't know which end of a knife to use."

Judy says, "He said he was real sorry afterwards."

Pru has been smoothing Judy's long red hair back from her face and now, just the middle fingers touching her forehead and cheeks, tucks back her own. She has outgrown the Sphinx look; it hangs limp to her shoulders. "He calmed down after I called you. He said, `You called them? I can't believe it. You called my parents?' It was like he was too stunned to be angry. He kept saying this is the end and how sorry he was for everything. He makes no sense." She grimaces and lightly pushes Judy away from her body and tightens the robe around her middle, with a shiver. For a second they all seem to have forgotten their lines. In crises there is something in our instincts which whittles, which tries to reduce the unignorable event back to the ignorable normal. "I could use a cup of coffee," Pru says.

Janice asks, "Shouldn't we go upstairs to Nelson first?"

Judy likes this idea and leads the way upstairs. Following her milky bare feet up the stair treads, Harry feels guilty that his granddaughter has to wear outgrown pajamas while all those Florida acquaintances of theirs have different-colored slacks for every day of the week and twenty sports coats hanging in cleaner's bags. The house, which he remembers from way back in the days of the Springers, when they were younger than he is now, seems rather pathetically furnished, now that he looks, in remnants from the old days, including the battered old brown Barcalounger that used to be Fred Springer's throne, along with nondescript newer stuff from Schaechner's or one of the shabby furniture places that have sprung up along the highways leading out of the city, mingled among the car lots and fast-food joints. The stairs still have the threadbare Turkish runner the Springers had tacked down forty years ago. The house has descended to Nelson and Pru in stages and they never really have taken it on as their own. You try to do something nice for kids, offer them a shortcut in life, a little padding, and it turns out to be the wrong thing, undermining them. This was no house for a young couple.

All the lights being turned on gives the house a panicky overheated air. They ascend the stairs in the order Judy, Harry, Janice, and Pru, who maybe regrets having called them by now and would rather be nursing her face and planning her next move in solitude. Nelson greets them in the hallway, carrying Roy in his. "Oh," he says, seeing his father, "the big cheese is here."

"Don't mouth off at me," Harry tells him. "I'd rather be home in bed."

"It wasn't my idea to call you."

"It was your idea though to go beating up your wife, and scaring the hell out of your kids, and otherwise acting like a shit." Harry fishes in the side pocket of his chinos to make sure the little vial of heart pills is there. Nelson is trying to play it cool, still wearing the black slacks and white shirt he was out on the town in, and having the kid on his arm, but his thinning hair is bristling out from his head and his eyes in the harsh hallway light are frantic, full of reflected sparks like that time outside the burning house at 26 Vista Crescent. Even in the bright light his pupils look dilated and shiny-black and there is a tremor to him, a shiver now and then as if this night nearly in May is icy cold. He looks even thinner than in Florida, with that same unpleasant sore-looking nose above the little half-ass blur of a mustache. And that earring yet.

"Who are you to go around deciding who's acting like a shit?" he asks Harry, adding, "Hi, Mom. Welcome home."

"Nelson, this just won't do."

"Let me take Roy," Pru says in a cool neutral voice, and she pushes past the elder Angstroms and without looking her husband in the face plucks the sleepy child from him. Involuntarily she grunts with the weight. The hall light, with its glass shade faceted like a candy dish, crowns her head with sheen as she passes under it, into Roy's room, which was Nelson's boyhood room in the old days, when Rabbit would lie awake hearing Melanie creep along the hall to this room from her own, the little room at the front of the house with the dress dummy. Now she's some gastroenterologist. In the harsh overhead light, Nelson's face, white around the gills, shows an electric misery and a hostile cockiness, and Janice's a dark confused something, a retreat into the shadows of her mind; her capacity for confusion has always frightened Harry. He realizes he is still in charge. Little Judy looks up at him brightly, titillated by being awake and a witness to these adult transactions. "We can't just stand here in the hall," he says. "How about the big bedroom?"

Harry and Janice's old bedroom has become Nelson and Pru's. A different bedspread – their old Pennsylvania Dutch quilt of little triangular patches has given way to a puff patterned with yellow roses, Pru does like flowered fabrics – but the same creaky bed, with the varnished knobbed headboard that never hit your back quite right when you tried to read. Different magazines on the bedside tables - Racing Cars and Rolling Stone instead of Time and Consumer Reports – but the same cherry table on Harry's old side, with its sticky drawer. Among the propped-up photographs on the bureau is one of him and Janice, misty-eyed and lightly tinted, taken on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in March of 1981. They look embalmed, Rabbit thinks, suspended in that tinted bubble of time. The ceiling light in this room, glass like the hall light, is also burning. He asks, "Mind if I switch that off? All these lights on, I'm getting a headache."

Nelson says sourly, "You're the big cheese. Help yourself."

Judy explains, "Mommy said to turn them all on while Daddy was chasing her. She said if it got worse I should throw a chair through a front window and yell for help and the police would hear."

With the light switched off, Rabbit can see out into the dark gulf of air where the copper beech used to be. The neighbor's house is closer than he ever thought, in his ten years of living here. Their upstairs lights are on. He can see segments of wall and furniture but no people. Maybe they were thinking of calling the police. Maybe they already have. He switches on the lamp on the cherry table, so the neighbors can look in and see that everything is under control.

"She overreacted," Nelson explains, fitfully gesturing. "I was trying to make a point and Pru wouldn't hold still. She never listens to me any more."

"Maybe you don't say enough she wants to hear," Harry tells his son. The kid in his white shirt and dark trousers looks like a magician's assistant, and keeps tapping himself on the chest and back of the neck and rubbing his anus through the white cloth as if he's about to do a trick. The boy is embarrassed and scared but keeps losing focus, Rabbit feels; there are other presences for him in the room besides the bed and furniture and his parents and daughter, a mob of ghosts which only he can see. A smell comes off him, liquor and a kind of post-electrical ozone. He is sweating; his gills are wet.

"O.K., O.K.," Nelson says. "I treated myself to a bender tonight, I admit it. It's been a helluva week at the lot. California wants to have this nationwide Toyotathon to go with a TVcommercial blitz and they expect to see a twenty-per-cent increase of new sales to go with the discounts they're offering. They let me know they haven't been liking our figures lately."

"Them and who else?" Harry says. "Did your buddy Lyle tell ya I was over there the other day?"

"Snooping around last week, yeah, he sure did. He hasn't come to work since. Thanks a bunch. You put Elvira into a snit, too, with all your sexist flirtatious stuff:"

"I wasn't sexist, I wasn't flirtatious. I was just surprised to see a woman selling cars and asked her how it was going. The cunt, I was just as pleasant as I could be."

"She didn't think so."

"Well screw her, then. From my look at her she can take care of herself. What's your big huff for – you boffing her?"

"Dad, when are you going to get your mind off boffing? You're what, fifty-seven? -"

"Fifty-six."

"- and you're so damn adolescent. There's more things in the world than who's boffing who."

"Tell me about it. Tell me about how the me generation has a bender. You can't keep snorting this stuff every half-hour to keep high, your nose'd burn out. Yours looks sort of shot already. What do you do with crack? How do you take it in? It's just little crystals, isn't it? Do you need all that fancy burning stuff and tubes they show on TV? Where do you do it, then? You can't just haul all that paraphernalia into the Laid-Back or whatever they call it now, or can you?"

"Harry, please," Janice says.

Judy contributes, bright-eyed at three in the morning, "Daddy has lots of funny little pipes."

"Shut up honey, would you mind?" Nelson says. "Go find Mommy and she'll put you to bed."

Harry turns on Janice. "Let me ask him. Why should we all go around on tiptoe forever pretending the kid's not a hophead? Face it, Nellie, you're a mess. You're a mess and you're a menace. You need help."

Self-pity focuses the boy's features for a second. "People keep telling me I need help but they're no help is what I notice. A wife who doesn't give me shit, a father who's no kind of father at all and never was, a mother…" He trails off, not daring offend his one ally.

"A mother," Harry finishes for him, "who's letting you rob her blind."

This gets to him a little, burns through the jittery buzz in his eyes. "I'm not robbing anybody," he says, numbly, as though a voice in his head told him to say it. "Everything's been worked out. Hey, I feel sick. I think I have to throw up."

Harry raises his hand in lofty blessing. "Go to it. You know where the bathroom is."

The bathroom door is to the right of the dresser with the color snapshots of the kids at various stages of growing and the tinted one of Harry and Janice looking embalmed, mistily staring at the same point in space. Looking in, Harry sees all sorts of litter on the floor. Prell, Crest, pills. Luckily most things come in plastic containers these days so there isn't much breakage. The door closes.

Janice tells him, "Harry, you're coming on too strong."

"Well, hell, nobody else is coming on at all. You expect it to go away by itself. It won't. The kid is hooked."

"Let's just not talk about the money," she begs.

"Why not? Just what is so fucking sacred about money, that everybody's scared to talk about it?"

The tip of her tongue peeks from between her worried lips. "With money you get into legal things."

Judy is still with them and has been listening: her clear young eyes with their bluish whites, her reddish-blonde eyebrows with their little cowlick, her little face pale as a clock's face and as precise pluck at Harry's anger, undermine his necessary indignation. Retching noises from behind the bathroom door now frighten her. Harry explains, "It'll make your daddy feel better. He's getting rid of poison." But the thought of Nelson being sick upsets him too, and those bands of constriction around his chest, the playful malevolent singeing deep within, reassert their threat. He fishes in his pants pocket for the precious brown vial. Thank God he remembered to bring it. He unscrews the top and shakes out a small white Nitrostat and places it, as debonairly as he used to light a cigarette, beneath his tongue.

Judy smiles upward. "Those pills fix that bad heart I gave you."

"You didn't give me my bad heart, honey, I wish you'd get that out of your mind." He is bothered by Janice's remark about money and legal things and the implication that they are getting in over their heads. ANGSTROM, SON INCARCERATED. Joint Scam Sinks Family Concern. The lights in the neighbor's upstairs windows have gone off and that relieves some pressure. He could feel Ma Springer turning in her grave at the possibility that her old house has become a bother to the neighborhood. Nelson comes out of the bathroom looking shaken, wide-eyed. The poor kid has seen some terrible things in his day: Jill's body carried from the burned-out house in a rubber bag, his mother hugging the little dead body of his baby sister. You can't really blame him for anything. He has washed his face and combed his hair so his pallor has this gleam. He lets a shudder run from his head down into his body, like a dog shaking itself dry after running in a ditch.

For all his merciful thoughts Harry goes back on the attack. "Yeah," he says, even as the kid is closing the bathroom door, "and another new development over there I wasn't crazy about is this fat Italian you've hired. What are you letting the Mafia into the lot for?"

"Dad, you are incredibly prejudiced."

"I don't have prejudices, just facts. The Mafia is a fact. It's being scared out of the drug trade, too violent, and is getting into more and more legitimate businesses. It was all on 60 Minutes."

"Mom, get him off me."

Janice gets up her courage and says, "Nelson, your father's right. You need some help."

"I'm fine," he whines. "I need some sleep, is what I need. You have any idea what time it is? – it's after three. Judy, you should go back to bed."

"I'm too wired," the child says, smiling, showing her perfect oval teeth.

Harry asks her, "Where'd you learn that word?"

"I'm too jazzed," she says. "Kids at school say that."

Harry asks Nelson, "And who're these guys keep calling our house at all hours asking for money?"

"They think I owe them money," Nelson answers. "Maybe I do. It's temporary, Dad. It'll all work out. Come, Judy. I'll put you to bed."

"Not so fast," Harry says. "How much do you owe, and how're you going to pay 'em?"

"Like I said, I'll work it out. They shouldn't be calling your number, but they're crude guys. They don't understand term financing. Go back to Florida if you don't like your phone ringing. Change your number, that's what I did."

"Nelson, when will it end?" Janice asks, tears making her voice crack, just from looking at him. In his white shirt with his electric movements Nelson has the frailty and doomed alertness of a cornered animal. "You must get off this stuff"

"I am, Mom. I am off. Starting_tonight."

"Ha," Harry says.

Nelson insists to her, "I can handle it. I'm no addict. I'm a recreational user."

"Yeah," Harry says, "like Hitler was a recreational killer." It must be the mustache made him think of Hitler. If the kid would just shave it off, and chuck the earring, he maybe could feel some compassion, and they could make a fresh start.

But, then, Harry thinks, how many fresh starts for him are left? This room, where he spent ten years sleeping beside Janice, listening to her snore, smelling her nice little womanly sweat, her unconscious releases of gas, making some great love sometimes, that time with the Krugerrands, and other times disgustedly watching her stumble in tipsy from a night downstairs sipping sherry or Campan, this room with the copper beech outside the window leafing in and changing the light and then losing its leaves and giving the light back and the beech nuts popping like little firecrackers and Ma Springer's television mumbling on and making the bedside lamp vibrate when a certain pitch was reached on the program-ending surge of music, Ma sound asleep and never hearing it, this room soaked in his life, how many more times will he see it? He hadn't expected to see it tonight. Now all at once, as happens at his age, fatigue like an inner overflowing makes him feel soggy, dirty, distracted. Little sparks are going off and on in the corners of his eyes. Avoid aggravation. He'd better sit down. Janice has sat down on the bed, their old bed, and Nelson has pulled up the padded stool patterned with yellow roses Pru must use to perch on in her underwear when she sits putting on makeup at her dresser mirror before going out with him to the LaidBack or some yuppie buddies' party in northeast Brewer. How sorry is he supposed to feel for his son when the kid has a big tall hippy dish like that to boff?

Nelson has changed his tune. He leans toward his mother, his fingers intertwined to still their shaking, his lips tensed to bite back his nausea, his dark eyes full of an overflowing confusion like her own. He is pleadingly, disjointedly, explaining himself. "… the only time I feel human, like other people I guess feel all the time. But when I went after Pru that way tonight it was like a monster or something had taken over my body and I was standing outside watching and felt no connection with myself. Like it was all on television. You're right, I got to ease off. I mean, it's getting so I can't start the day without… a hit… and all day all I think about… That's not human either."

"You poor baby," she says. "I know. I know just what you're saying. It's lack of self-esteem. I had it for years. Remember, Harry, how I used to drink when we were young?"

Trying to pull him into it, make him a parent too. He won't have it, yet. He won't buy in. "When we were young? How about when we were middle-aged, like now even? Hey look, what's this supposed to be, a therapy session? This kid just clobbered his wife and is conning the pants off us and you're letting him!"

Judy, lying diagonally on the bed behind her grandmother, and studying them all with upside-down eyes, joins in, observing, "When Grandpa gets mad his upper lip goes all stiff just like Mommy's does."

Nelson comes out of his fog of self-pity enough to say to her, "Honey, I'm not sure you should be hearing all this."

"Let me put her back to bed," Janice offers, not moving though.

Harry doesn't want to be left alone with Nelson. He says, "No, I'll do it. You two keep talking. Hash it out. I've had my say to this jailbait."

Judy laughs shrilly, her head still upside down on the bed, her reversed eyelids monstrous. "That's a funny word," her mouth says, the teeth all wrong, big on bottom and little on top. " Jailbait.' You mean jailbird.' "

"No, Judy," Harry tells her, taking her hand and trying to pull her upright. "first you're jailbait, then you're a jailbird. When you're in jail, you're a jailbird."

"Where the holy fuck is her mother?" Nelson asks the air in front of his face. "That damn Pru, she's always telling me what a jerk I am, then she's out to lunch half the time herself. Notice how broad in the beam she's getting? That's alcohol. The kids come home from school and find her sound asleep." He says this to Janice, placating her, badmouthing his wife to his mother, then suddenly turns to Harry.

"Dad," he says. "Want to split a beer?"

"You must be crazy."

"It'll help bring us down," the boy wheedles. "It'll help us to sleep."

"I'm fighting sleep; Jesus. It's not me who's wired or whatever you call it. Come on, Judy. Don't give Grandpa a hard time. He hurts all over." The child's hand seems damp and sticky in his, and she makes a game of his pulling her off the bed, resisting to the point that he feels a squeeze in his chest. And when he gets her upright beside the bed, she goes limp and tries to collapse onto the rug. He holds on and resists the impulse to slap her. To Janice he says sharply, "Ten more minutes. You and the kid talk. Don't let him con you. Set up some kind of plan. We got to get some order going in this crazy family."

As he pulls the bedroom door halfway shut, he hears Nelson say, "Mom, how about you? Wouldn't half a beer be good? We have Mick, and Miller's."

Judy's room, wherein Ma Springer used to doze and pretend to watch television, and from whose front windows you can see patches of Joseph Street, deserted like tundra, blanched by the streetlights, through the sticky Norway maples, is crowded with stuffed toys, teddy bears and giraffes and Garfields; but Harry feels they are all old toys, that nobody has brought this child a present for some time. Her childhood is wearing out before she is done with it. She turned nine in January and who noticed? Janice sent her a Dr. Seuss book and a flowered bathing cap from Florida. Judy crawls without hesitation or any more stalling into her bed, under a tattered red puff covered with Peanuts characters. He asks her if she doesn't need to go pee-pee first. She shakes her head and stares up at him from the pillow as if amused by how little he knows about her insides. Slant slices of streetlight enter around the window shades and he asks her if she would like him to draw the curtains. Judy says No, she doesn't like it totally dark. He asks her if the cars going by bother her and she says No, only the big trucks that shake the house sometimes and there's a law that says they shouldn't come this way but the police are too lazy to enforce it. "Or too busy," he points out, always one to defend the authorities. Strange that he should have this instinct, since in his life he hasn't been especially dutiful. Jailbait himself on a couple of occasions. But the authorities these days seem so helpless, so unarmed. He asks Judy if she wants to say a prayer. She says No thanks. She is clutching some stuffed animal that looks shapeless to him, without arms or legs. Monstrous. He asks her about it and she shows him that it is a stuffed toy dolphin, with gray back and white belly. He pats its polyester fur and tucks it back under the covers with her. Her chin rests on the white profile of Snoopy wearing his aviator glasses. Linus clutches his blanket; Pigpen has little stars of dirt around his head; Charlie Brown is on his pitcher's mound, and then is knocked head over heels by a rocketing ball. Sitting on the edge of the bed, wondering if Judy expects a bedtime story, Harry sighs so abjectly, so wearily, that both are surprised, and nervously laugh. She suddenly asks him if everything will be all right.

"How do you mean, honey?"

"With Mommy and Daddy."

"Sure. They love you and Roy, and they love each other."

"They say they don't. They fight."

"A lot of married people fight."

"My friends' parents don't."

"I bet they do, but you don't see it. They're being good because you're in the house."

"When people fight a lot, they get divorced."

"Yes, that happens. But only after a lot of fighting. Has your daddy ever hit your mommy before, like tonight?"

"Sometimes she hits him. She says he's wasting all our money."

Harry has no ready answer to that. "It'll work out," he says, just as Nelson has. "Things work out, usually. It doesn't always seem that way, but they usually do."

"Like you that time you fell on the sand and couldn't get up."

"Wasn't that a funny way to act? Yes, and see, here I am, as good as new. It worked out."

Her face broadens in the dark; she is smiling. Her hair is spread in dark rays across the glowing pillow. "You were so funny in the water. I teased you."

"You teased me how?"

"By hiding under the sail."

He casts his weary mind back and tells her, "You weren't teasing, honey. You were all blue and gaspy when I got you out. I saved your life. Then you saved mine."

She says nothing. The dark pits of her eyes absorb his version, his adult memory. He leans down and kisses her warm dry forehead. "Don't you worry about anything, Judy. Grandma and I will take good care of your daddy and all of you."

"I know," she says after a pause, letting go. We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.

Emerging opposite to the closed door of the old sewing room, where Melame used to sleep, Rabbit sneaks down the hall past the half-closed door to the master bedroom – he can hear Janice and Nelson talking, their voices braided into one – and to the room beyond, a back room with a view of the back yard and the little fenced garden he used to tend. This was Nelson's room in the distant days when he went to high school and wore long hair and a headband like an Indian and tried to learn the guitar that had been Jill's and spent a small fortune on his collection of rock LPs, records all obsolete now, everything is tapes, and tapes are becoming obsolete, everything will be CDs. This room is now little Roy's. Its door is ajar; with three fingertips on its cool white wood Harry pushes it open. Light enters it not as sharp slices from the proximate streetlights above Joseph Street but more mistily, from the lights of the town diffused and scattered, a yellow star-swallowing glow arising foglike from the silhouettes of maples and gables and telephone poles. By this dim light he sees Pru's long body pathetically asleep across Roy's little bed. One foot has kicked off its fake-furry slipper and sticks out bare from its nightie, so filmy it clings to the shape of her bent full-thighed leg, her short quilted robe ruched up to her waist, rumpled in folds whose valleys seem bottomless in the faint light. One long white hand of hers rests extended on the rumpled covers, the other is curled in a loose fist and fitted into the hollow between her lips and chin; the bruise on her cheekbone shows like a leech attached there and her hair, its carrot-color black in the dark, is disarrayed. Her breath moves in and out with a shallow exhausted rasp. He inhales through his nose, to smell her. Perfumy traces float in her injured aura.

As he bends over for this inspection, Rabbit is startled by the twin hard gleam of open eyes: Roy is awake. Cuddled on his bed by his mother, sung a song that has put the singer to sleep, the strange staring child reaches up through the darkness to seize the loose skin of his grandfather's looming face and to twist it, his small sharp fingernails digging in so that Harry has to fight crying out. He pulls this fierce little crab of a hand away from his cheek, disembeds it finger by finger, and with a vengeful pinch settles it back onto Roy's chest. In his animal hurt Harry has hissed aloud; seeing Pru stir as if to awake, her hand making an agitated motion toward her tangled hair, he backs rapidly from the room.

Janice and Nelson are in the bright hall looking for him. With their thinning hair and muddled scowling expressions they seem siblings. He tells them in a whisper, "Pru fell asleep on Roy's bed."

Nelson says, "That poor bitch. She'd be O.K. if she'd just get off my case."

Janice tells Harry, "Nelson says he feels much more like himself now and we should go home to bed."

Their voices seem loud, after the foglit silence of Roy's room, and he pointedly keeps his own low. "What have you two settled? I don't want this to happen again."

In Nelson's old room, Roy has begun to cry. He should cry; it's Harry's cheek that hurts.

"It won't, Harry," Janice says. "Nelson has promised to see a counsellor."

He looks at his son to see what this means. The boy visibly suppresses a smile of collusion, over the necessity ofplacating women. Harry tells Janice, "I said, Don't let him con ya."

Her forehead, which her bangs do not cover, creases in impatience. "Harry, it's time to go." She is, as Lyle informed him, the boss.

On the drive back, he vents his indignation. "What did he say? What about the money?" Route 422 shudders with tall trucks, transcontinental eighteen-wheelers. They make better time in the dead of the night.

Janice says, "He's running the lot and it would be too unmanning to take it from him. I can't run it and you're going into the hospital for that angio-thing. Plasty."

"Not till the week after next," he says. "We could always put it off."

"I know that's what you'd like but we just can't go on pretending you're fine. It's been nearly four months since New Year's and in Florida they said you should recover enough in three. Dr. Breit told me you're not losing weight and avoiding sodium the way you were told and you could have a recurrence of what happened on the Sunfish any time."

Dr. Breit is his cardiologist at the St. Joseph's Hospital in Brewer – a fresh-faced freckled kid with big glasses in fleshcolored plastic rims. Janice's telling him all this in her mother's matter-of-fact, determined voice carves a dreadful hollowness within him. The sloping park as they cruise through on Cityview Drive seems fragile and papery, the illuminated trees unreal. There is nothing beneath these rocks, these steep lawns and proud row houses, but atoms and nothingness, waiting for him to take his tight-fitting place among them. Dear God, reach down. Pull my bad heart out of me. Thelma said it helped. Janice's mind, far from prayer, is moving on, her voice decided and a bit defiant. "As for the money, Nelson did allow as there has to be some financial restructuring."

"Restructuring! That's what everybody up the creek talks about. South American countries, those Texas S and Ls. Did he really say `restructuring'?"

"Well, it's not a word I would have thought to use. Though I expect when I start with my courses it'll be one of the things they teach."

"Your courses, Jesus," he says. That tank, painted the wrong green, how much longer before nobody remembered why it was there – the ration stamps, the air-raid drills, the screaming eightcolumn headlines every morning, God versus Satan a simple matter of the miles gained each day on the road to Aachen? "What did he say about himself and Pru?"

"He doesn't think she's found another man yet," Janice says. "So we don't think she'll really leave."

"Well, that's nice and hard-boiled ofyou both. But what about her, her own welfare? You saw her battered face tonight. How much more should she take? Face it, the kid is utterly gonzo. Do you see the way he was twitching all the time? And throwing up then? Did you hear him offer me a beer? A beer, for Chrissake, when we should have been the cops really. He's damn lucky the neighbors didn't call 'em."

"He was just trying to be hospitable. It's a great trial to him, Harry, that you're so unsympathetic."

"Unsympathetic! What's to be sympathetic with? He cheats, he snivels, he snorts or whatever, he's a lush besides, over at the lot he hires these gangsters and guys with AIDS -"

"Really, you should hear yourself. I wish I had a tape recorder."

"So do I. Tape me; I'm talking truth. So what's he going to do about the dope?" Even at this hour, going on four, a few men in sneakers and jeans are awake in the park, conferring behind trees, waiting on benches. "Did he promise to give it up?"

"He promised to see a counsellor," Janice says. "He admits he might have a problem. I think that's a good night's work. Pru has all sorts of names and agencies from these Narc-Anon meetings she's been going to."

"Names, agencies, we can't expect society to run our lives for us, to baby us from cradle to grave. That's what the Communists try to do. There comes a point when you got to take responsibility." He fingers his pants pocket to make sure the little hard cylindrical bottle is there. He won't take a pill now, but save it for when they get home. With a small glass of milk in the kitchen. And a Nutter-Butter cookie to dip into the milk. Shaped like a big peanut, a Nutter-Butter is delicious dipped into milk, first up to the peanut waist, and then the rest for a second bite.

Janice says, "I wish my parents were still alive to hear you talk about responsibility. My mother thought you were the most irresponsible person she ever met."

This hurts, slightly. He had liked Ma Springer toward the end, and thought she liked him. Hot nights out on the screened porch, pinochle games up in the Poconos. They both found Janice a bit slow.

Out of the park, he heads the slate-gray Celica down Weiser, through the heart of Brewer. The Sunflower Beer Clock says 3:50, above the great deserted city heart. Something cleansing about being awake at this forsaken hour. It's a new world. A living, crouching shadow – a cat, or can it be a raccoon? – stares with eyes like circular reflectors in his headlights, sitting on the cement stairs of a dry fountain there on the edge of the little woods the city planners have created. At the intersection of Weiser and Sixth, Rabbit has to turn right. In the old days you could drive straight to the bridge. The wild kids in high school liked to drive down the trolley tracks, between the islands where passengers would board.

As his silence lengthens, Janice says placatingly, "Weren't those children dear? Harry, you don't want them to live in one of those sad one-parent households."

Rabbit has always been squeamish about things being put into him – dental drills, tongue depressors, little long knives to clean out earwax, suppositories, the doctor's finger when once a year he sizes up your prostate gland. So the idea of a catheter being inserted at the top of his right leg, and being pushed along steered with a little flexible tip like some eyeless worm you find wriggling out of an apple where you just bit, is deeply repugnant to him, though not as much so as being frozen half to death and sawed open and your blood run through some complicated machine while they sew a slippery warm piece of your leg vein to the surface of your trembling poor cowering heart.

In the hospital in Deleon they gave him some articles to try to read and even showed him a little video: the heart sits in a protective sac, the pericardium, which has to be cut open, snipped the video said cheerfully like it was giving a sewing lesson. It showed it happening: cold narrow scalpels attack the shapeless bloody blob as it lies there in your chest like a live thing in a hot puddle, a cauldron of tangled juicy stew, convulsing, shuddering with a periodic sob, trying to dodge the knives, undressed of the sanitary pod God or whoever never meant human hands to touch. Then when the blood has been detoured to the gleaming pumping machine just like those in those horrible old Frankenstein movies with Boris Karloff the heart stops beating. You see it happen: your heart lies there dead in its soupy puddle. You, the natural you, are technically dead. A machine is living for you while the surgeons' hands in their condomlike latex gloves fiddle and slice and knit away. Harry has trouble believing how his life is tied to all this mechanics – that the me that talks inside him all the time scuttles like a waterstriding bug above this pond of body fluids and their slippery conduits. How could the flame of him ever have ignited out of such wet straw?

The angioplasty seemed far less deep a violation than the coronary bypass. It was scheduled for a Friday. Youngish-old Dr. Breit, with his painfully fair skin and his plastic-rimmed glasses too big for his button nose, explained the operation – the procedure, he preferred to call it – in the lulling voice of a nightclub singer who has done the same lyrics so often her mind is free to wander as she sings. The cardiologist's real preference was the bypass, Harry could tell. The angioplasty to Breit was just a sop, kid stuff, until the knives could descend. "The rate of restenosis is thirty per cent in three months' time," he warned Harry, there in his office with the framed color photos of a little pale woman who resembled him as one hamster resembles another and of little children arranged in front of their parents like a small stepladder, all with curly fair hair and squints and those tiny pink noses, "and twenty per cent of PTCA patients wind up having a CABG eventually anyway. Sorry -that's percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty versus coronary artery bypass graft."

"I guessed," Harry said. "Still, let's do the balloon first, and save the knives for later." A lot later, he thinks to himself.

"Fair enough," said Dr. Breit, semi-singingly, his tone clipped and grim and even-tempered and resigned. Like a golfer: you lose this match but you'll play again next week. "You think the way ninety per cent of all heart patients do. They love the idea of the PTCA, and no heart specialist can talk them out of it. It's irrational, but so's the human species. Tell you what, Harold." No one had told him Harry was never called Harold, though that was his legal name. Rabbit let it go; it made him feel a child again. His mother used to call him Hassy. "We'll give you a treat. You can watch the whole procedure on TV. You'll be under local anesthetic, it'll help you pass the time."

"Do I have to?"

Dr. Breit seemed momentarily bothered. For so fair a man, he sweated a great deal, his upper lip always dewy. "We screen off the monitor usually, for the patients we think are too excitable or frail. There's always a slight chance of a coronary occlusion and that wouldn't be too good, to be watching it happen. But you, you're not frail. You're no nervous nelly. I've sized you up as a pretty tough-minded guy, Harold, with a fair amount of intellectual curiosity. Was I wrong?"

It was like a ten-dollar press, when you're already thirty dollars down. You can't refuse. "No," he told the young doctor. "That's me all right."

Dr. Breit actually does not perform the procedure: it needs a specialist, a burly menacing man with thick brown forearms, Dr. Raymond. But Breit is there, his face peeping like a moon – big specs glinting, upper lip dewy with nervous perspiration – over the mountainous lime-green shoulders of Dr. Raymond and the surgical caps of the nurses. The operation takes two attending nurses; this is no little "procedure"; Harry's been sandbagged. And it takes two rooms of the hospital, the room where it happens and a monitoring room with several TV screens that translate him into jerking bright lines, vital signs: the Rabbit Angstrom Show, with a fluctuating audience as the circulating nurse and Dr. Breit and some others never named to him, lime-green extras, come and watch a while and leave again. There is even, he has been casually told, a surgical team standing by just in case he needs immediate bypass surgery.

Another double-cross: they shave him, down beside his privates, without warning, where the catheter will go in. They give him a pill to make him light in the head and then when he's helpless on the operating table under all these lights they scrape away at the right half of his groin area and pubic bush; he's never had much body hair and wonders if at his age it will ever grow back. The needle that comes next feels bigger and meaner than the Novocain needle the dentist uses; its "pinch" – Dr. Raymond murmurs, "Now you'll feel a pinch" – doesn't let go as quickly. But then there's no pain, just an agony of mounting urinary pressure as the dyes build up in his system, injected repeatedly with a hot surge like his chest is being cooked in a microwave. Jesus. He closes his eyes a few times to pray but it feels like a wrong occasion, there is too much crowding in, of the actual material world. No old wispy Biblical God would dare interfere. The one religious consolation he clings to through his three-and-a-half-hour ordeal is a belief that Dr. Raymond, with his desert tan and long melancholy nose and bearish pack of fat across his shoulders, is Jewish: Harry has this gentile prejudice that Jews do everything a little better than other people, something about all those generations crouched over the Torah and watch-repair tables, they aren't as distracted as other persuasions, they don't expect to have as much fun. They stay off booze and dope and have a weakness only (if that history of Hollywood he once read can be trusted) for broads.

The doctors and their satellites murmurously crouch over Harry's sheeted, strategically exposed body, under a sharp light, in a room whose tiles are the color of Russian salad dressing, on the fourth floor of St. Joseph's Hospital, where decades ago his two children were born – Nelson, who lived, and Rebecca, who died. In those years nuns ran the place, with their black and white and cupcake frills around their pasty faces, but now nuns have blended into everybody else or else faded away. Vocations drying up, nobody wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun. No more nuns, no more rabbis. No more good people, waiting to have their fun in the afterlife. The thing about the afterlife, it kept this life within bounds somehow, like the Russians. Now there's just Japan, and technology, and the profit motive, and getting all you can while you can.

Turning his head to the left, Rabbit can see, over the shoulders that crowd around his body like green cotton tummocks, the shadow of his heart on an X-ray monitor screen, a twitching palegray ghost dimly webbed by its chambered structure and darkened in snaky streaks and bulbous oblongs by injections of the opacifying dye. The thin wire tip of the catheter, inquisitive in obedience to Dr. Raymond's finger on the trigger, noses forward and then slowly eels, in little cautious jerking stabs, diagonally down into a milky speckled passageway, a river or tentacle within him, organic and tentative in shape where the catheter is black and positive, hard-edged as a gun. Harry watches to see if his heart will gag and try to disgorge the intruder. Like a finger down his throat, he thinks, feeling a wave of nausea and yet a test pilot's detachment from this picture on the screen, blanched and hard to read like a. section of aerial map, and these conferring voices around him. "We're home," Dr. Breit murmurs, as if not to awaken something. "That's your LAD, your left anterior descending. The widow-maker, they call it. By far the most common site oflesions. See how stenotic those walls are? How thickened with plaque? Those little agglutinated specks – that's plaque. I'd say your luminal narrowing is close to eighty-five per cent."

"Rice Krispies," Harry tries to say, but his mouth is too dry, his voice cracks. All he wanted was to acknowledge that yes, he sees it all, he sees his tangled shadowy self laid out like a diagram, he sees the offending plaque, like X-rayed Rice Krispies. He nods a little, feeling even more gingerly than when getting a haircut or having his prostate explored. Too vigorous a nod, and his heart might start to gag. He wonders, is this what having a baby is like, having Dr. Raymond inside you? How do women stand it, for nine months? Not to mention being screwed in the first place? Can they really like it? Or queers being buggered? It's something you never see really discussed, even on Oprah.

"Now comes the tricky part," Dr. Breit breathes, like a golf commentator into the mike as a crucial putt is addressed. Harry feels and then sees on the monitor his heart beat faster, twist as if to escape, twist in that convulsive spiral motion Dr. Olman in Florida demonstrated with his fist; the shadowy fist is angry, again and again, seventy times a minute; the anger is his life, his soul, mind over matter, electricity over muscle. The mechanically precise dark ghost of the catheter is the worm of death within him. Godless technology is fucking the pulsing wet tubes we inherited from the squid, the boneless sea-cunts. He feels again that feathery touch of nausea. Can he possibly throw up? It would jar and jam the works, disrupt the concentrating green tummocks he is buried beneath. He mustn't. He must be still.

He sees, on the monitor, behind the inquisitive tip, a segment of the worm thicken and swell, pressing the pallid Rice Krispies together against the outlines of the filmy crimped river descending down his heart, and stay inflated, pressing, filling; it has been explained to him that if the LAD has not developed any collateral arteries the blood flow will cease and another heart attack begin, right on camera. You are there.

"Thirty seconds," Dr. Breit breathes, and Dr. Raymond deflates the balloon. "Looking good, Ray." Harry feels no pain beyond the knifelike sweet pressure in his bladder and a soreness in the far back of his throat as if from swallowing all that saltwater out on the Gulf. "Once more, Harold, and we'll call it a day."

"How're ya doing?" Dr. Raymond asks him, in one of those marbles-in-the-mouth voices muscular men sometimes have, Pennsylvanians especially.

"Still here," Harry says, in a brave voice that sounds high in his ears, as if out of a woman's throat.

The tense insufflation repeats, and so do the images on the TV screen, silent like the bumping of molecules under the microscope on a nature program, or like computer graphics in an insurance commercial, where fragments flickeringly form the logo. It seems as remote from his body as the records of his sins that angels are keeping. Were his heart to stop, it would be mere shadowplay. He sees, when the catheter's bulge subsides a second time, that the Rice Krispies have been pushed to the sides of his LAD. He feels blood flowing more freely into his heart, rich in combustible oxygen; his head in gratitude and ecstasy grows faint.

"Looking good," Dr. Breit says, sounding nervous.

"Whaddya mean?" Dr. Raymond responds – "looking great," like those voices on television that argue about the virtues of Miller Lite.

The nurse who that evening comes into his room (a private room, $160 more a day, but it's worth it to him; in Florida the guy in the bed next to him finally died, gurgling and moaning all day and then shitting all over himself as a last pronouncement) and takes Harry's temperature and blood pressure and brings his allotment of pills in a little paper cup has a round kind face. She is a bit overweight but it's packed on firm. She looks familiar. She has pale-blue eyes in sockets that make a dent above the cheekbones in the three-quarters view, and her upper lip has that kind of puffy look he likes, like Michelle Pfeiffer. Her hair shows under her nurse's cap as browny-red, many-colored, with even a little gray, though she is young enough to be his daughter.

She lifts the strange plastic rocket-shaped thermometer that gives its reading in red segmented numbers from his mouth and enwraps his left arm with the Velcro-fastened blood-pressure cuff. As she inflates it she asks, "How's the Toyota business?"

"Not bad. The weak dollar doesn't help. My son runs the place now, basically. How'd you know I sold Toyotas?"

"My boyfriend then and I bought a car from you about ten years ago." She lifts those bleached blue eyes mockingly. "Don't you remember?"

"It's you! Yes. Of course. Of course I remember. An orange Corolla." She is his daughter; or at least he imagines she is, though Ruth out of spite would never admit it to him. As the girl stands close to his bed, he reads her badge: ANNABELLE BYER; R.N. She still has her maiden name.

Annabelle frowns, and deflates the blood-pressure cuff, as tight around his arm as a policeman's grip. "Let's try that again in a minute. It shot up while we were talking."

He asks her, "How'd the Corolla work out? How'd the boyfriend work out, for that matter? What the hell was his name? Big red-eared country kid."

"Don't talk, please, until I've got my reading. I'll be quiet. Try to think of something soothing."

He thinks of Ruth's farm, the Byer place, the slope down through the orchard from the line of scrub trees he used to spy behind – the little square stone house, the yellow shells of the abandoned school buses, the dark collie that tried to herd him down there, as though he knew Harry belonged there with the others. Fritzie, that was that dog's name. Sharp teeth, black gums. Oo boy, scary. Calm down. Think of the big sky of Texas, above the hot low barracks at Fort Larson, himself in fresh khaki, with a pass for the evening. Freedom, a soft breeze, a green sunset on the low horizon. Think of playing basketball against Oriole High, that little country gym, the backboards flush against the walls, before all the high schools merged into big colorless regionals and shopping malls began eating up the farmland. Think of sledding with Mim in her furry hood, in Mt. Judge behind the hat factory, on a winter's day so short the streetlights come on an hour before suppertime calls you home.

"That's better," the nurse says. "One forty over ninety-five. Not great, but not bad. In answer to your questions: the car lasted longer than the boyfriend. I traded in the car after eight years; it had a hundred twenty thousand miles on the speedometer. Jamie moved out about a year after we moved into town. He went back to Galilee. Brewer was too tough for him."

"And you? Is it too tough for you?"

"No, I like it. I like the action."

Action like her mother used to get? You were a real hooer? Dusk and May's fully arrived leafiness soften his private room; it is a quiet time on the hospital floor, after dinner and the post-work surge of visitors. Harry dares ask, "You married now? Or live with a guy?"

She smiles, her natural kindness contending a moment with surprise at his curiosity, his presumption, and then smoothing her face into calm again. The dusk seems to be gathering it closer, the pale round glimmer of her face. But her voice discloses a city dryness, a guardedness that might rise up. "No, as a matter of fact I live with my mother. She sold the farm we inherited from my father and moved in with me after Jamie moved out."

"I think I know that farm. I've passed it on the road." Harry's violated, tired heart feels weighted by so much information, as his groin had been weighted down, literally sandbagged, in the hours after the angioplasty. To think of that other world, with all its bushes and seasons and green days and brown, where this child's life had passed without him. "Does Ruth -" he begins, and ends, "What does she do? Your mother."

The girl gives him a look but then answers readily, as if the question passed some test. "She works for one of these investment companies from out of state, money markets and mutual funds and all that, that have branch offices in the new glass building downtown, across from where Kroll's used to be."

"A stenographer," Rabbit remembers. "She could take dictation and type."

The girl actually laughs, in surprise at his groping command of the truth. She is beginning to be pert, to drop her nurse's manner. She has backed off a step from his bed, and her full thighs press against the crisp front of her white uniform so that even standing up she has a lap. Why is Ruth turning this girl into a spinster? She tells him, "She was hired for that but being so much older than the other women they've let her have some more responsibility. She's a kind of junior exec now. Did you know my mother, ever?"

"I'm not sure," he lies.

"You must have, in the days when she was single. She told me she knew quite a few guys before meeting up with my father." She smiles, giving him permission to have known her mother.

"I guess she did," Harry says, sad at the thought. Always he has wanted to be every woman's only man, as he was his mother's only son. "I met her once or twice."

"You should see her," Annabelle goes on pertly. "She's lost a lot of weight and dresses real snappy. I kid her, she has more boyfriends than I do."

Rabbit closes his eyes and tries to picture it, at their age. Come on. Work. Dressing snappy. Once a city girl, always a city girl. Her hair, that first time he saw her, rimmed with red neon like wilt.

The girl he thinks is his daughter goes on, "I'll tell her you're in here, Mr. Angstrom." Though he is trying now to withdraw, into his evening stupor, an awakening affinity between them has stirred her to a certain forwardness. "Maybe she'll remember more than you do."

Outside the sealed hospital windows, in the slowly thickening dusk, sap is rising, and the air even in here feels languid with pollen. Involuntarily Harry's eyes close again. "No," he says, "that's O.K. Don't tell her anything. I doubt if she'd remember anything." He is suddenly tired, too tired for Ruth. Even if this girl is his daughter, it's an old story, going on and on, like a radio nobody's listening to.

They keep him in the hospital for five nights. Janice visits him Saturday. She is very busy on the outside; the classes she has to take to be a real-estate salesman have begun to meet, "The Laws of Real Property and Conveyancing" for three hours one night, and the other, "Procedures of Mortgages and Financing," on another. Also, she has been spending a lot of daytime hours with Pru and the grandchildren, and Charlie Stavros called her up and took her out to lunch.

Rabbit protests, "The bastard, he did? I'm not even dead yet."

"Of course not, darling, and nobody expects you to be. He said it was your idea, from when you had lunch together. Charlie's concerned about us, is all. He thinks I shouldn't just be letting things slide but should get an outside accountant and our lawyer and look at the books over at the lot, just like you wanted."

"You believe it when Charlie tells you, but not when I do."

"Honey, you're my husband, and husbands get wives all confused. Charlie's just an old friend, and he has an outsider's impartiality. Also, he loved my father, and feels protective toward the firm."

Harry has to chuckle, though he doesn't like to laugh now or do anything that might joggle his heart, that delicate web of jumping shadow he saw on the radiograph monitor during his operation. Sometimes, when shows like Cosby or Perfect Strangers or Golden Girls begin to tickle him too much, he switches off the set, rather than stress his heart with a laugh. These shows are all idiotic but not as totally stupid as this new one everybody raves about, Roseanne, starring some fat woman whose only talent as far as he can see is talking fast without moving her mouth. "Janice," he says seriously, "I think the only person who ever loved your father was you. And maybe your mother, at the beginning. Though it's hard to picture."

"Don't be rude to the dead," she tells him, unrufed. She looks plumped up, somehow; without that steady diet of tennis and swimming Valhalla Village provides she is maybe gaining weight. They are still members up at the Flying Eagle, but haven't made it out that way as much as in past springs. They had enjoyed good friendly times up there without realizing they would end. And, with his heart, Harry doesn't quite know how much to get into golf again. Even with a cart, you can be out there on the seventh hole and keel over and by the time they bring you in, through the other foursomes, there's been no oxygen to the brain for ten minutes. Five minutes is all it takes, and you're a vegetable.

"Well, are you going to do it? Call in another accountant."-

"I've done it already" she announces, the proud secret she's been waiting for the conversation to elicit. "Charlie had called up Mildred on his own already and we went over there to this very nice nursing home right near us, she's perfectly sensible and competent, just a little unsteady on her legs, and we went over to the lot and this Lyle who was so mean to you wasn't there but I was able to reach him over the phone at his home number. I said we wanted to look over the accounts since October and he said the accounts were mostly in these computer disks he keeps at his house and he was too sick to see us today, so I said maybe he was too sick to be our accountant then."

"You said that?"

"Yes I did. The first thing they teach you in this class on conveyancing is never to pussy-foot around, you do somebody and a potential sale more harm by not being clear than by speaking right out, even if they might not like hearing it at first. I told him he was fired and he said you can't fire somebody with AIDS, it's discrimination, and I said he should bring in his books and disks tomorrow or a policeman would be out to get them."

"You said all that?" Her eyes are bright and her hair bushes out from her little nut of a face, getting tan again, with a touch of double chin now that she's putting on weight. Harry admires her as you admire children you have raised, whose very success pulls them away, into the world's workings, into distance and estrangement.

"Maybe not as smoothly as I'm saying it to you, but I got it all out. Ask Charlie, he was right there. I don't like what these queers have done to Nelson. They've corrupted him."

"Gay," Harry says wearily. "We call them gay now." He is still trying to keep up with America, as it changes styles and costumes and vocabulary, as it dances ahead ever young, ever younger. "And what did Lyle say then?"

"He said we shall see. He asked whether I'd consulted with Nelson about all this. I said no but I wasn't sure Nelson was fit to consult with these days. I said in my opinion he and his friends were milking Nelson for all he was worth and had turned him into a human wreck and a dope addict and Charlie wrote on a pad of paper for me to see, `Cool it.' Elvira and Benny were out in the showroom all ears even though the office door was closed. Oh, but that fairy got me mad," Janice explains, "he sounded so aboveit-all and bored on the phone, as if dealing with women like me was just more than his poor sensitive body and spirit could bear."

Rabbit is beginning to know how Lyle felt. "He probably was tired," he says in his defense. "That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up."

"Well, he should have kept his penis out of other men's bottoms then," Janice says, lowering her voice though, so the nurses and orderlies in the hall don't hear.

Bottoms. Thelma. That casket of nothingness. Probing the void. "And I don't know," Rabbit wearily pursues, "in a situation like Nelson's, who corrupts who. Maybe 1 corrupted the poor kid, twenty years ago."

"Oh Harry, don't be so hard on yourself. It's depressing to see you like this. You've changed so. What have they done to you, these doctors?"

He's glad she asked. He tells her, "They stuck a long thin thing into me and I could see it on television in my heart. Right on the screen, my own poor heart, while it was pumping to keep me alive. They shouldn't be allowed to go into your heart like that. They should just let people die."

"Darling, what a stupid way to talk. It's modern science, you should be grateful. You're going to be fine. Mim called all worried and I told her how minor it was and gave her your number here."

"Mim." Just the syllable makes him smile. His sister. The one other survivor of that house on Jackson Road, where Mom and Pop set up their friction, their heat, their comedy, their parade of days. At nineteen Mim took her bony good looks and went west, to Las Vegas. One of her gangster pals with a sentimental streak set her up with a beauty parlor when her looks began to go, and now she owns a Laundromat as well as the hairdresser's. Vegas must be a great town for Laundromats. Nobody lives there, everybody is just passing through, leaving a little bit of dirt like on the pale Antron carpets back at 14Y2 Franklin Drive. Harry and Janice visited Mim once, seven or eight years ago. These caves of glowing slot machines, no clocks anywhere, just a perpetual two o'clock in the morning, and you step outside and to your surprise the sun is blazing, and the sidewalks so hot a dog couldn't walk on them. What with Sinatra and Wayne Newton, he expected a lot of glitz, but in fact the gambling addicts were no classier than the types you see pulling at the one-armed bandits down in Atlantic City. Only there was a Western flavor, their voices and faces lined with little tiny cracks. Mim's face and voice had those tiny cracks too, though she had had a face-lift, to tighten up what she called her "wattles." Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.

"Harry." Janice has been telling him something. "What did I just say?"

"I have no idea." Irritably he adds, "Why bother to talk to me when you've got Charlie back advising you, to say the least?"

She flares a little; her lips pinch in and her face comes forward. "Advising me is all he's doing and he's doing that because you asked him to. Because he loves you."

She wouldn't have spoken this way before going to Florida and those women's groups, of "love" as something that is all over the map, like oil drips from speeding automobiles. She is trying to stir him, he dimly recognizes, back into life, into the fray. He tries to play along. "Me?"

"Yes, you, Harry Angstrom."

"Why would he, for Chrissake?"

"I have no idea," Janice says. "I've never understood what men see in each other." She tries a joke. "Maybe he's gone gay in his old age."

"He's never married," Harry admits. "You think he'd be interested in coming back to work for Springer Motors?"

She is gathering up her things – a black leather pocketbook packed like a bomb, the old-fashioned round kind people used to throw and not the flattened Semtex that terrorists smuggle into suitcases in airplanes, and her real-estate textbook and photocopied sample documents stapled together, for her class tonight, and a new spring coat she's got herself, a kind of jonquil-yellow gabardine with a broad belt and wide shoulders. She looks girlish, fluffyhaired, putting it on. "I asked him," she says, "and he says absolutely not. He says he's into these partnerships with his cousins, rental properties in the north end of the city and over toward the old fairgrounds, and a rug-cleaning business his nephew started up with another boy and they needed backers, and Charlie says that's enough for him, he couldn't stand to go back into a salaried job and all that withholding tax and the aggravation of being expected somewhere like at the lot every day. He likes his freedom."

"We all do," sighs Rabbit. "Hey, Janice. I was thinking just the other day we ought to get the wall-to-wall carpets in our house cleaned. No fault of yours, but they're filthy, honey."

Dr. Breit comes in Sunday morning and tells him, "Harold, you're looking A-1. Ray does beautiful work. They say around the OR, `He could tickle a tapeworm under the chin with that catheter."' Breit looks up through his furry eyelashes for the expected laugh, doesn't get it, and perches on the edge of the bed for extra intimacy. "I've been reviewing our own films plus the stuff the jerks down at Deleon Community finally got around to sending us. Your lumen in the LAD has gone up from fifteen per cent of normal to sixty. But I can't say I'm crazy about your RCA, the right coronary artery; it shows I'd put it at about eightyper-cent blockage, which is fine and dandy as long as the welldeveloped collateral is supplying the right ventricle from the circumflex. But a lesion is developing at the bifurcation of the circumflex and the LAD, and a lesion at a bifurcation is tougher to treat with angioplasty. Same thing – I assume you're interested in this – if the lesion is too long, or in a hyperkinetic AV groove, or in a situation where in the middle of the procedure you might get stranded without enough collateral circulation. In those kinds of cases, it can get hairy."

His legs are a little short for sitting on the bed comfortably; he bounces his ham a little closer to Harry's legs, and Harry feels the blood inside his supine body sway. Breit smiles and his voice grows confidential, like when he was murmuring over Dr. Raymond's shoulders. "The fact is, Harold, PTCA is a pretty Mickey Mouse treatment, and what I want you to seriously consider as you lie here these few days, even though as I say this procedure appears to have produced good results for the time being, is, now that you've tested the waters, going ahead with a CABG. Not right away. We're talking four, six months down the road before we go in again. We'd bypass both the RCA and the CFX, and the LAD depending on the restenosis, and you'll be a new man, with damn close to a brand-new heart. While we're in there we might want to look at that leaky aortic valve and think about a pacemaker. Frankly, we may have had a little postoperative MI; your electrocardiogram shows some new Q waves and there's been an elevation of the CPK isoenzyme, with positive MB bands."

"You mean," Harry says, not totally snowed, "I've been having a heart attack just lying here?"

Dr. Breit shrugs daintily. All his gestures have a daintiness that goes with his milky-pink skin. His voice is a bit squeaky, piped through his blistered-looking lips. He says, "PTCA is an invasive procedure, nobody said it wasn't. A little trauma is to be expected. Your heart shows myocardial scarring from way back. All a heart attack is is some heart muscle dying. A little can die without your noticing. It happens to all of us, just as everybody over a certain age has some emphysema. It's called the aging process and there's no escaping it. Not in this life."

Harry wonders about the next life, but decides not to ask. He doubts that Breit knows more than The National Enquirer. "You're telling me I've come into this hospital for I don't know how many thousands of dollars for a Mickey Mouse operation?"

"Rome wasn't built in a day, Harold, and your heart isn't going to be rebuilt in a week. Angioplasty does some good, at least for a while, in about eighty per cent of the cases. But bypass is up to around ninety-nine per cent initial success. Look. It's the difference between scrubbing out your toilet bowl with a long brush and actually replacing the pipes. There are places you can't reach with a brush, and deposits that have become chemically bonded. A man your age, in generally good health, shouldn't be thinking twice about it. You owe it not only to yourself but to your wife and son. And those cunning little grandchildren I've heard about."

The faster Breit talks, the more constricted Harry's chest feels. He gets out, "Let me see if I understand it. They rip veins out of your legs and sew them to your heart like jug handles?"

A frown clouds the young doctor's face. He is overrunning the allotted time for his visit, Rabbit supposes. With visible patience he licks his sore-looking lips and explains, "They take a superficial vein from your leg and in some cases the mammary chest artery, because arteries hold up better under arterial pressure than veins. But you don't have to worry about any of that. You're not the surgeon, it's our bailiwick. This operation is done tens of thousands of times in the United States every year – believe me, Harold, it's a piece of cake."

"You'd do it here?"

Breit's eyes behind his flesh-colored glasses are strange furry slits, with puffy pink lids. "The facilities don't exist yet in this physical plant," he admits. "You'd have to go to Philadelphia, I doubt we could slot you into Lancaster, they're booked solid for months."

"Then it can't be such a very little deal, if you need all these facilities." Since childhood, Rabbit has had a prejudice against Philadelphia. Dirtiest city in the world: they live on poisoned water. And Lancaster is worse – Amish farmers, overwork their animals to death, inbred so much half are humpbacks and dwarfs. He saw them in the movie Witness being very quaint, Kelly McGillis wiping her bare tits with a sponge and everybody chipping in to build that barn, but it didn't fool him. "Maybe Florida would be the place," he offers Dr. Breit. Florida always seems unreal to him when he's up here and having the operation there might be the same as not having it at all.

Dr. Breit's sore-looking mouth gets stern; his upper lip has sweat on it. Why is he selling this so hard? Does he have a monthly quota, like state cops with speeding tickets? "I haven't been that impressed by our dealings with Deleon," he says. "But you think about it, Harold. If I were in your shoes, it's what I'd have done – without any hesitation. You're just toying with your life otherwise."

Yeah, Rabbit thinks when the doctor is gone from the room, but you're not in my shoes. And what's life for but to toy with?

Mim phones. He takes a moment to recognize her voice, it is so dry and twangy, so whisky-and-cigarette-cracked. "What are they doing to you now?" she asks. She has always taken the attitude that he is a lamb among wolves in Diamond County and he should have gotten out like she did.

"They've got me in the hospital," he tells her. He could almost cry, like a boy. "They stuck a balloon up through my leg into my heart and pumped it full of saltwater to open up an artery that was plugged up with old grease I've been eating. Then afterwards they put a sandbag on the incision down at my thigh and told me not to move my leg for six hours or I'd bleed to death. That's how hospitals are; they tell you what they're going to do is about as simple as having a haircut and then midway through they tell you you might bleed to death. And then this morning the doctor comes around and tells me it was a Mickey Mouse operation and hardly worth bothering with. He wants me to go for broke and have a multiple bypass. Mim, they split you right open like a coconut and rip veins out of your legs."

"Yeah, I know," she says. "You gonna do it?"

Rabbit says, "I suppose they'll talk me into it eventually. I mean, they've got you by the balls. You're scared, and what else is there?"

"Guys I know out here have had open-heart and swear by it. I can't see it made that much difference, they still spend all day sitting on their fat asses getting manicures and talking on the phone, but then they weren't such dynamite before either. When you get to our age, Harry, it's work to stay alive."

"Come on, Mim. You're only fifty."

"For a woman out here, that's ancient. That's cow pasture. That's hang-it-up time, if you're a woman. You don't get the stares any more, it's like you've gone invisible."

"Boy, you did use to get the stares," he says proudly. He remembers her when she was nineteen – dyed-in blonde streak, big red cinch-in belt, sexy soft sweaters, skinny arms ending in a clash of bangle bracelets, buck teeth she couldn't help revealing when she smiled, lips smeared with lipstick like she had eaten a jam sandwich, a leggy colt of a girl dying to break out of Brewer, to kick or fuck her way through the fence. She made it, too. Rabbit never could have made it out there. He was too soft. Even Florida bakes the spirit out of him. He needed to stay where they remembered him when. "So when are you coming east?" he asks Mim.

"Well, how bad are you, Harry?"

"Not that bad. I just complain a lot. All I have to do is stay away from animal fats and salt and don't get aggravated."

"Who would aggravate you?"

"The usual," he says. "Nellie's been having some problems. Hey, you'll never guess who's back on the scene squiring Janice around while I'm laid up. Your old boyfriend, Charlie Stavros."

"Chas was not what I'd ever call a boyfriend. I took him on that time to get him off your wife's back. Around here you're not a boyfriend until you at least set the girl up in a condo."

He is striving to keep her interested. People who've made it like she has, they get bored easily. "How the hell is Vegas?" he asks. "Is it hot there yet? How about you coming east to get away from the heat for a couple of weeks? We'll put you up in the guest room above the den and you'll get to know your great-niece and -nephew. Judy's a real little lady now. She's gonna be a looker not like you, but a looker."

"Harry, the last time I came to Pennsylvania I nearly died from the humidity. I don't know how you people do it, day after day; it was like being wrapped in warm washcloths. It's that heavy climate is doing you in. That pollen is off the scale."

"Yeah," he weakly agrees. The phone receiver feels soggy in his hand. His own capacity to be interested isn't what it should be. He's free to wander the halls now, and you see amazing things: less than an hour ago, an amazing visitor, a young Brewer girl, she couldn't have been more than fifteen, all in black, black jacket, tight black pants, pointed black boots, and her hair dyed yellowy white and cut short and mussed every which way so her skull reminded him of a wet Easter chick, plus a little flowery cruciform tattoo pricked right beside her eye. But his heart couldn't quite rise to it, he felt he'd seen even this before, girls doing wicked things to themselves believing their youth would shine through and all would heal.

"Maybe l'll come in the fall if you can last it out," Mim tells him.

"Oh I can last," he says. "You aren't going to get rid of big brother so easy." But the connection feels strained, and he can sense Mim groping, in the little pauses, for what to say next. "Hey, Mim," he says. "Do you remember if Pop complained of chest pains?"

"He had emphysema, Harry. Because he wouldn't stop smoking. You stopped. You were smart. Me, I'm down to a pack a day. But I don't think I ever really inhaled."

"I seem to remember him complaining of feeling full in the chest. He'd sneak his hand inside his shirt and rub his chest."

"Maybe he itched. Harry, Pop died because he couldn't breathe. Mom died because of her Parkinson's. I suppose their hearts failed in the end but so does everybody's, because that's what life is, a strain on the heart."

His little sister has become so dogmatic, everything cut and dried. She's mad at something, too. Just like little Roy. "Hey," he says, not wanting to let go however, "and another thing I was wondering about. Remember how you used to always sing, `Shoo-fly pie and apple pan dowdy?"'

"Yeah. Kind of."

"What's the line that comes after `Makes your eyes light up, your tummy say "howdy" '?"

In the silence he can hear chatter in the background, beautyparlor chatter, and a hair dryer whirring. "I have no fucking idea," she says finally. "Are you sure I used to sing this song?"

"Well, I was, but never mind. How's your life?" he asks. "Any new irons in the fire? When're we going to marry you off?"

"Harry, come off it. The only reason anybody out here'd marry an old bag like me would be as some kind of cover. Or a tax dodge, if the accountant could figure one."

"Speaking of accountants," he begins, and he might have told her all about Nelson and Lyle and Janice, and the voices on the phone, but she doesn't want to hear him; she says hurriedly, in a lowered voice, "Harry, a real special customer has just come in, even you've heard of her, and I got to hang up. You take care of yourself, now. You sound on the mend. Any time they get to be too much for you, you can come on out here for some sun and fun."

What sort of fun, he would have liked to ask – in the old days she was always offering to get a girl for him if he came out alone, though he never did – and he would have liked to have heard more of why she thinks he is on the mend. But Mim has hung up. She has a life to get on with. His arm hurts in its crook from holding the phone. Ever since they invaded his arteries with dyes and balloons, he has aches and pains in remote and random joints, as if his blood is no longer purely his own. Once you break the cap on a ginger-ale bottle, there is never again as much fizz.

The nurse with the round pale face – a country kind of face comes in Monday evening and says to him, "My mother is having to drop something off for me tonight. Should I ask her to come up and see you for a second?"

"Did she say she'd be willing?" When 1 think of you thinking she's your daughter it's like rubbing her all over with shit, Ruth had said the last time they talked.

The young woman in her folded cap smiles. "I mentioned the other night, casual-like, that you were here, and I think she would be. She didn't say anything rude or anything." There is on her face a trace of a blush, a simper, a secret. If something does not soon happen to her, it will become a silly empty face. Innocence is just an early stage of stupidity.

This has not been the best day for Harry. The sounds of traffic and work resuming on the street outside reminded him of how out of it he still is. Janice didn't visit, and now her evening class has begun. All day gray clouds packed the sky, in long rolls of nimbus, and trailed black wisps above the brick chimneys, but no rain has actually fallen. The view from his window consists of several intricately notched bands of ornamental brickwork capping the third stories of narrow buildings that hold at street level a coffee shop, a dry cleaner's, an office-supplies store. The corner building is painted gray, the middle one blue, and the third, with the most ornate window framing, beige. It has slowly dawned upon the people of Brewer that you can paint over brick with any color you choose, not just brick red. People live behind the upper windows across the street, but though Harry faithfully stares he has not yet been rewarded with the sight of a woman undressing, or even of anyone coming to the window to look out. Further depressing him, he has not been able to have a bowel movement since entering St. Joseph's three days ago. The first day, he blamed the awkwardness of the bedpan and his solicitude for the nurses who would have to carry what he produced away, and the second day, the change of diet from what he usually eats – the food the hospital dieticians conjure up looks pretty good but tastes like wet cardboard and chews like chaff, so bland as to shut down his salivary glands – but on the third day, when he can wander the halls and use the bathroom behind a closed door in his room, he blames himself, his decrepitude, his drying up, the running down of his inner processes. Running out of even gas.

It is strange that this girl (hardly that, she would be only three years younger than Nelson) should offer to bring him her mother, for last night he dreamed about Ruth. As the world around him goes gray, his dreams have taken on intense color. Ruth – Ruth as she had been, the spring they lived and slept together, both of them twenty-six, she fleshy, cocky, pretty in a coarse heavy careless way – was wearing a sea-blue dress, with small white polka dots, and he was pressing his body against it, with her body inside it, and telling her how lovely a color it was on her, while the hair on her head glistened red, brown, and gold, close to his eyes. Ruth had turned her head not, he felt, in aversion from him but in natural embarrassment at the situation, for she seemed to be living with him and Janice, all together, and Janice was somewhere near them -upstairs, though the furniture around them was sunstruck floral-patterned wicker, as from their Florida condo, which has no upstairs. His embrace of Ruth felt semi-permitted, like an embrace of a legal relation, and his praise of her vivid dress was meant to urge her into his own sense of well-being, of their love being at last all right. He hid his face beside her throat, in the curtain of her many-colored hair, and knew he could fuck her forever, on and on, bottomlessly spilling himself into her solid beauty. When he awoke it was with the kind of absolute hard-on he almost never has while awake, what with the anti-hypertensive medicine and his generally gray mood. He saw while the dream still freshly clung to him in sky-blue shreds that the white polka dots were the confettilike bits of blossom that littered the sidewalk a month ago on that street of Bradford pear trees up near Summer, where he had once lived with Ruth, and that the splashy sunlight was what used to pour in on Ma Springer's iron table of ferns and African violets, in the little sunroom across the foyer from the gloomy living room. For though the furniture of the dream was Florida, the house they were all sharing had certainly been the old Springer manse.

Harry asks the round-faced nurse, "How much do you know about me and your mother?"

The blush deepens a shade. "Oh, nothing. She never lets on about the time before she settled down with my father." It now sounds rather conventional, Ruth's time as a single woman; but at the time she was beyond the pale, a lost soul scandalous to the narrow world of Mt. Judge. "I figure you were a special friend."

"Maybe not that special," Harry tells her.

He feels bad, because there is nothing much she can say to that, his lie, just stand there polite with her puffy upper lip, a nurse being patient with a patient. He is leaving her out on a limb. He loves her; love flows through him like a blind outpouring, an anesthesia. He tells his possible daughter, "Look, it's a cute idea, but if she came up it would be because you asked her to rather than she wanted to on her own, and, frankly, Annabelle" – he has never called her by her name before – "I'd just as soon she didn't see me like this. You say she's lost weight and looks snappy. I'm fat and a medical mess. Maybe she'd be too much for me."

The girl's face returns to being pale and prim. Boundaries have been restored, just as he's getting to feel paternal. "Very well," Annabelle says. "I'll tell her you've been released, if she asks."

"Might she ask? Wait. Don't get prissy. Tell me, why did you want to get us together?"

"You seem so interested in her. Your face comes to life when I mention her."

"It does? Maybe it's looking at you that does it." He dares go on, "I've been wondering, though, if you should still be living with her. Maybe you ought to get out from under her wing."

"I did, for a while. I didn't like it. Living alone is tough. Men can get nasty."

"Can we really? I'm sorry to hear it."

Her face softens into a dear smile, that curls her upper lip at the edges and buckles the plump part in the middle. "Anyway, she says just what you say. But I like it, for now. It's not like she's my mother any more, she's a roommate. Believe me, bad things can happen to women who live alone in this city. Brewer isn't New York but it isn't Penn Park, either."

Of course. She can read his address right off the chart at the foot of the bed. To her he is one of those Penn Park snobs he himself has always resented. "Brewer's a rugged town," he agrees, sinking back into his pillow. "Always was. Coal and steel. Bars and cathouses all along the railroad tracks right through the middle of the city, when I was young." He glances away, at the ornamental brickwork, the hurrying dry dark clouds. He tells his nurse, "You know best how to live your own life. Tell your mother, if she asks, that maybe we'll meet some other time." Under the pear trees, in Paradise.

Lying there these days, Harry thinks fondly of those dead bricklayers who bothered to vary their rows at the top of the three buildings across the street with such festive patterns of recess and protrusion, diagonal and upright, casting shadows in different ways at different times of the day, these men of another century up on their scaffold, talking Pennsylvania Dutch among themselves, or were Italians doing all the masonry even then? Lying here thinking of all the bricks that have been piled up and knocked down and piled up again on the snug square streets that lift toward Mt. Judge, he tries to view his life as a brick of sorts, set in place with a slap in 1933 and hardening ever since, just one life in rows and walls and blocks of lives. There is a satisfaction in such an overview, a faint far-off communal thrill, but hard to sustain over against his original and continuing impression that Brewer and all the world beyond are just frills on himself, like the lace around a plump satin valentine, himself the heart of the universe, like the Dalai Lama, who in the news lately – Tibet is still restless, after nearly forty years of Chinese rule – was reported to have offered to resign. But the offer was greeted with horror by his followers, for whom the Dalai Lama can no more resign godhood than Harry can resign selfhood.

He watches a fair amount of television. It's right there, in front of his face; its wires come out of the wall behind him, just like oxygen. He finds that facts, not fantasies, are what he wants: the old movies on cable AMC seem stiff and barky in their harshly lit black and white, and the old TV shows on NIK impossibly tinny with their laugh tracks and spray-set Fifties hairdos, and even the incessant sports (rugby from Ireland, curling from Canada) a waste of his time, stories told people with time to kill, where he has time left only for truth, the truth of DSC or Channel 12, MacNeilLehrer so gravely bouncing the news between New York and Washington and reptiles on Smithsonian World flickering their forked tongues in the desert blaze or the giant turtles of Galápagos on World of Survival battling for their lives or the Russians battling the Nazis in the jumpy film clips of World War II as narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier ("Twenty million dead," he intones at the end, as the frame freezes and goes into computer-blur and the marrow-chilling theme music comes up, thrilling Harry to think he was there, on the opposite side of the Northern Hemisphere, jumping on tin cans and balling up tin foil for his anti-Hitler bit, a ten-year-old participant in actual history) and War and Peace in the Nuclear Age and Nature's Way and Portraits of Power and Wonders of the World and Wildlife Chronicles and Living Body and Planet Earth and struggle and death and cheetahs gnawing wildebeests and tarantulas fencing with scorpions and tiny opossums scrambling for the right nipple under the nature photographer's harsh lights and weaverbirds making the most intricate damn nests just to attract one little choosy female and the incredible cleverness and variety and energy and waste of it all, a kind of crash course he is giving himself in the ways of the world. There is just no end to it, no end of information.

The nightly news has a lot of China on it – Gorbachev visiting, students protesting in Tiananmen Square, but not protesting Gorbachev, in fact they like him, all the world likes him, despite that funny mark on his head shaped like Japan. What the Chinese students seem to want is freedom, they want to be like Americans, but they look like Americans already, in blue jeans and T-shirts. Meanwhile in America itself the news is that not only President George Bush but Mrs. Bush the First Lady take showers with their dog Millie, and if that's all the Chinese want we should be able to give it to them, or something close, though it makes Harry miss Reagan slightly, at least he was dignified, and had that dream distance; the powerful thing about him as President was that you never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything, he was like God that way, you had to do a lot of it yourself. With this new one you know he knows something, but it seems a small something. Rabbit doesn't want to have to picture the President and middle-aged wife taking showers naked with their dog. Reagan and Nancy had their dignity, their computer-blur, even when their bowel polyps and breasts were being snipped off in view of billions.

Janice comes in at six on Tuesday while he is eating his last bland supper – he is being released tomorrow. She is wearing her new coat and a gray skirt and a low-cut magenta blouse almost as vivid as the polka-dot dress Ruth wore in his dream. His wife looks energized, businesslike, her salt-and-pepper hair trimmed and given body by a hairdresser who has eliminated the bangs, gelled them back into a softly bristling mass, parted low on one side. Janice reminds him of those heightened and rapid-talking women on television who give the news. She in fact is brimming with news. Her eyes seem to be wearing contact lenses of an unnatural glitter until he realizes those are tears, prepared for him during the station break.

"Oh Harry," she begins, "it's worse than we thought! Thousands and thousands!"

"Thousands of what?"

"Of dollars Nelson stole! Charlie and I and this accountant his nephew knows – Mildred says she was too old for doing an audit and anyway is too busy in the nursing home – went over there today, Charlie said I had to be there, he and the accountant weren't enough, and I asked to see the books, Nelson was there for once, and he looked at me in this heartbreaking hopeless way I'll never forget as long as I live and said, Sure, Mom, what did I want to know? He told us everything. At first, when he needed money so desperately for the, you know, the cocaine, he would just write himself a check marked `Expenses' or `Operating Cash,' but Mildred, she was still around then, questioned him about it and he got scared. Anyway, these little amounts, a hundred or even two at a time, weren't really enough to keep him going, so he got the idea of offering people a discount on the used cars if they paid in cash or with a check written directly out to him."

"I told you there weren't enough used sales on the statements," Harry says, in a triumph that feels rather flat. Ever since they poked that catheter in, there's been something drained about his emotional responses. "How many cars did he pull this stunt with?"

"Well, he doesn't really remember, but Charlie says we can reconstruct it from the records, the NV-is and so on, it will just take time. Of course, Nelson didn't approach every customer with this sort of shady deal, he had to pick and choose, the ones that looked poor enough not to look a gift horse in the face. He was clever about it, Nelson is much more clever than you ever gave him credit for."

"I never said the kid wasn't clever."

"Oh, but Harry" – the shell of tears is refreshed, the brown eyes spill, shiny trails glitter beside her blunt little knob of a nose, a nose with no more character than a drawer pull. She tugs a paper facial tissue from the box the hospital puts on his night table – as she leans forward he glimpses the tops of her tidy breasts through the loose neck of the magenta peasant-style blouse he has never seen before, something she has bought for the real-estate course and these meetings with Charlie and her general stepping-out into the world, without him. He feels a flash of unpleasant heat, as in catheterization. His own wife's tits, surprising him like that. Janice dabbles at her face, her muddled mutt's face, and leans even farther forward, so he feels her breath on his face, smells some faint mint of a Life Saver. To hide the tobacco on her breath. Her tears shine under his eyes; her shaky voice is low so only he can hear. "- he didn't even stop with that. He was doing crack by this time and the amount of money he needed was incredible. He and Lyle worked out this scheme, here it gets very technical -"

"Wait," he tells her. The culinary aide has come in to remove his tray. She is a plump Hispanic woman with long red fingernails and a distinct mustache.

"You no eat enough," she scolds, with her shy smile of pearlsize teeth.

"Enough," he says. "For now. Very good. Bueno."

She has a notebook on which she writes the percentages of the food he has consumed. A third of the overcooked watery string beans, half the pale oval of tasteless veal, scarcely a leaf of the coarse green salad drowned in an orange grease, a bite of the tapioca pudding, whose wobbly texture in his mouth made him shudder. "For breakfast," she reads from her clipboard, "pieces pineapple, cream of wheat, whole-wheat toast, coffee decal"

"I can hardly wait," he tells her.

"Eat more now," she suggests.

He holds firm. "No thanks, too cold now. My wife's here."

She reads from the chart. "Says here last day tomorrow."

"How about that?" Harry asks her. "The big wide world. I'll miss you. And all your healthy eats. Your comestibles."

As she removes his plastic tray, her long red fingernails scrape on its underside with a noise that puts his teeth on edge. He is reminded ofthat platinum-haired bimbo who used to tickle the computer keys at Fiscal Alternatives. Her fingernails were too long too. Dead, Lyle said. If there is an afterlife where the dead all gather, would he get a chance to deepen their acquaintance? But without money around, what would they talk about?

When the woman goes, Janice resumes. The tip of her tongue protrudes a second or two between her lips as she tries to think. "I'm not sure I understand it entirely, but you know how we keep a rolling inventory – so many trucks and vans and cars a month from Mid-Atlantic Toyota in Maryland."

"Between twenty and twenty-five a month is how it's been running," Harry tells her, to let her know he may be flat on his back but knew his business. "We haven't been able to move three hundred new units a year except that one year, '86, after Nelson first took over. The strong yen's been killing us, and Honda and Nissan taking a bigger bite. Ford Ranger put a real dent in our one-ton pickup last year."

"Harry, try to focus. The way it was explained to me is that there's this Toyota Motors Credit Corporation in California that finances our inventory direct with Mid-Atlantic and gets paid when we sell a car and adds to our credit account when we order one for the lot. What Nelson was doing, each month he'd report one or two sales fewer than there actually were and so Toyota would roll over the indebtedness on these cars while he and Lyle put the proceeds in a separate account they'd opened up in the company name, you know how banks now are always offering you all these different accounts, savings and checking with savings and capital accounts with limited checks and so on. So every month we'd owe this TMCC for one or two more cars than were actually on the lot and our debt to them kept getting bigger and our actual inventory was getting smaller; in two or three years if nothing had happened we would have had no new cars in stock at all and owed Mid-Atlantic Toyota a fortune!"

"How much do we actually owe 'em?" His mind can't quite assign weight to these facts, these phantom Toyotas, yet. He is still thinking hospital thoughts -the pineapple he's been promised for breakfast, and whether or not he has taken his digitalis for the evening.

"Nobody knows, Harry. Nelson doesn't exactly remember and Lyle says a lot of the disks he was keeping the accounts on have been accidentally erased."

"Accidentally on purpose, as they used to say," he says. "What a shit. What a pair of shits."

"I know, it's horrible," Janice says, "and Lyle is horrible on the phone. He says he's dying and doesn't care what we do to him! He sounded kind of crazy in the head; isn't that one of the things that happens?" The weight of the facts hits her and bears her suddenly down into hysteria; the tears flow accompanied by sobs and she tries to rest her wet face on his blanketed chest, but she is too short, perched on the chair beside his high bed, and instead presses her eyes and mouth against the hard mattress edge, burbling her disbelief that he would do this to her.

"He" means Nelson; Harry is off the hook for once. In her grief her whole head is hot, even the top of her skull, like a pot come to boil. He comfortingly rubs it, through her little new hairdo, and tries not to smile. Serve them both right, he thinks. Springers. Her dark hair is so fine it sticks to his fingers like cobwebs. For a good five minutes he massages her warm unhappy head with his fingertips while staring at the blank television screen and thinking that he is missing the six-o'clock news, followed by national news at six-thirty. Somehow he can't believe that what Janice is trying to tell him ranks with the national news, for reality. She may be his wife but she's no Connie Chung, let alone Diane Sawyer with her wide-apart blue eyes and melting mouth and stunned look like some beautiful blonde ox. "So what's going to happen?" he asks Janice at last.

She lifts her tear-smeared face and, surprisingly, has some answers. Charlie must have been coaching her. "Well, once we find out how much we owe TMCC we'll have to settle up. We've been paying interest on the inventory so they shouldn't care too much, it's like a mortgage, only Nelson has sold the house without telling them."

"If he faked any signatures, that's forgery," Harry says, and a black dye of despair is beginning to enter his heart, as he sees what a lost cause his son is. Human garbage, like his own father once said of him. He asks, "What's going to happen with the kid?"

Janice blinks her wet lashes. What she has to say seems to her so momentous she withholds it a moment. Her voice has the juicy precision Ma Springer would speak with when she had made up her mind. "He's agreed to enter a rehab place. Immediately."

"Good, I guess. What made him agree?"

"I said it was either that or I'd fire him from the lot. And prosecute."

"Wow. You said that? Prosecute?"

"I did, Harry. I made myself."

"To your own son?"

"I had to. He's been sinking, and he knows it. He was grateful, really. We had it out right there on the lot, out where the weeds are, while Charlie and the accountant stayed inside. Then we made some phone calls, from your old office."

"Where is this rehab place?"

"In North Philadelphia. It's the one his counsellor recommends, if he can get Nelson in. They're all overcrowded, you know. Society can't keep up. There are some day-treatment programs in Brewer but his counsellor says the important thing is to get away from the entire environment the drugs are part of."

"So he really did go to a counsellor, after that blowup with Pru. "

"Yes, to everybody's surprise. And even more surprisingly, Nelson seems to like him. Respect him. It's a black man."

Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in the professionals. "For how long is the rehab?"

"The complete program is ninety days. The first month is detox and intensive therapy, and then he lives in a halfway house for sixty days and gets some kind of a job, a community-service sort of thing probably, just something to get him back out into the normal world."

"He'll be gone all summer. Who'll run the lot?"

Janice puts her hand over his, a gesture that feels to him learned, coached. "You will, Harry."

"Honey, I can't. I'm a sick son of a bitch."

"Charlie says your attitude is terrible. You're giving in to your heart. He says the best thing is a positive spirit and lots of activity."

"Yeah, why doesn't he come back and run the lot if he's so fucking active?"

"He has all these other fish to fry these days."

"Yeah, and you seem to be one of them. I'm hearing you sizzle."

She giggles, along with the ugly tears drying on her face. "Don't be so silly. He's just an old friend, who's been wonderful in this crisis."

"While I've been useless, right?"

"You've been in the hospital, dear. You've been being brave in your way. Anyway as we all know there are things you can't do for me, only I can do them for myself."

He is disposed to argue this, it sounds pious in a new-fashioned way he distrusts, but if he's ever going to get back into the game he must let up and avoid aggravation. He asks, "How did Nelson take your getting tough?"

"Like I said, he liked it. He's just been begging for the rest of us to take over, he knew he was way out of control. Pru is thrilled to think he's going to get help. Judy is thrilled."

"Is Roy thrilled?"

"He's too little to understand, but as you say yourself the atmosphere around that house has been poisonous."

"Did I say poisonous?"

She doesn't bother to answer. She has straightened up and is wiping her face with a licked facial tissue.

"Will I have to see the kid before he goes?"

"No, baby. He's going tomorrow morning, before we bring you home."

"Good. I just don't know as I could face him. When you think of what he's done, he's flushed the whole bunch of us, not just you and me but his kids, everybody, right down the toilet. He's sold us all out to a stupid drug."

"Well, my goodness, Harry – I've known you to act selfishly in your life."

"Yeah, but not for a little white powder."

"They can't help it. It becomes their life. Anyway, evidently they were buying drugs for Lyle, too. I mean drugs for his illness – medicines for AIDS you can't buy yet in this country and are terribly expensive, they have to be smuggled."

"It's a sad story," Rabbit says, after a pause. Inky depression circulates in his veins. He's been in the hospital too long. He's forgotten what life is like. He asks Janice, "Where are you going now, in that snappy blouse?"

She rolls her eyes upward at him, from the mirror of her purse as she fixes her face, and then her face goes wooden and stubborn, bluffing it through. "Charlie said he'd take me out to dinner. He's worried I'm going to crash, psychologically, after all this trauma. I need to process."

"Process?"

"Talk thins through."

"You can talk them through with me. I'm just lying here with nothing to do, I've already missed the sports section of the news."

She makes that mmmm mouth women make after putting on lipstick, rolling her lips together in a complacent serious way, and tells him, "You're not impartial. You have your own agenda with Nelson, and with me for that matter."

"What's so impartial about Charlie, he wants to get into your pants again. If he hasn't already."

She pops the lipstick back into her bomb-shaped pocketbook and touches up her new hairdo with her fingers, glancing from several angles at herself in the mirror, and snaps the lid shut. She says, "That's sweet of you, Harry, to pretend to think I'm still interesting to anybody in that way, but in fact I'm not, except maybe once in a while to my own husband, I hope."

He says, embarrassed, for he knows he's been letting her down in that department lately, "Sure, but you know, for a man, it's all a matter of blood pressure, and -"

"We'll talk about it when you're home. I told Charlie I'd meet him at seven -"

"Where? The salad bar that used to be Johnny Frye's? It's only two blocks from here. You can walk."

"No, actually. There's a new Vietnamese place out near Maiden Springs he wanted to try. It's a bit of a drive and, you know me, I'll probably get lost. And then on top of everything I have fifty pages of a book on British realty law, full of all these funny old obsolete words, I have to read before class tomorrow night."

"You won't be home tomorrow night? My first night home?" He is making a complaint of it, scoring points, but he wishes she'd go and leave him alone with the television screen.

"We'll see," Janice says, rising. "I have an idea." Then she asks, "Aren't you proud of me?" She bends forward to press her hot busy face against his. "Managing everything the way I am?"

"Yeah," he lies. He preferred her incompetent. She leaves with her jonquil-yellow new coat over her arm and he thinks she is gaining weight behind, she has that broad-beamed look women of the county wear when they come into their own.

Harry watches what is left of Tom Brokaw and is settling into a seven-o'clock show on life in Antarctica when, of all people, the Harrisons come visiting. Not just Thelma – she's brought Ron along, or Ron has brought her, since she is thinner and sallower than he has ever seen her, and moves as if every step might break a bone. She smiles regretfully; her eyes apologize for the shape she's in, for Ronnie's being with her, for her being unable to stay away. "We were here in the hospital seeing my doctor," she explains, "and Ron junior had heard you were in."

"For what they call a little procedure," he says, and gestures toward the chair Janice has pulled up to the bed and that's probably still warm from her broad beam. "Ron, there's that big padded chair over in the corner if you want to pull it over; it's on wheels."

"I'll stand," he says. "We can only stay a minute."

He is sullen, but Rabbit didn't ask the Harrisons to come visit and doesn't see why he should be bullied. "Suit yourself." He asks Thelma, "How are you?"

Thelma sighs elaborately. "You know doctors. They never admit they don't have an answer. I'm on home dialysis twice a week, Ronnie's a saint to put up with me. He took a course on how to cope with the machine."

"Ronnie always was a saint," Harry tells her, everybody in the room knowing that Ronnie Harrison was just about his least favorite person in the world, though he had known him from kindergarten. A dirty-mouthed plug-ugly even at the age of five, and now bald as a prick's tip, with wisps above his big droopy ears. Ronnie in high school and afterward had a certain chunkiness, but the approach of old age has pulled the chunks like taffy, leaving hollows in his face and lumps and a painful stringiness around the throat. Harry says, as if she doesn't already know, "Janice is taking courses too, to learn how to sell real estate. I guess so she has a trade in case I pop off."

Thelma's eyelids flutter, a bony hand wearing a wedding ring gestures the possibility away. The sicker she gets, the more driedout and schoolteacherish she looks. That was one of the jokes of her being his mistress, her looking so prim and being so wild in bed, but maybe the real her was the schoolteacher and the other was put on purely for him. "Harry, you're not going to pop off" she tells him urgently, afraid for him. That strange way women have, of really caring about somebody beyond themselves. "They do wonderful things with hearts now, they stitch and mend them just like rag dolls." She manages a thin smile. "Want to see what I have?"

He thinks he knows what she has, all of it, but she unbuttons her sleeve and with that matter-of-fact baring which was her style Thelma shows him the underside of her bared arm. Two purple bruised patches on her slender wrist are connected by a translucent U of some plastic tubing taped flat against the jaundiced skin. "That's called my shunt," she says, pronouncing the last word carefully. "It connects an artery and vein and when I have the dialysis we take it off and connect me to the machine."

"Pretty," seems all he can say. He tells them about his angioplasty, but is already tired of describing it, and trying to convey the creepy business of seeing the dark shadow of the catheter like a snaky forefinger inch ever more intimately into his heart's paler, trembling shades. "My coronary artery could have occluded and I would have gone into CA. Cardiac arrest."

"But you didn't, you jerk," Ronnie says, standing erect and abandoning his shadow on the wall. "The Old Master," he says, a sardonic phrase he used to kid Harry with in their basketball-playing days. Funny, all of his life Harrison has been shadowing Harry with his ugly flesh, a reminder of everything sweaty and effortful in life Rabbit squeamishly hoped to glide over and avoid. "Nobody lays a finger on the Old Master. He makes it all look easy." Ronnie used to resent how Marty Tothero would put him, Ronnie, into the game when the bruisers on the other side were roughing Harry up, to give rough stuff back. An enforcer, they call it now.

"It was never as easy as I made it look," Rabbit tells him. He turns to Thelma, wanting to be tender, since she had braved her husband's anger by bringing him here. She had never balked at humiliating Ronnie to give Harry her gift of love, and indeed, sick as the two lovers are, her nearness does give him that socketed feeling you have with certain women, that graceful feeling you can do no wrong. "How about you, Thel? Your docs think they're licking it?"

"Oh, they never say die, but a body gets tired. You can fight only so long. The pains I can live with, and the weakness all the time, but the kidneys going is really demoralizing. It takes away your pleasure in life if you can't take such things for granted. Harry, you know that part of the Bible they used to read to us in assembly, before the Bible got outlawed, about a time for everything? A time to gather up stones, a time to cast them away? I'm beginning to think there's a time to give up."

"They don't say that," Ronnie says, with an urgency of his own. He loves this woman too, also calls her Thel. It occurs to Harry that two men for a woman and vice versa is about right, just as we need two kinds of days, workdays and holidays, and day and night. Ronnie sounds angry, that she would talk of giving up, but this May evening is slowly melting him into the shadowy wall, so it is beginning to seem that Harry and Thelma are alone together, as in so many stolen afternoons, their hearts beating, the school buses braking outside on the curved street signalling that he must go, and as in that room in the Caribbean, their first time together, when they stayed awake until dawn and then fell asleep as one body as the tropical blue air between the louvers paled and the palm trees ceased their nighttime stirring. Ronnie's disembodied voice says to her angrily, "You have three boys who want to see you grow old."

Thelma smiles slyly at Harry, her face colorless and waxy in the May day fading above the fancy brickwork cornices and chimneys visible through the windows. "Why would they want to see that, Ron?" she asks mischievously, not taking her gaze from Harry's face. "They're grown men. I've done all I can do for them."

Poor Ron has no answer. Maybe he's choked up. Rabbit takes pity and says to him, "How's the insurance business going, Ron?"

"It's levelled out," his voice says gruffly. "Not bad, not good. The S and L mess hurt some companies but not ours. At least people've stopped borrowing against their policies at five per cent and investing at ten the way they were. That was killing our figures."

"One of the nice things about getting to be old geezers like us," Harry says, "is people like you stop trying to sell me insurance." Footsteps and tingling pans sound from the hall, where the lights seem bright suddenly. Night has come.

"Not necessarily," Ron is saying. "I could get you a pretty fair deal on some twenty-payment straight life, if you and Janice are interested. I know a doctor who doesn't look too close. You've survived one coronary, that's in your favor. Let me work up some figures."

Harry ignores him. To Thelma he says, "Your boys are in good shape?"

"We think so. Good enough. Alex has had an offer from a hightech place in Virginia, outside Washington. Georgie thinks he has a spot with a musical-comedy troupe in the Catskills this summer."

"Here's something Janice just told me. She's got Nelson to sign up for a drug rehab."

"That's nice," Thelma says, so softly and sincerely here in the gloom that her voice seems to exist not in the air but already in his blood, inserted intravenously. All the afternoons when their bodies intertwined and exchanged fluids are not gone but safe inside him, his cells remembering.

"You're nice to say so," he says, and dares to grasp her cool hand, the one without the shunt, and move it up from her lap so the back of his own hand brushes a breast.

Ronnie's voice comes forward from the wall. "We gotta go, Thel."

"Ron, thanks for bringing her by."

"Anything for the Old Master. We were in the building."

"Master of nothing at this point."

Ronnie grunts. "Who's to say?" He's not all bad.

Thelma has stiffly stood and, bending by his bed, asks, right out in front of Ronnie, "Darling, can you manage a little kiss?"

He may imagine it, but Thelma's pale cool departing face, swiftly pressed against his, their lips meeting a bit askew, gives off a faint far tang of urine. When he is alone in his room again he remembers how sometimes when he kissed Thelma goodbye at her house her mouth would be flavored by the sour-milk taste of his prick, the cheesy smegma secreted beneath his foreskin. She would be still all soft and blurred by their lovemaking and unaware, and he would try to conceal his revulsion, a revulsion at his own smell on her lips. It was like, another sad thing to remember, the time when Nixon, with Watergate leaking out all around him, during one of the oil crunches went on television to tell us so earnestly to turn our thermostats down, for not only would it save oil but scientific studies showed that colder houses were healthier for us. That big scowling scared face on television, the lips wet and fumbling. Their President, crook or not, going down in disgrace but trying to say what needed to be said; Harry as a loyal American did go and turn his thermostat down.

Janice wakes up early out of nervousness; it is going to be a long and complicated day for her, of seeing Nelson off at nine and picking Harry up at noon and taking a quiz in British property law at seven, in the Brewer extension of Penn State in a renovated disused elementary school on South Pine Street, a section she isn't too easy about parking the car in at night. In Penn Park in midMay the day begins with a kiss of coolness as in Florida; the little limestone house is cozier now that the surrounding trees are fully leafed. She has enjoyed, enough to add to her feelings of guilt, these days of Harry's being in the hospital and her being free to come and go without explanation, and to get into bed as early or late as she pleases, and to watch what television shows she wants to. Wednesday nights, for instance, she likes Unsolved Mysteries, but Harry is always sitting beside her in the study or in bed telling her how ridiculous these so-called mysteries are and how they always derive, if you think about it, from the testimony of people who are either mentally unbalanced or have something to gain financially. The older Harry gets the more cynical he is; he used to be religious in a funny way. They couldn't put the show on television if there weren't some truth to it and that Robert Stack seems ever so sensible. Last night, what with being out with Charlie at that Vietnamese place along the Maiden Springs Pike (it was nice, but she never figured out what she was supposed to do with those bubbly brittle rice things like warped pancakes that were so tasteless you must be supposed to dip them in something), she missed all but the last ten minutes of thirtysomething which she likes to watch Tuesdays because it's so different from how she was when she was thirty-something, all those demands on her, mother wife daughter, and then being Charlie's mistress for a while and feeling so inadequate and guilty and having no female friends really except Peggy Fosnacht who went and slept with Harry anyway and now is dead, terrible to think, all rotten and parchmenty like a mummy in her casket, too hideous for the mind to grasp but it happens anyway, even to people your own age. With Harry gone, she can eat Campbell's chicken noodle soup cold out of the can if she wants, with a few Ritz crackers crushed in, and not have to worry about giving him a good balanced low-fat low-sodium meal that he complains to her is tasteless. Maybe being a widow won't be so very bad is the thought she keeps trying not to think.

Last night it rained hard for an hour, she was kept awake by its drumnning on the air-conditioner, and they say showers this evening again, though the sun is making a kind of tawny fog slanting across the yard through the neighbor's tall trees to where Harry has his little vegetable garden in imitation of the one his parents had in the back yard on Jackson Road, all he grows is lettuce and carrots and kohlrabi, he does love to nibble. She sees with her coffee that Bryant and Willard are getting along better on the Today show after that unfortunate thing with Bryant's private memo being exposed in all the papers, really nothing's private any more, the scandalmongers never rest, always hoping for another Watergate, her father's death was brought on by Watergate she has always felt. The news is mostly about China and Gorbachev, you can never trust Communists not to gang up on you, and Panama where that evil pockmarked Noriega just won't leave, and how Pennsylvania voters yesterday turned down the tax reform that Governor Casey wanted; people thought it would mean a tax increase and if there's anything you can count on Americans to be these last ten years it's selfish.

She tries to pick an outfit suitable for seeing your son off to a drug clinic and then babysitting for Roy all morning while Pru drives Nelson into North Philadelphia, which she's very nervous about, who wouldn't be, they do terrible things now, deliberately rear-end you and then drive off with your car when you get out, there is no such thing any more as a good Philadelphia neighborhood, and for a striking-looking younger woman like Pru is it's worse. Pru hopes to be back by noon so Janice can go pick Harry up at the hospital, by twelve-thirty at the latest the nurse on duty warned, they don't like to give them lunch that last day and the girls coming round to make the beds don't like having somebody in one of them dirtying the sheets and then leaving. It makes her stomach nervous to think of Harry and his heart, men are so fragile it turns out, though that nice young intelligent Dr. Breit seemed delighted with what the balloon did, but Harry's image of himself has changed, he speaks of himself almost as if he's somebody he knew a long time ago, and he seems more of a baby than he ever did, letting her make all the decisions. She doesn't see how she can leave him alone in their house his first night out of the hospital, but she can't miss the quiz either, it really makes more sense with all this coming and going and the children upset about their father's going off to the rehab to shift her base of operations to Mother's house and to wear the smart light wool outfit she bought two years ago at the Wanamaker's out at the mall on the old fairgrounds (didn't they use to get excited in school, getting the day off and all the rides, the one where four of you were in a kind of cylinder and the boy opposite would be above you and then below and the sky every which way and your skirt doing heaven knows what, the smells of sawdust and cotton candy, and the freaks and animals and prizes for tossing little hoops at pegs that were bigger than they looked), a navy-blue-and-white outfit with a kicky blue pleated skirt and off-white satin jersey and blue buttonlessjacket with wide shoulders that always come back from the cleaner's with the padding askew or bent or tom loose, it's a terrible fashion as far as dry cleaning goes. The first time she posed for Harry in that suit he said it made her look like a little policeman – the shoulders and the piping on the pockets, she supposed, gave it the look of a uniform but it would do all day, she thinks, from having not to break down in saying goodbye to Nelson to taking this quiz with all the strange old terms in it, curtilage and messuage and socage and fee simple and fee tail and feoffee and copyhold and customary freehold and mortmain and devises and lex loci rei sitae. The little old elementary-school desks have been uprooted and taken away in favor of one-armed chairs of combination aluminum tubing and orange plastic, but the old blackboards are still there, gray with chalk dust rubbed in over the years, and the high windows you have to have a pole to raise and lower, and those high floating lights like flattened moons, like big hollow flowers upside down on their thin stems. Janice loves being back in class again, trying to follow the teacher and learn new things but also aware of the other students, their breathing and their feet scraping and the silent effort of their minds. The class is women three out of four and most younger than she but not all, to her relief she is not the oldest person in the class and not the dumbest either. The years with their heartbreak and working off and on over at the lot have taught her some things; she wishes her parents were alive to see her, sitting with these twenty-five others studying to get their licenses, the city sounds and Hispanic music and customized Hispanic cars revving their engines on Pine Street beyond the tall windows, sitting there with her notebooks and pencils and yellow highlighter (they didn't have those when she went to high school); but of course if they were alive she wouldn't be doing this, she wouldn't have the mental space. They were wonderful parents but had never trusted her to manage by herself, and her marrying Harry confirmed them in their distrust. She made bad decisions.

The teacher, Mr. Lister, is a doleful tall rumpled man with jowls that make him look like a dog. He gave her a B on the last quiz and likes her, she can tell. The other students, even the younger ones, like her too, and lend her cigarettes in the bathroom break at eightthirty and invite her to come out with them for a beer afterward at ten. She hasn't accepted yet but she might some night when things are more normal with Harry, just to show she's not stuck-up. At least she hasn't let herself go to fat like some of the women her age in the class – shocking, really, to see flesh piled up like that, and not doing anything to reduce, just carrying these hundreds of pounds back and forth and scarcely able to squeeze them into the desks. You wonder how long people can live like that. One of the few natural blessings God handed Janice was a tidy figure and that she has tried to keep, for Harry's sake as well as her own. He does seem prouder of her, the older they get. He looks at her sometimes as if she's just dropped down out of the moon.

Even with hurrying this morning, she gets caught in the slow traffic through the thick of the Brewer rush hour. All these cars, where are they going? By the side of the highway as it heads around the side of the mountain you can see erosion from last night's heavy rain – big twisted ditches of red clay washed away, weeds and all. At Joseph Street she parks and goes up the walk scared of what chaos she'll find, but Nelson is dressed in one of those putty-colored suits he has and Pru in brown slacks and a khaki-colored mannish shirt under a red cardigan sweater with the arms loosely knotted around her shoulders, an outfit to drive in. Both she and Nelson look pale and drawn; you can almost see the agitated psychic energy around their heads, like one of those manifestations Harry scoffs at on Unsolved Mysteries.

In the kitchen, showing Janice the special peanut-butter-and honey sandwich she has made just the way Roy likes it (otherwise he throws everything on the floor, even the TastyKake for dessert), Pru perhaps thinks the older woman notices something wrong in her manner and explains in a hurried low voice, "Nelson had some coke hidden around the house and thought we should use it up before he goes. It was too much even for him, so I did a few lines. I honestly don't know what he sees in it – it burned and I sneezed and then couldn't fall asleep but otherwise felt nothing. Nothing. I said to him, `If this is all it is I don't see any problem in giving it up,' I'd have a harder time giving up Hershey bars."

But just the fact that she is talking so much, confessing so freely, stroking the lank red hair back from her forehead with a caressing gesture of both hands, with trembling fingertips, indicates to Janice that there has been a chemical event. Her son is poisonous. Everything he touches. With all her maternal effort she's brought destruction into the world.

Nelson has stayed in the front room, sitting on the Barcalounger with Roy in his arms, murmuring to the boy and gently blowing to tickle his ear. He looks up at his mother with resentment written all over his face. He says to her, "You know why I'm doing this, don't you?"

"To save your own life," Janice tells him, lifting the child out of his lap. Roy is growing heavier by the day and she puts him down on his own legs. "Time you start making him walk," she explains to Nelson.

"Just like you're making me go to this stupid useless place," Nelson says. "I want that perfectly clear. I'm going because you're making me and not because I admit I have any problem."

A weight of weariness floods her, as if she is at the end and not the beginning of her day. "From what it seems you've done with the money, we all have a problem."

The boy scarcely flinches, but does for an instant lower his eyelids, with their beautiful lashes, a little long for a boy's. She has always found those lashes heartbreaking. "It's just debt," he says. "If Lyle weren't so sick now he'd have explained it to you better. We were just borrowing against future income. It would have all worked out."

Janice thinks of the quiz she must face tonight and of poor Harry with that metal worm they put into his heart and she tells her son, "Darling, you've been stealing, and not just pennies from the change jar. You're an addict. You've been out of your head. You've not been yourself for I don't know how long and that's all any of us want, for you to be yourself again."

His lips, thin like her own, tighten so as to disappear under his mustache, that seems to be growing out, getting droopier. "I'm a recreational user just like you're a social drinker. We need it. We losers need a lift."

"I'm not a loser, Nelson, and I hope you're not." She feels a tightness growing in her but she tries to keep her voice low and level like Charlie would. "We had this same conversation in Florida and you made promises then you didn't keep. Your problem is too much for me, it's too much for your wife, it's too much for your father – much too much for him."

"Dad doesn't give a damn."

"He does. Don't interrupt. And your problem is too much for you. You need to go to this place where they've developed a method, where they're experienced. Your counsellor wants you to go."

"Ike says it's all a con. He says everything's a con."

"That's just his black way of talking. He got you in, he wants you to go."

"Suppose I can't stand it?" She and Harry never sent him off to summer camp, for fear he couldn't stand it.

"You must stand it, or -"

"Yeah, or what, Mom?"

"Or else."

He tries to mock her: "Oh sure. What are you and Charlie and old Harry going to do to me, put me in jail?" It is a real question; in nervousness he loudly sniffs, and then rubs his pink nostrils.

She tries to give him a real answer, saying in the level soft voice, "We wouldn't be the ones doing it. The Toyota Company and the police would be doing it, if they were called in."

He sniffs again, in disbelief. "Why would you call them in? I'll put the money back. I was always going to put it back. You care more about the dumb lot than you care about me."

His tone is trying for a bantering lightness, but her own mood has hardened; outrage has seized her, and self-righteousness. "You stole from me, never mind that. But you stole from your grandfather. You stole from what he had built."

Nelson's guarded eyes widen; his pallor seems a prisoner's in the murky parlor light. "Granpop always wanted me to run the lot. And what about my kids? What about Judy and Roy if you carry through on all these threats?" Roy has whimpered and collapsed to the floor, and is leaning against her ankles, hoping to distract her, hating the sounds of this conversation.

"You should have been thinking of them before now," Janice says stonily. "You've been stealing from them, too." She takes a weary pride in her stoniness; her head is numb but clear, with the product of her own womb pleading and wriggling beneath her. This numbness she feels must be the power her women's group in Florida talks about, the power men have always had.

Nelson tries outrage of his own. "Ah, fuck, Mom. Don't give me all this, all this `How could you do this to your mother and father?' What about what you did to me, all that mess around when Becky died so I never had a sister, and then that time you ran away with your oily Greek and crazy Dad brought Jill and then Skeeter into the house and they tried to make me take dope when I was just a little kid?"

Janice realizes that with all her stoniness and inner hardness she has been crying, her throat feels raw and tears have been flowing stupidly down her face. She wipes at them with the back of her hand and asks shakily, "How much dope did they make you do?"

He squirms, retreats a bit. "I don't know," he says. "They let me take a puff of pot now and then. But they were doing worse stuff and didn't try to hide it from me."

She works with a balled-up Kleenex at drying her face and eyes, thinking what a messy start she is having to this day, in a costume that was supposed to see her through the roles of mother, grandmother, ministering wife, eager student, and prospective working girl. "Your childhood I guess wasn't ideal," she admits, stabbing under her eyes, feeling distracted, ready for her next role, "but then whose is? You shouldn't sit in judgment of your parents. We did the best we could while being people too."

He protests, "Being people too!"

She tells him: "You know, Nelson, when you're little you think your parents are God but now you're old enough to face the fact that they're not. Your father isn't well and I'm trying to make something of what little life I have left and we just can't focus on you and your misbehavior as much as you think we should. You're of an age now to take responsibility for your own life. It's plain to everybody who knows you that your only chance is to stick with this program in Philadelphia. We're all going to try to hold the fort here for three months but when you come back in August you'll be on your own. You won't get any favors at least from me."

He sneers. "I thought mothers were supposed to love their kids no matter what." As if to challenge her physically he pushes up out of his grandfather's Barcalounger and stands close. He is three inches taller than she.

She feels the rawness in her throat and the heat in her eyes beginning again. "If I didn't love you," she says, "I'd let you go on destroying yourself." Her store of words is exhausted; she launches herself toward the white sneering face and embraces the boy, who grudgingly, after a resistant wriggle, responds and hugs her back, patting her shoulder blade with what Harry's mother used to call "those little Springer hands." Now, there, Janice thinks, was a hateful mother, who never said No to her son in all her life.

Nelson is saying in her ear that he'll be fine, everything will be fine, he just got a little overextended.

Pru comes downstairs carrying two big suitcases. "I don't know how often they wear suits," she says, "but I thought they must have a lot of physical therapy so I packed all the shorts and athletic socks I could find. And blue jeans, for when they make you scrub the floors."

"Bye bye Daddy," Roy is saying down among their legs. Since Pru has her hands full, Janice hoists him up, heavy and leggy though he is getting to be, for his father's farewell kiss. The child hangs on to Nelson's ear in parting and she wonders where Roy got this idea of inflicting pain to show affection.

When his parents have gone off in the burgundy-red Celica Supra that Nelson drives, Roy leads his grandmother into the back yard where Harry's old vegetable garden with the little chickenwire fence he could step over has been replaced with a swing-and slide set bought five years ago for Judy and pretty well gone to rust and disuse. Already, though the summer is young, tall weeds flourish around the metal feet of it. Janice thinks she recognizes the ferny tops of carrots and kohlrabi among the plantain and dandelions, the dandelions' yellow flowers now seedy white pompons that fly apart at the swat of the broken hockey stick whose tapedup handle little Roy swings like a samurai sword. The Springers moved to this house when Janice was eight and from the back yard the big house looks naked to her without the copper beech. The sky is full of puffy scudding clouds with those purely-dark centers that can bring rain. The weatherman this morning had called for more, though not as violent as last night's showers. She takes Roy for a little walk over the sidewalk squares of Joseph Street, some of them replaced but here and there a crack she remembers still unmended and two slabs still tilted up by a sycamore root in a way that made a treacherous bump for a girl on roller skates. She tells Roy some of this, and the names of families that used to live in the houses of the neighborhood, but he gets cranky and tired within the block; children now don't seem to have the physical energy, the eagerness to explore, that she remembers, girls as well as boys, her knees always skinned and dirty, her mother always complaining about the state of her clothes. Roy's interest during their walk flickers up only when they come to a string of little soft anthills like coffee grounds between two sidewalk cracks. He kicks them open and then stamps the scurrying armies suddenly pouring out to defend the queen. Such slaughter wearies him, the ants keep coming, and she finally has to pick the lummox up and carry him back to the house, his sneakers drumming sluggishly against her belly and pleated skirt.

One of the cable channels has cartoons all morning. Gangs of outlined superheroes, who move one body part at a time and talk with just their lower lips, do battle in space with cackling villains from other galaxies. Roy falls asleep watching, one of Pru's oatbran low-sugar cookies broken in two wet crumbling halves in his hands. This house where Janice lived so long – the potted violets, the knickknacks, the cracked brown Barcalounger Daddy loved to relax on, to wait with closed eyes for one of his headaches to subside, the dining-room table Mother used to complain was being ruined by the lazy cleaning women who like to spray on Pledge every time and ruin the finish with gummy wax build-up deepens her guilt in regard to Nelson. His pale frightened face seems still to glow in the dark living room: she pulls up the shade, surprising the sleepy wasps crawling on the sill like arthritic old men. Across the street, at what used to be the Schmehlings' house, a pink dogwood has grown higher than the porch roof its shape in bloom drifts sideways like those old photos of atomic bomb-test clouds in the days when we were still scared of the Russians. To think that she could be so cruel to Nelson just because of money. The memory of her hardness with him makes her shake, chilling the something soft still left in the center of her bones, giving her a little physical convulsion of self-disgust such as after you vomit.

Yet no one will share these feelings with her. Not Harry, not Pru. Pru comes back not at noon but after one o'clock. She says traffic was worse than anyone would imagine, miles of the Turnpike reduced to one lane, North Philadelphia enormous, block after block of row houses. And then the rehab place took its own sweet time about signing Nelson in; when she complained, they let her know that they turned down three for every one they admitted. Pru seems a semi-stranger, taller in stature and fiercer in expression than Janice remembered as a mother-in-law. The link between them has been removed.

"How did he seem?" Janice asks her.

"Angry but sane. Full of practical instructions about the lot he wanted me to pass on to his father. He made me write them all down. It's as if he doesn't realize he's not running the show any more."

"I feel so terrible about it all I couldn't eat any lunch. Roy fell asleep in the TV chair and I didn't know if I should wake him or not."

Pru pokes back her hair wearily. "Nelson kept the kids up too late last night, running around kissing them, wanting them to play card games. He gets manicky on the stuff, so he can't let anybody alone. Roy has his play group at one, I better quick take him."

"I'm sorry, I knew he had the play group but didn't know where it was or if Wednesday was one of the days."

"I should have told you, but who would have thought driving to Philadelphia and back would be such a big deal? In Ohio you just zip up to Cleveland and back without any trouble." She doesn't directly blame Janice for missing Roy's play group, but her triangular brow expresses irritation nevertheless.

Janice still seeks absolution from this younger woman, asking, "Do you think I should feel so terrible?"

Pru, whose eyes have been shuttling from detail to detail of what is, after all, as far as use and occupancy go, her house, now for a moment focuses on Janice a look of full cold clarity. "Of course not," she says. "This is the only chance Nelson has. And you're the only one who could make him do it. Thank God you did. You're doing exactly the right thing."

Yet the words are so harshly stated Janice finds herself unreassured. She licks the center of her upper lip, which feels dry. There is a little crack in the center of it that never quite heals. "But I feel so – what's the word? -mercenary. As if I care more about the company than my son."

Pru shrugs. "It's the way things are structured. You have the clout. Me, Harry, the kids – Nelson just laughs at us. To him we're negligible. He's sick, Janice. He's not your son, he's a monster con artist who used to be your son."

And this seems so harsh that Janice starts to cry; but her daughter-in-law, instead of offering to lend comfort, turns and sets about, with her air of irritated efficiency, waking up Roy and putting him in clean corduroy pants for play school.

"I'm late too. We'll be back," Janice says, feeling dismissed. She and Pru have previously agreed that, rather than risk leaving Harry alone in the Penn Park house while she does her three hours at the Penn State extension, she will bring him back here for his first night out of the hospital. As she drives into Brewer she looks forward to seeing him on his feet again, and to sharing with him her guilt over Nelson.

But he disappoints her just as Pru did. His five nights in St. Joseph's have left him self-obsessed and lackadaisical. He seems brittle and puffy, suddenly; his hair, still a dull blond color, has been combed by him in the same comb-ridged pompadour he used to wear coming out of the locker room in high school. His hair has very little gray, but his temples are higher and the skin there, in the hollow at the corner of the eyebrows, has a crinkly dryness. He is like a balloon the air just slowly goes out of over days it wrinkles and sinks to the floor. His russet slacks and blue cotton sports coat look loose on him; the hospital diet has squeezed pounds of water out of his system. Drained of spirit as well, he seems halting and blinky the way her father became in his last five years, closing his eyes in the Barcalounger, waiting for the headache to pass. It feels wrong: in their marriage in the past Harry's vitality always towered over hers – his impulsive needs, his sense of being generally cherished, his casual ability to hurt her, his unspoken threat to leave at any moment. It feels wrong that she is picking him up in her car, when he is dressed and wet-combed like the boy that comes for you on a date. He was sitting meekly in the chair by his bed, with his old gym bag, holding medicine and dirty underwear, between his feet in their big suede Hush Puppies. She took his arm and with cautious steps he moved to the elevator, as the nurses called goodbye. One plump younger one seemed especially sad to see him go, and the Hispanic culinary aide said to Janice with flashing eyes, "Make him eat right!"

She expects Harry to be more grateful; but a man even slightly sick assumes that women will uphold him, and in this direction, men to women, the flow of gratitude is never great. In the car, his first words are insulting: "You have on your policeman's uniform."

"I need to feel presentable for my quiz tonight. I'm afraid I won't be able to concentrate. I can't stop thinking about Nelson."

He has slumped down in the passenger seat, his knees pressed against the dashboard, his head laid back against the headrest in a conceited way. "What's to think?" he asks. "Did he wriggle out of going? I thought he'd run."

"He didn't run at all, that was one of the things that made it so sad. He went off just the way he used to go to school. Harry, I wonder if we're doing the right thing."

Harry's eyes are closed, as if against the battering of sights to see through the car windows – Brewer, its painted brick buildings, its heavy sandstone churches, its mighty courthouse, its new little green-glass skyscraper, and the overgrown park where Weiser Square had once been and which is now the home of drug addicts and the homeless who live in cardboard boxes and keep their clothes in stolen shopping carts. "What else can we do?" he asks indolently. "What does Pru think?"

"Oh, she's for it. It gets him off her hands. I'm sure he's been a handful lately. You can see in her mind she's single already, all independent and brisk and a little rude to me, I thought."

"Don't get touchy. What does Charlie think? How was your Vietnamese dinner last night?"

"I'm not sure I understand Vietnamese food, but it was nice. Short but sweet. I even got home in time to catch the end of thirtysomething. It was the season finale – Gary tried to protect Susannah from a magazine exposé being written by Hope, who found out that Susannah was stealing from the social-service center." All this in case he thinks she slept with Charlie, to show there wasn't time. Poor Harry, he doesn't believe you can grow beyond that.

He groans, still keeping his eyes shut. "Sounds awful. Sounds like life."

"Charlie's real proud of me," she says, "for standing up to Nelson. We had a grim little talk this morning, Nelson and me, where he said I loved the company more than him. I wonder if he isn't right, if we haven't become very materialistic since you first knew me. He seemed so little, Harry, so hurt and defiant, just the way he was the time I went off to live with Charlie. Abandoning a twelve-year-old like that, I'm the one should have been put in jail, what was I thinking of? It's true what he says, who am I to lecture him, to send him off to this dreary place? I was just about the age he is now when I did it, too. So young, really." She is crying again; she wonders ifyou can become addicted to tears like everything else. All the darkness and fumbling and unthinkable shames ofher life feel regurgitated in this unstoppable salty outpour. She can hardly see to drive, and laughs at her own snufing.

Harry's head rolls loosely on the headrest, as if he is basking in an invisible sun. The clouds are crowding out the hazy sky, their dark hearts merging into an overcast. "You were trying something out," Harry tells her. "You were trying to live while you were still alive."

"But I had no right, you had no right either, to do the things we did!"

"For Chrissake, don't bawl. It was the times," he says. "The Sixties. The whole country was flipping out back then. We weren't so bad. We got back together."

"Yes, and sometimes I wonder if that wasn't just more selfindulgence. We haven't made each other happy, Harry."

She wants to face this with him but he smiles as if in his sleep. "You've made me happy," he says. "I'm sorry to hear it didn't work both ways."

"Don't," she says. "Don't just score points. I'm trying to be serious. You know I've always loved you, or wanted to, if you'd let me. Ever since high school, at least ever since Kroll's. That's one of the things Charlie was telling me last night, how crazy about you I've always been." Her face heats; his failure to respond embarrasses her; she hurries on, turning left on Eisenhower. A gap in the clouds makes the hood of the Carnry glare; then it is dipped deeper into cloud shadow. "It really was a pretty restaurant," she says, "the way they've fixed it up and everything, these little Vietnamese women so petite they made me feel like a horse. But they spoke perfect English, with Pennsylvania accents – second generation, can it be? Has it been that long since the war? We should go there sometime."

"I wouldn't dream of intruding. It's your and Charlie's place." He opens his eyes and sits up. "Hey. Where're we going? This is the way to Mt. judge."

She says, "Harry, now don't get mad. You know I have to go to class and take the quiz tonight, and I'd feel too funny leaving you alone for three hours just out of the hospital, so Pru and I worked it out that you and I would sleep in Mother's old bed, which they moved across the hall into the old sewing room when Mother's room became Judy's room. This way you'll have babysitters while I'm off."

"Why can't I go to my own fucking house? I was looking forward to it. I lived in that damn barn of your mother's for ten years and that was enough."

"Just for one night, honey. Please – otherwise I'll be sick with worry and flunk my quiz. There are all those Latin and funny old English words you're expected to know."

"My heart's fine. Better than ever. It's like a sink trap after all the hair and old toothpaste has been cleaned out. I saw the bastards do it. Nothing will happen ifyou leave me alone, I promise."

"That nice Dr. Breit told me before they did it there was a chance of a coronary occlusion."

"That was while they were doing it, with the catheter in. The catheter's out now. It's been out nearly a week. Come on, honey. Take me home."

"Just one night, Harry, please. It's a kindness to everybody. Pru and I thought it would distract the children from their father's not being there."

He sinks back into his seat, giving up. "What about my pajamas? What about my toothbrush?"

"They're there. I brought them over this morning. I tell you, this day. I've really had to plan. Now, after we've got you settled, I must study, absolutely."

"I don't want to be in the same house with Roy," he says, sulking humorously, resigned to what after all is a tiny adventure, a night back in Mt. Judge. "He'll hurt me. Down in Florida he yanked the oxygen tube right out of my nose."

Janice remembers Roy stamping on all those ants but nevertheless says, "I spent the whole morning with him and he couldn't have been sweeter."

Pru and Roy are not there. Janice leads Rabbit upstairs and suggests he lie down. Ma's old bed has been freshly made up; his offwhite pajamas are folded nicely on his pillow. He sees in the murky far comer next to an old wooden-cased Singer sewing machine the dressmaker's dummy, dust-colored, eternally headless and erect. Ma's big bed crowds the room so there are just a few inches of space on one side next to the window and on the other beside the wall with its wainscoting. The sewing room has a wainscoting of vamished beaded boards, set upright and trimmed at chest-level with a strip of molding. The door of a shallow closet in the corner is made of the same boards. When he opens it, the door bumps annoyingly on the bedpost of Ma's old bed, a bedpost turned with a flattened knob at the top like a hard, brownpainted mushroom, and the paint on it has crackled into small rectangles, like a puddle that has dried. He opens the door to hang up his blue coat, among cobwebby crammed old irons and toasters, coverlets folded and preserved in yellowing cellophane moth bags, and a rack of Fred Springer's dead neckties. Harry folds back his shirtsleeves and begins to feel like himself, the idea of spending a day back in Mt. Judge is beginning to amuse him. "Maybe I'll take a little walk."

"Should you?" Janice asks.

"Absolutely. It's the best thing for you, that's what everybody at the hospital says. They had me walking the halls."

"I thought you might want to lie down."

"Later, maybe. You go study. Go on, this quiz ofyours is making me nervous."

He leaves her at the dining-room table with her book and her photocopies and heads up Joseph Street to Potter Avenue, where the ice-plant water used to run down in the gutter. The gutter has been long dry but the cement was permanently tinged green. Rabbit walks away from the center of the borough with its dry cleaners and Turkey Hill Minit Market and Pizza Hut and Sunoco and discount stereo and new video store that used to be a shoe store and aerobics class above what had been a bakery when he was a boy. The smell of warm dough and icing out of its doors would make him drool. He walks uphill to where Potter Avenue meets Wilbur Street; here a green mailbox used to lean on a concrete post and now the bigger boxy kind with the rounded top stands instead, painted blue. A fire hydrant painted red, white, and blue for the Bicentennial in the Seventies has been given a fresh and garish coat of the orange you see on life jackets and joggers' vests and hunters' outfits, as if a fog creeping into our way of life is making everything harder to see. He walks up Wilbur, feeling the steep slope tug at his heart. The street in its lower blocks holds pretentious large houses like the Springers', stucco and brick and slate, fortresslike, with gables and acres of roof, some of them now split up into condos reached by wooden outside stairs that look tacky. Beyond the alley where long ago there used to be a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it, Rabbit's chest has that full feeling, his ribs like bands of pressure, and he pops a Nitrostat under his tongue and waits for the relief and the tingle, while cool cloud shadows slide rapidly across the forested edge of the mountain above him. He had hoped he would need to take fewer pills but maybe it takes time for the operation to sink in.

He continues hiking, alone on the sloping sidewalk, up into the block where he and Janice lived when they were first married. Built all at once in the Thirties, a row of frame semi-detached climbs the hill like a staircase. Like the fire hydrant, they have become brighter, painted in fanciful storybook colors, pale purple and canary yellow, aqua and orange, colors that no respectable Pennsylvania householder would have applied when Harry was young. Life was not only bigger but more solemn then. Colors were bruise and dung, in gritty sidings that rubbed off on your fingers and were tar underneath.

His own house, the seventh in the row, number 447, had tired wooden steps that have been replaced with concrete inset with irregular multicolored pieces of broken tile and covered with a central runner of green outdoor carpeting; the house door into the vestibule has been painted a high-gloss ochre on its panels and maroon on its stiles, so a bold double cross is figured forth, ornamented by a brass knocker in the shape of a fox's head. Camaros and BMWs are parked out front; glass curtains and splashy abstract prints dress the windows. This row, a kind of slum when Harry and Janice and two-year-old Nelson lived here, has been spruced up: festive yuppie money has taken it over. These apartments are fashionable, high above the town as they are. Back then, thirty years ago, from the third floor, the view across the asphalted rooftops to the peaked houses and parked cars lower down just seemed an enlargement of their discontent, their defeat, a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs. There had been, being here makes him remember, those cheap sliding screens at the windows, and a rusty furnace odor in the vestibule, and a plastic clown some kid had left in the dirt under the front-porch steps, now concrete carpeted green like those traffic islands down at Valhalla Village.

This row used to end Wilbur Street; development had stopped at a gravel turnaround, and an abandoned gravel quarry made the transition to the mountain's shaggy back side. Now a double row, not quite new, of shingled condominiums, with strangely exaggerated chimneys and gables like houses in a child's storybook, occupies still higher ground. The windows and doors and trim boards of these condos are tinted in pale and playful colors. The plantings and little lawns are still tenuous; last night's downpour washed from the deforested acres of the mountain reddish mud that has drifted, hardening, all along the fresh curbs and overflowed onto the street's blue-black asphalt. We're using it all up, Harry thinks. The world.

He turns and walks downhill. On Potter Avenue he continues past Joseph and goes into a Turkey Hill Minit Market and to suppress his melancholy buys a ninety-nine-cent bag of Corn Chips. NET WT. 6%4 oz. 177 grams. Manufactured by Keystone Food Prod., Inc., Easton, Pa. 18042 U.S.A. Ingredients: Corn, vegetable oil (contains one or more of the following oils: peanut, cottonseed, corn, partially hydrogenated soybean), salt. Doesn't sound so bad. KEEP ON KRUNCHIN', the crinkly pumpkin-colored bag advises him. He loves the salty ghost of Indian corn and the way each thick flake, an inch or so square, solider than a potato chip and flatter than a Frito and less burny to the tongue than a triangular red-peppered Dorito, sits edgy in his mouth and then shatters and dissolves between his teeth. There are certain things you love putting into your mouth – Nibs, Good amp; Plentys, dry-roasted peanuts, lima beans cooked not too soft – and the rest is more or less disagreeable mush, or meat that gives the teeth too tough a fight and if you think about it almost makes you gag. Ever since childhood, Rabbit has had mixed feelings about eating, especially the creatures that not too long ago were living just like you. Sometimes he imagines he can taste the terror of the ax in the slice of turkey or chicken and the happy snorting and wallowing in pork and the stupid monotony of a cow's life in beef, and in lamb a hint of urine like that whiff from Thelma's face in the hospital. Her dialysis now and their night in that tropical hut, bodily fluids, but there were limits to what bodies can do, and limits of involvement what with Janice and Ron and the kids and fussy living rooms all over Diamond County, and some limitation within him really, a failure or refusal to love any substance but his own. And she too, she did tend afterwards to be curiously severe with him, as though he had become disgusting now that she had eaten, his sour-milk smell tainting her satisfied mouth. His meat having been eaten by her and now she being eaten by all that microscopic chewing from within. Lupus means wolf, she had told him, one of the autoimmune diseases in which the body attacks itself, antibodies attack your own tissue, self-hatred of a sort. Thinking of Thelma, Harry feels helpless and in his helplessness hard-hearted. The Corn Chips as he walks along the pavement begin to accumulate in his gut into a knotted muchness, a little ball of acid, and yet he cannot resist putting just one more into his mouth, to feel its warped salty edges, its virgin crunchiness, on his tongue, between his teeth, among these salivating membranes. By the time he gets back to 89 Joseph behind its wall of sticky leafed-out Norway maples he has consumed the full bag, even the fragments of salt and corn small enough for an ant to carry back to his brown queen bloated in her maze beneath the sidewalk; he has wrapped himself around all 6%a ounces of sheer poison, pure sludge in his arteries, an oily aftertaste in his throat and between his teeth. He hates himself, with a certain relish.

Janice is working at the dining-room table, making lists for herself to memorize. When she looks up, her eyes have a rubbed frowning look and her mouth is open a dark slot. He hates to see it, hates to see her struggling so hard not to be dumb. His long walk has left him so tired he goes upstairs and takes off his slacks to keep the crease and lies down on Ma Springer's bed, on top of the covers but under the Amish quilt, a patchwork quilt that releases to his nostrils a memory of how Ma smelled toward the end, with a musty far odor of fleshly corners gone unwashed.

He finds himself suddenly scared to be out of the hospital whiteness, the antisepsis, the halls of softly clattering concern focused upon him… sick him.

He must have fallen asleep, for when he opens his eyes the day has a different tone through the room's single window: a cooler, shadowed menace. The rain coming closer. The clouds and treetops merging. From the sounds downstairs, Pru and both children are home, and footsteps move about in the hall outside much as years ago he would hear Melanie and Nelson sneak back and forth at night. It is not night, it is late afternoon. The children, home from school, have been instructed to be quiet because Grandpa is sleeping; but they are unable to resist the spurts of squalling and of glee that come over them. Life is noise. Rabbit's stomach hurts, he forgets why.

After they hear him make a trip down the hall to the bathroom, they come and visit him, the poor little semi-orphans. Their four eyes, two green, two brown, feast on him from the bed's edge. Judy's face seems longer and graver than it was in Florida. She will have an Angstrom leanness, a hunted look. Her dress is lilaccolored, with white smocking. Does he imagine a touch of extra redness to her lips? Does Pru allow that? Certainly the child's hair has been given an artificial wave, a carrot-colored crimp. She asks, "Grandpa, did it hurt in the hospital?"

"Not much, Judy. It hurt my feelings, mostly, to be there at all."

"Did they fix that thing inside you?"

"Oh, yes. Don't you worry about that. My doctors says I'm better than ever."

"How come you're in bed, then?"

"Because Grandma was studying for her quiz and I didn't want to bother her."

"She says you're going to sleep over."

"Looks that way, doesn't it? A pajama party. Before you were born, Judy, Grandma and I lived here for years and years, with your great-grandmother Springer. You remember her?"

The child's eyes stare, their green intensified by the maple trees at the window. "A little bit. She had fat legs and wore thick orange stockings."

"That's right." But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?

"I used to hate her stockings," Judy goes on, as if sensing his need for more and trying to meet it.

"Those were Sup-Hose," Harry explains.

"And she wore funny little round glasses she never took off: She'd let me play with the case. It snapped."

Roy, bored to hear all this about a woman he never met, begins to talk. His round face strains upward as if he's trying to swallow something rough, and his arched eyebrows pull his dark shiny eyes painfully open. "Daddy – Daddy won't -" or perhaps he said "went"; he seems unable to wrestle his thoughts into shape and begins again with the strained word "Daddy."

Impatiently Judy gives him a push; he falls against a bedpost, there in the narrow space between the mattress edge and the beaded wainscoting. "Shut up if you can't talk," she tells him. "Daddy's in a rehab place getting better."

The child has hit his head; he stares at his grandfather as if waiting to be told what to do. "Ouch," Harry says for him, and, sitting up against Ma Springer's old brown headboard, opens his arms to the child. Roy dives against his chest and lets himself bawl, about his hurt head. His hair, when Harry rubs it, is stickily fine, like Janice's yesterday, when she cried. Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.

Judy talks right through Roy's aggrieved noise. "Grandpa, want to watch one of my videos with me? I have Dumbo and The Sound of Music and Dirty Dancing."

"I'd love to see Dirty Dancing sometime, I've seen the other two, but shouldn't you be doing your homework before dinner?"

The child smiles. "That's what Daddy always says. He never wants to watch a video with me." She looks at Roy being cradled and pulls at her brother's arm. "Come on, stupid. Don't lean on Grandpa's chest, you'll hurt him."

They go away. A ghostly moment as Judy stood by the bed reminded him of Jill, another of the many dead people he knows. The numbers are growing. Life is like a game they used to play on the elementary-school playground, Fox-in-the-Morning. You all lined up on one side of the asphalt area marked out for games. One person was "it," and that one would call out "Fox in the morning," and you would all run to the other side, and "it" would grab one victim from the running throng and drag him or her into the circle painted on the asphalt, and then there would be two "it"s, and these would capture a few more on the next massed gallop from safety to safety, and these four would become eight, and soon a whole mob would be roving the center; the proportions were reversed. The last person left uncaught became "it" for the next game.

Sparse specks of rain have appeared on the panes. His eyelids feel heavy again; a fog within is rising up to swallow his brain. When you are sleepy an inner world smaller than a seed in sunlight expands and becomes irresistible, breaking the shell of consciousness. It is so strange; there must be some other way of being alive than all this eating and sleeping, this burning and freezing, this sun and moon. Day and night blend into each other but still are nothing the same.

The call to dinner comes from far away, through many thicknesses of lath and plaster and hollow air, and from its sharp tone is being repeated. He can't believe he's been asleep; no time has passed, just a thought or two took a strange elastic shape as it went around a corner. His mouth feels furry. The specks of rain on the window are still few, few enough to be counted. He recalls remembering today the window screens they had in the Wilbur Street apartment, the kind you used to buy in hardware stores before combination storms made them obsolete. They never precisely fit, leaving splinters of light through which the mosquitoes and midges could crawl, but that wasn't the something tragic about them. Tragedy lay in a certain filtered summer breath they admitted, the glint of sun along segments of the mesh, an overlooked fervor in their details – the bent screening, the sliding adjustable frame stamped with the manufacturer's name, the motionless molding of the window itself, like the bricks that all through Brewer loyally hold their pattern though the masons that laid them long ago are dead. Something tragic in matter itself, the way it keeps watch no matter how great our misery. He went back to the apartment that day after Becky died and nothing was changed. The water in the tub, the chops in the skillet. The call to dinner repeats again, closer, in Janice's sharp voice, at the foot of the stairs: "Harry. Dinner."

"Coming, for Chrissake," he says.

Janice called but the meal was cooked by Pru; it is light, delicious, healthful. Baked sole garnished with parsley and chives and flavored with pepper and lemon, asparagus served steaming in a rectangular microwave dish, and in a big wooden bowl a salad including celery and carrot slices and dates and green grapes. The salad bowl and microwave equipment are new since Ma Springer died.

Everybody eats but nobody has much to say except Janice, who chatters on bravely about her quiz, her class, the people in it, some of them women like herself developing midlife careers and others young people that seem much the way we were in the Fifties, running scared, economically, and playing everything safe. She mentions her teacher, Mr. Lister, and Judy laughs out loud at the name, repeating it, the rhyme of it. "Don't laugh, Judy, he has such a sad face," Janice says.

Judy tells some involved story about what a boy at school did today: he accidentally spilled paint for a poster they were making all over the floor and when the teacher bawled him out took the spilled jar and shook it at her so some got on her dress. Meanwhile there is this one black boy in the class, his family has just moved to Mt. Judge from Baltimore, and he was painting his face all over with these designs that have a secret meaning, he said. Her talk is a little like her excited channel-flipping and it occurs to Harry that she is making it up or confusing her own classroom with classroom shows she has seen on television.

Pru asks Harry how he is feeling. He says fine; his breathing does feel freer since the operation – "the procedure, the doctors like to call it" – and his memory for that matter better. He wonders how soft in the head he was getting before without realizing it. Really, he says, apologizing to her for her trouble, thanking her for the good healthy meal that he has managed to get down on top of the fermenting lump of Corn Chips, saying he could perfectly well have been left alone in his own house tonight.

Janice says she knows it is probably foolish but she could never forgive herself if he took a bad turn while she was in class and how could she concentrate on liens and curtilage and lex loci thinking he was back in the house drowning?

The other adults at the table hold their breaths at this slip; Harry gently says, when the silence gets unbearable, "You don't mean drowning," and Janice asks, "Did I say drowning?," knowing now in her ear's recall that she did. Harry sees that she only seems to have forgotten Rebecca, that in her own mind she is always and will always be the woman who drowned her own baby. It was this time of year, late spring, they are approaching the anniversary, in June. Janice rises, flustered, blushing, shamed.

"Who wants coffee besides me?" she asks, all eyes upon her, like an actress who must come up with some line.

"And there's some butter-pecan ice cream for dessert if anybody wants," Pru says, her flat Ohio voice having fallen over the years into the local locutions, that considerate Pennsylvania way of speaking as if to make things clear in a stupefying haze. She has taken off the cardigan and folded back the cuffs of her mannish khaki shirt so that half her downy freckled forearms show, there at the kitchen table, under the faceted-glass light fixture overhead.

"My favorite flavor," Harry says, pitying his wife, wanting to help her out of the brightly lit center of the stage; even little Roy with his inky eyes is staring at Janice, sensing something strange, a curse nobody mentions.

"Harry, that's the worst possible thing for you," Janice says, grateful for this opportunity he has given her for a quarrel, a scene. "Ice cream and nuts both."

Pru says, "I got some frozen yogurt with Harry in mind. Peach and banana I think are the flavors."

"It's not the same," Harry says, clowning to keep the attention of both women. "I want butter-pecan. With something. How about some good old-fashioned apple strudel, with all that sort of wallpaper paste inside? Or some sticky buns? Or shoo-fly pie? Yum: huh, Roy?"

"Oh, Harry, you're going to kill yourself!" Janice cries, excessively, her grief centered elsewhere.

"There's something called ice milk," Pru is saying, and he feels that her heart too is elsewhere, that throughout the meal she has been maneuvering around the covered-up hole of Nelson's absence, which no one has mentioned, not even the wide-eyed children.

"Shoo-fly pie," Roy says, in an oddly deep and mannish voice, and when they explain to him that there isn't really any, that it was just a joke of Grandpa's, he feels he has made a mistake, and in his weariness at learning all day to be more independent he begins to whimper.

"Makes your eyes light up," Rabbit sings to him, "and your tummy say `howdy."'

Pru takes Roy upstairs while Janice serves Judy butter-pecan ice cream and stacks the dishes into the dishwasher. Harry kept his spoon and digs into Judy's dish while Janice's back is turned. He loves that second when the tongue flattens the ice cream against the roof of the mouth and the fragments of pecan emerge like stars at evening. "Oh Grandpa, you shouldn't," Judy says, looking at him with genuine fright, though her lips want to smile.

He touches his own lips with a finger and promises, "Just one spoonful," while going for another.

The child calls for help: "Grandma!"

"He's just teasing," Janice says, but asks him, "Would you like your own dish?"

This gets him up from the table. "I shouldn't have ice cream, that's the worst thing for me," he tells her, and scolds, seeing the jumble of plates she has stacked in the dishwasher, "My God, you have no system – look at all the space you're wasting!"

"You stack it, then," she says, a modern woman, and while he does, fitting the dishes closer together, in harrowlike rows, she gathers together her papers and book and purse from the diningroom table. "Damn," she says, and comes to the kitchen to tell Harry, "All my planning this morning what to wear and I forget to bring a raincoat." The rain has settled in outside, sheathing the house in a loud murmur.

"Maybe Pru could lend you one."

"It would fall off me," she says. But she goes upstairs to where Pru is putting Roy to bed and after a conversation Harry can't hear comes down in a cherry-red waterproof plastic coat, with wide lapels and a belt too long and gleaming zigzags under the light. "Do I look ridiculous?"

"Not exactly," he tells her. It excites him, this transposition: you follow the zigzagging creases up expecting to see red-haired Pru staring back and instead it's Janice's middle-aged face, framed in a splashy bandanna not hers either.

"Also, damn, I'm so mad at myself, I left my lucky pen on the upstairs table back home. And there's no time to drive back for it, in all this rain."

"Maybe you're taking all this too seriously," he says. "What're you trying to prove to the teacher?"

"I'm trying to prove something to myself," she says. "Tell Pru I've left and that I'll be back at ten-thirty, maybe eleven if we decide to go out for beers afterward. You go to bed and rest. You look tired, honey." She gives him in parting a pointed little fingering kiss, grateful for something. Glad to go. All these other male advisers she suddenly has – Charlie, Mr. Lister, the new accountant – seem an invasion as devious as that televised catheter nudging forward into his shadowy webbed heart.

The murmur around the house sounds louder after Janice's footsteps on the porch and the sound of the Camry starting up. She has a panicky way of racing the engine before she puts a car in gear, and usually jumps off like a drag-racer. Janice is wrapped in Pru's cherry raincoat, and he is the man of Pru's house.

On the set in the living room, he and Judy watch the end of ABC news on Channel 6 (that Peter Jennings: here he is telling Americans all about America and he still says "aboot" for "about," he's so Canadian) and then, with Judy punching the remote control, they skip back and forth between jeopardy! and Simon and Simon and the seven-o'clock syndicated reruns of Cosby and Cheers. Pru drifts downstairs, having put Roy down, and into the kitchen to tidy up totally after Janice's half-ass job and then through the dining room checking that all the windows are shut against the rain and into the sun room where she picks a few dead leaves off the plants on Ma Springer's old iron table there. Finally she comes into the living room and sits on the old sofa beside him, while Judy in the Barcalounger channel-surfs. On the Cosby Show rerun, the Huxtables are having one of those child-rearing crises bound to dissolve like a lump of sugar in their warm good humor, their mutual lovingness: Vanessa and her friends get all excited about entering a local dance contest, with lip synching, and get instruction from an old black nightclub pianist and when the time comes to demonstrate for their parents in their living room they bump and grind with a sexuality so startling and premature that Mrs. Huxtable, Claire, in real life the terrific Phylicia Rashad, married to the frog-eyed black sports commentator, restores decency, stopping the record and sending the girls back upstairs, yet with that smile of hers, that wide white slightly lippy black woman's smile, implying that indecency is all right, in its place, its wise time, as in one of those mutually ogling Huxtable snuggles that end many a Cosby Show. Beside him on the sofa Pru is staring at the screen with a jewel, a tear glittering in a comer of the eye toward him. From the Barcalounger Judy snaps the channel to a shot of tropical sky and a huge mottled turtle turning its head slowly while a Godlike voiceover intones, "… determined to defend its breeding grounds."

"Goddamn it, Judy, put it back to the Cosbys right now," Harry says, furious less for himself than for Pru, to whom the show seemed to be a vision of lost possibilities.

Judy, startled just like the girls on the show, does put it back, but by now it's a commercial, and she cries, as the insult sinks in, "I want Daddy back! Everybody else is mean to me!"

She starts to cry, Pru rises to comfort her, Rabbit retreats in disgrace. He circles the house, listening to the rain, marvelling that he once lived here, remembering the dead and the dead versions of the living who lived here with him, finding a half-full jar of dry-roasted cashews on a high kitchen shelf and, on the kitchen television set, a cable rerun of last night's playoff game between the Knicks and the Bulls. He hates the way Michael Jordan's pink tongue rolls around in his mouth as he goes up for a dunk. He has seen Jordan interviewed, he's an intelligent guy, why does he swing his tongue around like an imbecile? The few white players there are on the floor look pathetically naked, their pasty sweat, their fuzzy armpit hair; it seems incredible to Harry that he himself was ever out there in this naked game, though in those days the shorts were a little longer and the tank-top armholes not quite so big. He has finished off the jar of cashews without noticing and suddenly the basketball-Jordan changing direction in midair not once but twice and sinking an awkward fall-back jumper with Ewing's giant hand square in his face -pains him with its rubbery activity, an extreme of bodily motion his nerves but not his muscles can remember. He needs a Nitrostat from the little bottle in the coat jacket in that shallow closet upstairs. The hauntedness of the downstairs is getting to him. He turns off the kitchen light and holds his breath passing Ma Springer's old breakfront in the darkened dining room, where the wallpaper crawls with the streetlight projections of rain running down the windows.

In the upstairs hall, he hears from Ma's old room, now Judy's, the murmur of a television set, and dares tap the door and push in. The little girl has been put into a sleeveless nightie and, holding her stuffed dolphin, sits propped up on two pillows while her mother sits on the bed beside her. The TV set flickering at the foot of the bed picks out pale patches – the whites of Judy's eyes, her bare shoulders, the dolphin's belly, Pru's long forearms laid across the child's flat chest. He clears his throat and says, "Hey, Judy sorry if I got a bit mean down there."

With a hushing impatient hand motion she indicates that her grandfather is forgiven and ought to come in and watch with them. In the blue unsteady light, he picks out a child's straight chair and brings it close to the bed and lowers himself to it; he virtually squats. Raindrops glint on the panes in the light from Joseph Street. He looks at Pru's profile for the glint of a tear but her face is composed. Her nose comes to a sharp point, her lips are clamped together. They are watching Unsolved Mysteries: pale, overweight American faces float into the camera's range, earnestly telling of UFOs seen over sugar-beet fields, above shopping malls, in Navajo reservations, while their homely rooms and furniture, exposed to the glaring lights the cameras require, have the detailed hard weirdness of diatoms seen under a microscope. Harry is struck by how well, really, these small-town sheriffs and trailercamp housewives, and even the drifters and dropouts who just happened to be tripping out on a deserted picnic grounds when the geniuses commanding the UFOs decided to land and sample the terrestrial fauna, speak – a nation of performers, of smoothly talking heads, has sprung up under the lights, everybody rehearsed for their thirty seconds of nationwide attention. During the commercials, Judy skips to other channels, to Jacques Cousteau in a diving suit, to Porky Pig in his big-buttoned blue vest (odd, those old cartoon animals all going around with bare bottoms), to a stringy-haired rock singer mouthing his mike in a lathered-up agony like a female porn star approaching a blow job, to a courtroom scene where the judge's shifty eyes in a second show that he is in on a deal, a hummingbird beating its surprisingly flexible wings in slow motion, Angela Lansbury looking shocked, Greer Garson looking gently out of focus in black and white, and back to Unsolved Mysteries, now about an infant who disappeared from a New York hospital, making Robert Stack, in his mystical raincoat, extra quizzical. Having been rude before, Rabbit holds his tongue. He feels fragile. The flickering images bear down upon him, relentless as heartbeats. With the mystery of the vanished baby still unsolved, he rises and kisses Judy goodnight, his face gliding past the bigger one next to hers. "Love you, Grandpa," the child mechanically says, forgiving or forgetful.

"Lights are off downstairs," he mutters to Pru.

"I need to go down anyway," she says, softly, both of them fearful of breaking the spell that exists between the child and the television set.

Her face, as his face glided past it on the way to kiss another, exuded an aura, shampooey-powdery, just as the trees outside the house are yielding to the rain a leafy fresh tree-smell.

This green wet fragrance is present in his room too, the old sewing room, where the headless dress dummy stands. He changes into the clean pajamas Janice uncharacteristically had the foresight to bring. A blooming cottony weariness has overtaken him, enveloping him like the rain. In the narrow room its sound is more distinct than elsewhere, and complicated, a conversation involving the porch roof, the house gutter, the echoing downspout, the yielding leaves of the maples, the swish of a passing car. Closest to him, periodic spurts of dripping between the storm window and the wooden sash suggest some leakage into the walls and an eventual trouble of rot. Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.

The window is open a little for air and stray droplets prick the skin of his hands as he stands a moment looking out. Mt. Judge doesn't change much, at least here in the older section, but has dropped away beneath his life as if beneath a rising airplane. His life flowed along this shining asphalt, past these tilted lawns and brick-pillared porches, and left no trace. The town never knew him, the way he had imagined as a child it did, every pebble and milkbox and tulip bed eyelessly watching him pass; each house had been turned inward, into itself. A blurred lit window across the street displays an empty easy chair, a set of brassheaded fireplace tools, a brick mantel supporting a pair of oblivious candlesticks.

Rabbit hurries in bare feet down the hall to the bathroom and back and into bed, before it is nine o'clock. At the hospital by now the last visitors would be long gone, the flurry of bathroom-going and pill-taking that followed their departure subsided, the lights and nurses' voices in the hall turned down. There is no reading lamp in his room, just a paper-shaded overhead he resists switching on. He noticed a stack of old Consumer's Digests in the closet but figures the products they evaluated will all be off the market by now. The history book Janice gave him, that he can't get through although he is more than halfway, is back in the Penn Park den. Nor is the streetlight enough to read by. It projects rhomboidal ghosts of the windowpanes, alive with a spasmodic motion as raindrops tremblingly gather and then break downward in sudden streaks. Like the origins of life in one of those educational television shows he watches: molecules collecting and collecting at random and then twitched into life by lightning. Behind his head, past the old brown headboard with its jigsaw scrolls and mushroom-topped posts, his dead mother-in-law's sewing machine waits for her little swollen foot to press its treadle into life, and her short plump fingers to poke a wetted thread through its rusted needle. About as likely that to happen as life just rising up out of molecules. A smothered concussion, distant thunder, sounds in the direction of Brewer, and the treetops stir. Harry's head is up on two pillows so the full feeling in his chest is eased. His heart is giving him no pain, just floats wounded on the sea of ebbing time. Time passes, he doesn't know how much, before the door handle turns and clicks and a slant rod of hall light stabs into the amniotic isolation of the little borrowed room.

Pru's head, with coppery highlights on the top of her hair, pokes in. "You awake?" she asks in almost a whisper. Her voice seems roughened and her face is a milky heart-shaped shadow.

"Yep," Rabbit says. "Just lying here listening to the rain. You get Judy settled?"

"Finally," the young woman says, and with the exasperated emphasis enters the room wholly, standing erect. She is wearing that shorty bathrobe of hers, her legs cased in a white shadow descending to her ankles. "She's very upset about Nelson, naturally."

"Naturally. Sorry I blew up at her," he says. "The last thing the poor kid needs." He pushes up on his elbows, feeling himself somehow host, his heart thundering at the strangeness, though after his days in the hospital he should be used to people seeing him in bed.

"I don't know," Pru says. "Maybe it was just what she needed. A little structure. She thinks she has a right to all the TV sets in the world. Mind if I smoke?"

"Not at all."

"I mean, I see the window's a little bit open, but if it -"

"It doesn't," he says. "I like it. Other people's smoke. Almost as good as your own. After thirty years, I still miss it. How come you haven't given it up, with all this health kick?"

"I had," Pru says. Her face in the blue-green flare of her Bic lighter – a little tube as of lipstick – looks flinty, determined, a face stripped to essentials, with a long shadow leaping across her cheek from her nose. The flame goes out. She loudly exhales. Her voice continues in the renewed shadows. "Except for maybe one or two at night to keep myself from eating. But now, this thing with Nelson – why not? What does anything matter?" Her hovering face shows one profile, then the other. "There's no place to sit in here. This is an awful room."

He smells not only her cigarette smoke but her femininity, the faint department-store sweetness that clings to women, in the lotions they use, the shampoo. "It's cozy," he says, and moves his legs so she can sit on the bed.

"I bet you were asleep," Pru says. "I'll only stay for this cigarette. I just need a little adult company." She inhales like a man, deep, so the smoke comes out thin in a double jet from her mouth and nostrils, and keeps coming for several breaths. "I hope putting the kids down with Nelson gone isn't such a nightmare every night. They need so much reassurance."

"I thought he wasn't here a lot of nights."

"This time of night he usually was. The action over at the LaidBack doesn't begin until around ten. He'd come home from work, eat, be with the kids, and then get restless. I honestly think most nights he didn't plan to go out for a couple hits again, it just came over him and he couldn't help himself." She takes another drag. He hears her intake, like a sigh with several levels, and remembers how it was, to smoke. It was creating out of air an extension of yourself. "With the kids, he was helpful. However much of a shit he was to everybody else, he wasn't a bad father. Isn't. I shouldn't talk about him as if he's dead."

He asks her, "What time is it, anyway?"

"Quarter after nine or so."

Janice would get back at ten-thirty at the earliest. There was plenty of time to see this through. He relaxes back into his pillows. Good he had that nap this afternoon. "Is that how you see it?" he asks. "He was a shit to you?"

"Absolutely. Terrible. Out all night doing God knows what, then this snivelling and begging for forgiveness afterwards. I hated that worse than the chasing; my father was a boozer and a chaser, but then he wouldn't whine to Mom about it, he'd at least let her do the whining. This immature dependence of Nelson's was totally outside my experience."

Her cigarette tip glows. A distant concussion of thunder steps closer. Pru's presence here feels hot in Harry's mind, she is awkwardly big and all sharp angles in the sac of his consciousness. Her talk seems angular and tough, the gritty Akron toughness overlaid with a dismissive vocabulary learned from professional copers. He doesn't like hearing his son called immature. "You knew him for some time out at Kent," he points out, almost hostilely. "You knew what you were taking on."

"Harry, I didn't," she says, and the cigarette tip loops through an agitated arc. "I thought he'd grow, I never dreamed how enmeshed he was, with you two. He's still trying to work out what you two did to him, as if you were the only parents in the world who didn't keep wiping their kid's ass until he was thirty. I tell him: Get real, Nelson. Lousy parents are par for the course. My God. Nothing's ideal. Then he gets sore and tells me what a cold fish I am. He means sex. A thing that goes fast with coke is shame; these women that are hooked will do anything. I say to him, You're not going to give me AIDS from one of your coke whores. So he goes out again. It's a vicious circle. It's been going on for years."

"How many years, would you say?"

When she shrugs her shoulders, Ma's old bed shakes. "More than you'd think. That crowd around Slim was always doing pot and uppers – gays don't give a damn, they have all this money only for themselves. Maybe two years ago Nelson became a big enough user on his own to need to steal. At first he just stole from us, money that should have gone into the house and stuff, and then he started stealing from you – the company. I hope you send him to jail, I really do." She has been cupping her hand beneath the cigarette, to catch the ash, and now she looks around for an ashtray and sees none and finally flips the butt toward the window, where it sparks against the screen and sizzles out on the wet sill. Her voice is hoarsening and finding a certain swing, a welling up. "I have no use for him any more. I'm scared to fuck him, I'm scared to be legally associated with him. I've wasted my life. You don't know what it's like. You're a man, you're free, you can do what you want in life, until you're sixty at least you're a buyer. A woman's a seller. She has to be. And she better not haggle too long. I'm thirty-three. I've had my shot, Harry. I wasted it on Nelson. I had my little hand of cards and played them and now I'm folded, I'm through. My husband hates me and I hate him and we don't even have any money to split up! I'm scared – so scared. And my kids are scared, too. I'm trash and they're trash and they know it."

"Hey, hey," he has to say. "Come on. Nobody's trash." But even as he says it he knows this is an old-fashioned idea he would have trouble defending. We're all trash, really. Without God to lift us up and make us into angels we're all trash.

Her sobbing is shaking the bed so badly that in his delicate postop state he feels queasy. To quiet her big body he reaches out and pulls her toward him. As if expecting his touch, she huddles tightly, though a blanket and a sheet are between them, and continues sobbing in a bitter, lower register, her breath hot on his chest, where a pajama button has come undone. His chest. They want to carve it up. "At least you're healthy," he tells her. "Me, all they need to do is nail down the coffin lid. I can't run, I can't fuck, I can't eat anything I like, I know damn well they're going to talk me into a bypass. You're scared? You're still young. You've got lots of cards still. Think of how scared I feel."

In his arms Pru says in a voice gone calm again, "People have bypass operations all the time now."

"Yeah, easy for you to say. Like me telling you people are married to shits all the time. Or you telling me people have their kids turn out to be dope-addict embezzlers all the time."

A small laugh. A flash of light outside and, after some seconds, thunder. Both listen. She asks, "Does Janice say you can't fuck?"

"We don't talk about it. We just don't do it much lately. There's been too much else going on."

"What did your doctor say?"

"I forget. My cardiologist's about Nelson's age, we were all too shy to go into it."

Pru sniffs and says, "I hate my life." She seems to him to be unnaturally still, like a rabbit in oncoming headlights.

He lets the hand of the arm around her broad back move up across the bumps of the quilted robe and enter the silken cave at the nape of her neck, to toy with the warm hair there. "I know the feeling," he says, content to toy, aware through the length of his body of a cottony sleepiness waiting to claim him.

She tells him, "You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like you."

"Maybe he did. You don't get to see what a bastard I can be."

"I can imagine," she says. "But people provoke you."

He goes on, "I see a lot of myself in the kid." The nape of her neck tingles under his fingers, the soft hairs rising to his electricity. "I'm glad you're letting your hair grow long," he says.

"It gets too long." Her hand has come to rest on his bare chest, where the button is unbuttoned. He pictures her hands with their pink-knuckled vulnerable raw look. She is left-handed, he remembers. The oddity of this excites him further. Not waiting too long to think about it, he with his free hand lifts hers from his chest and places it lower, where an erection has surprisingly sprouted from his half-shaved groin. His gesture has the pre-sexual quality of one child sharing with another an interesting discovery – a stone that moves, or a remarkably thick-bodied butterfly. The eyes widen in the dim face inches from his on the pillow. Tiny points of light are caught in her lashes. He lets his face drift, on the tide of blood risen within him, across those inches to set their mouths together, carefully testing for the angle, while her fingers caress him in a rhythm slower than that of his thudding heart. As the space narrows to nothing he is watchful of his heart, his accomplice in sin. Their kiss tastes to him of the fish she so nicely prepared, its lemon and chives, and of asparagus.

Rain whips at the screen. The leak onto the windowsill accelerates its tapping. A brilliant close flash shocks the air everywhere and less than a second later a heart-stopping crack and splintering of thunder crushes the house from above. As if in overflow of this natural heedlessness, Pru says "Shit," jumps from the bed, slams shut the window, pulls down the shade, tears open her bathrobe and sheds it, and, reaching down, pulls her nightie up over her head. Her tall pale wide-hipped nakedness in the dimmed room is lovely much as those pear trees in blossom along that block in Brewer last month were lovely, all his it had seemed, a piece of Paradise blundered upon, incredible.