Rabbit Remembered

Chapter 2

"Hello?"

"Yes?" Wary. Single women have to be, the world full of phonecreeps."Is this Annabelle Byer?"Yes." Slightly reassured to be named."This is Nelson Angstrom."Oh! Nelson! How nice!"A pause; he had thought from her enthusiasm she might go on a little more. He says, "My mother described your visit."Did she? I wasn't sure it went very well."Oh, yeah. She liked you. She just isn't sure what to make of the general situation. It took her by surprise."Me, too. I mean, I was surprised at first, when my mother told me. It shouldn't matter, my being a grown woman and all."Oh, but it has to matter." He feels more secure, as the conversation tips toward the therapeutic."How do you feel about it?" she asks."I feel good," he says. "Why not? The more the merrier, isn't that what they say? Listen. I was wondering if we could have lunch sometime. Just to look each other over." That was one sentence too many, but then he might as well get the curiosity issue on the table.

She hesitates. Why would she hesitate, when it was she who had come out of the woodwork? "I think I'd like that."

"Tomorrow? Next day? What's your schedule?" he says. "I work at Eighth and Elm, there's a little restaurant opened up in the block on Elm toward Weiser, it's called The Greenery, but don't be put off, it's decent enough, soups and sandwiches and salads, kind of neo-New Age, but they have booths for a little privacy."

"Sounds cute," she says. That slightly puts him off. This may be an airhead, sister or not. After all, what does she have for genes? Nothing that promising. She asks, "Would you mind not until next Thursday? Until then I'm on day duty, it's an Alzheimer's patient who needs round-the-clock."

"Great," he says. "Thursday the sixteenth. Twelve-thirty O.K.? I'll be waiting outside. Medium height, short haircut these days."

"I'm," she began to say, then giggled, not knowing how to describe herself. "I'll be in fat white shoes."

Wouldn't you know, they have picked the one day in September when a hurricane called Floyd is supposed to hit. All sorts of wind damage and heavy flooding in North Carolina, and then predicted to come right up the Chesapeake into southeastern Pennsylvania. But these forecasters are paid to whip everybody up, and though the wind kept him awake last night, rattling the window sashes Ronnie had painted last summer and swishing sheets of rain across the asphalt-shingle roof that supposedly ought to be replaced if they want to keep their equity in the house, the morning isn't so bad that cars aren't moving on Joseph Street, slowing down to go around a medium-size maple branch that broke and crashed last night in his sleep. He didn't hear the noise; he slept better than he thought. The branch lies in the center of the asphalt like a big piece of road kill, its leaves' pale undersides up and already wilting.

Nelson thinks of phoning Annabelle to cancel but he doesn't want Mom and Ronnie to know he has this planned. Instead he phones his boss, Esther Bloom, who lives in Brewer, and she tells him the Center will be open at least until noon. "These people have nowhere else to go, Nelson. A weather event like this brings up survival issues they may need to process."

On the way into town he sees two highway crews, with flashing lights and cops in orange slickers directing traffic, cleaning up fallen trees with chain saws-an old willow that had sunk its roots in the roadside ditch by the failing mall with the four-screen cineplex and, on the other side of the viaduct, where 422 enters Brewer and becomes Cityview Drive, a gorgeous big tulip poplar at the edge of the park. The park has always struck Nelson as sinister, slightly. Tough minority kids hang out among the trees, and there is a dim association with the time his father had left home and lived not far from here in the city, on Summer Street. The World War II tank near the tennis courts has been recently taken away, and a pretty little white-and-green bandstand built, as part of downtown renewal, though it serves mostly to collect graffiti and to shelter thugs from the weather and has never held a concert that Nelson can remember. The car radio is full of this gunman, one more straight-shooting psychotic, who killed seven and then himself in some Texas Baptist church, and terrorist blasts in Moscow killing dozens, and an interesting item which he doesn't quite catch about cocaine addiction linked to a build-up of certain proteins in the brain-it hadn't been his fault, it was brain chemistry-and then another medical item, which interests him less, about how hot tubs may help diabetics. The Phillies beat Houston eight to six in ten innings, but they still aren't going anywhere, not in the middle of September. As he drives across the park's most open stretch, wind shakes his car so hard that he tightens both hands on the steering wheel.

In Brewer around Eighth and Elm the buildings cut down on the wind somewhat. It's an older area, where commercial meets residential. A former hat factory stands empty but for one little photocopy-and-offset-printing establishment named PRINTSMART in a lower corner. The treatment center occupies the basement floor of what used to be a three-story elementary school, grades K through six. The parking lot consists of a strip of diagonal places at the side of the building where the neighborhood residents stick their rusty heaps at night, right across two spaces, neglecting to wake up in time to take them away. The neighborhood is shabby but not dangerous, like most of the clients.

As Nelson gets out of his Corolla he sees a sky darkly bruised in patches above the brick cornices, the clouds layered and shredding as they slide swiftly sideways, but the rain appears to be stopping and the air brightens as if to clear. People on the sidewalks, especially the young women who work in the glass courthouse annex a block away, hugging themselves in short sleeves and not even carrying umbrellas, don't appear to know they're almost in a hurricane. Across Eighth Street a cheap big orange facade saying DISCOUNT OFFICE SUPPLIES has been attached above the doorway to an old stationery store that Nelson remembers still smelling of gum erasers and ink eradicator before everything was bubble-wrapped and packaged for bulk sales; the sign makes a shivery noise as a spatter of bright raindrops sweeps by. Farther down Eighth an old-timey, routed, gold-lettered Tavern sign swings back and forth. Maybe he should have suggested that as the place to eat-a little racier and more cavelike, with a liquor license -but he obscurely wanted to keep his meeting with his sister sober and pure: a solemn occasion.

The radio said Governor Ridge was considering declaring an emergency and sending all state and local workers home, but inside the Center the staff has shown up, all but Andrea the art therapist, who lives beyond Pottstown, almost on the Main Line.

She commutes up to Brewer because funds for art therapists are drying up nationwide and the job she had in Philly was eliminated. To snotty, pouty, twice-divorced Andrea, a henna-tinged brunette with big rings she makes herself on nearly every finger, Brewer is a hick town with too many religious cranks and dumb Dutchmen.

As the morning wears on, the rain with renewed vigor whips at the basement windows so hard that water begins to dribble across the wooden sills. Years ago, before Nelson was hired, the floor was gutted and partitioned into suitable spaces-tiny offices for the staff, larger group rooms for the clients, a reception space, a kitchen where the clients make their lunch and a dining area, with six round tables, adjacent to the sofas and upholstered chairs of the milieu. In the milieu the clients not doing a group or having a consultation can read, knit, play games, and hopefully interact. When this was a kindergarten the five-year-olds learned to tie their shoelaces and fit pegs into holes but social interaction, socialization, sitting in a circle and learning to share, was the main lesson; for these dysfunctional adults it still is. There are thirty of them, theoretically present from nine to four, and a staff of eight, headed by Esther, a doctor of psychology. Nelson has resisted suggestions that he go after an advanced license or degree; he doesn't want a private practice or, after the mess he made running the Toyota agency, any administrative responsibility. He learned his limits.

Some clients straggle in, drenched and exhilarated about a hardship they are sharing with all the residents of Brewer, and others have chosen to stay at home with their delusions, anxieties, and television sets. Because of low attendance Nelson's three-times-a-week group on Relationships is absorbed into Katie Shirk's group on Goals and Priorities. Nelson uses his downtime to catch up on paperwork-progress notes, intake forms-and goes around mopping up windowsills with paper towels. Left wet, the paint peels. The rain has intensified again.

The DiLorenzos show up, though, all three of them, hurricane or not, at eleven sharp. They are desperate. Their world has come crashing down because of a few misfiring neurons. In the waiting area they give off a powerful damp odor of bafflement-graying patriarch, swag-bellied but still powerful in the arms and shoulders; mother, a touch of peasant drab still in her plain dark suit though money talks in her shoes and the silk scarf at her throat; and son, twenty, slim and good-looking, with an almost feminine delicacy, bright-eyed, wavy-haired, but going soft and pasty with inactivity, and the fear of his own strangeness giving his dark eyes an anxious bulge. His eyes fascinate Nelson with their helpless beauty-dark but not black, paler than his thick brows, an ale color, or like the dark jelly bees feed to their queen, freckled with light, life in them like a squirt of poison. He decides to take the boy first, and asks the parents to wait.

"Well, Michael. How are you feeling?" he asks when the door is closed and he is settled at his desk. His desk is of minimum size and with a fake-wood-grain top. The young man folds himself into the one-piece molded-plastic chair, orange in color, opposite. He wants to slouch to show how lightly he takes all this but the chair in its flimsy, scientifically determined form does not permit much of a slouch.

"O.K. Good. The same."

"Voices quiet?"

Michael licks his lips as if abruptly aware of a dryness. "Yes."

He is lying, Nelson knows, but he keeps his eyes down on the young man's folder, opened six months ago. "Taking your Trilafon consistently?"

"Absolutely, sir." This is another lie, Nelson can tell from a certain retraction in the young voice, a telltale flattening, but Michael wants to believe it, he wants to be cured, of an illness that seems to be nothing less than himself, a rot of his most intimate ego, that voice within, where it was nestled supposedly safe in his skull.

"Any side effects from the Trilafon you want to take up with Dr. Wu?" Howard Wu is the Center's M.D., here three half-days a week. Golden in color, stocky in form, he is much beloved, for his hearty Chinese pragmatism and large convex teeth. He is their jolly Buddha.

The boy readjusts his position, perching on the chair's edge and jerking forward. "I feel plugged up. At both ends. It's like a cold in my nose all the time. I feel sleepy all day, and then I can't sleep at night. I feel shitty," he says, and titters, as if to disown his feeling. A fission, a scatter, in his young face makes him hard for Nelson to look at.

"Do you want me to write down, 'No voices'? If I do that, Dr. Wu will see no reason to adjust the medication."

Nelson's deliberate gaze elicits from Michael a flutter of avoidance, a batting of lashes under the shapely black brows, which have that touch of a built-in frown Italian men have, a thickening toward the bridge of the nose. He must have cut a tidy swath at Brewer High, not to mention summers cruising among his peers in the convertible his parents had bought him, proud they could afford it. He peaked too early, like Dad in a way. There is still a little bravado, mannerly but dangerous, in the boy's smile, and in the slick way his bouncy black hair was tamed by the comb. The grooming is a positive sign. Or did his mother comb his hair for him today, for this appointment, and see to it that he shaved? "There were some voices," he admits, huskily, then smirks as if to dare the world to make much of it.

"What did they say, do you remember?"

No answer.

"What did the voices say?"

"Nasty stuff."

Nelson waits.

"They tell me what a miserable fuck-up I am. They tell me to kill myself. Or maybe I think of that myself, to shut them up. It might be worth it."

"Michael," Nelson said, loud and urgent enough to make the boy, whose eyes sidle and flutter, look at him. "If you ever, for a moment, think you might follow through on these impulses, you must do what?"

A long pause. "I don't know."

"You must get in touch with the Center. At any hour."

"Yeah, well, shit, I'm not apt to be calling any center at four in the morning."

"The recording gives the number for Emergency Services. Call it. Here's the number in case." He writes it out on a Fresh Start memo pad and rips the sheet off. A renewed surge of rain slashes against the window at Nelson's back. He pictures the leaks venturing, trembling, lengthening, out onto the windowsills of this old school, the paint flaky from previous soakings. "Do the voices say anything else?" Nelson can hardly hear the answer against the noise of the rain.

"They tell me to kill my parents."

This is delivered with a mumbled huskiness and yet with some defiance, a twitch of teen-age swagger and a smirk that hangs on his face forgotten. "How does that make you feel?" Nelson asks.

Michael surprises him with a surge of affect: "Horrible. I love my parents. They've been great to me, giving me everything I've ever wanted and not putting any pressure on about entering the, you know, fucking dry-cleaning business." His voice is hurrying, to keep up with his brain. "They sent me to college when a lot of parents would have had me go straight into the business. My dad's getting older and hasn't been strong for a while. They sent me to Penn, the finest university in the state. So what did I do? Hey, I fucked it up."

"You didn't, Michael, you got sick. We're trying to make you better. You're better now. You dress yourself, you're no longer violent-"

"I can be violent at home." He begins to brag, to someone imaginary sitting where Nelson sits. "My mother, what a naggy bitch, honest to God. She says to stop watching the old movies on TV, get up, get out, do this, do that. I don't see the use."

"The use is what we call normal psychosocial functioning. It doesn't come without effort. Let's look at your graph. You have not been in to the Center for a week, and then only twice the week before. That's why I've asked your parents to come in with you. They, and Dr. Birkits, and all of us want your attendance to improve." Birkits was the Brewer psychiatrist the DiLorenzos had taken him to on the advice of the Penn psych service after his break. Birkits, one of these demoralized post-talking-cure shrinks, referred this hot potato to Fresh Start. They don't get many clients with an intact home, and who can afford a private psychiatrist.

"I bet you all do," Michael sneers.

"We do, Michael. We want to improve your functioning, and we offer here at Fresh Start a safe environment for you to practice in, with the groups, the activities, the counselling. But you must attend."

"Hey. Sir. O.K. Can I be frank?"

"Of course."

"I can't stand these people. They're fat. They're queer. They're ugly. They're not my type."

"What is your type?" Nelson asks, and instantly regrets the hostility he hears in the question, which popped out reflexively.

"Loser," Michael responds, and laughs, a barking abrupt noise that doesn't belong to his frightened face. "Loser is my type."

"Not so. You or anyone here. We're human, which isn't always easy. The other clients are kind people, here to help each other. They care about you, if you let them."

"They wouldn't if they knew what's inside my head." He jerks forward in the straight chair. His complexion looks a little clammy, moist at the hairline. The poisoned eyes swarm with shame and yet with an excitement that something transformingly strange is happening to him. "The voices whisper to me about girls I see on the street. This one and that one. They tell me to picture her shitting."

"Shitting?" Nelson has been betrayed into confessing surprise. Perhaps Michael intended this. He wonders how much of an enemy the boy sees him as. Does he sense, within his mental-health counsellor, some ethnic enmity, with envy of his easy slender build and dago good looks? When Nelson tries to picture what a schizophrenic sees he remembers Howie Wu telling him, Their sense of distance has broken down. Things up close look far away, is how Nelson has framed this-there is no clear depth in which to locate yourself. The gears that notch us one into another fail to mesh, maddeningly, meltingly. Trying to think his way into Michael's head plants a sliding knife inside Nelson, a flat cold queasy sensation below his ribs.

"They show me her squatting down. I want to rub her face in it. I want her to eat it. Does that shock you?"

"No," Nelson lies.

"Well, it does me." Michael slumps back as far as the chair allows him. His affect is flattening; his eyes narrow as he recalls, "Thirty thousand bucks a year, think of it, plus extras and my own car. Pussy everywhere. Hot-shit professors. A bunch of frats rushing me. And I fucked up. I couldn't hack it. I didn't even know what courses I was supposed to be taking. I hid in my room with the shades down until my roommate complained to the dean and they got the psych service on me. They tell me I told the dean or somebody he was the Whore of Babylon. I never heard of her." He snickers a little, testing the face opposite his.

"Michael," Nelson says in firm conclusion. The boy was bragging now, bullying. When you feel uncomfortable, Howie has told him, trust your gut. Get off the horse. "I can't emphasize enough how important it is that you are faithful with your medications. I've made a note here to Dr. Wu to reconsider the Trilafon dosage."

"I drank beer and tequila at Penn," Michael tells him, uncertainly standing, sensing he is dismissed and being relieved yet not, unsatisfied, uncured. "My parents didn't know it, but I would get fucking blasted. I think that's what screwed up my brain."

"I don't think so. The human brain can take a lot of beer. Michael, this is not your fault" Nelson says, coming around his desk so that in the tiny office the boy-tall when he stands up, his girlish mouth sagging, his face glimmering in the rainy light, begging to be understood-has nowhere to go but out, to the waiting room, where his parents are eager to come in.

"Such a gorgeous child," says Mr. DiLorenzo, when a second chair has been pulled up for his wife in front of Nelson's desk. "Bright, good, A miracle boy. To have this boy after his three sisters and Maria over forty, it seemed to us a miracle." He speaks carefully, with dignity, as one who remembers when he spoke English less well, the child of immigrants who spoke it hardly at all. His hair, brushed straight back, is going white but his bushy eyebrows are still black.

The wife speaks up: "Even as a little boy, though, he stood apart a little. He would play with others, but then wander away and come inside. I'd say, 'What's wrong?' He'd say, 'Nothing.' As if he didn't see the point of people. He was quiet. He never had a tantrum."

"My wife imagines things in hindsight," Mr. DiLorenzo says, sitting back erect, his eyes enlarged by thick spectacles, eyes frayed to death from closely inspecting fabric. "He was a perfectly normal boy. Got top marks, too, all the way up through senior year. Gave the salutatorian speech about how we should help Russia keep democracy and capitalism. Never any trouble to anybody- teachers, me, nobody."

"A little trouble would have been more normal," his wife says. "At the time I wondered if having all those older sisters hadn't taken something out of him. My daughters and me, we had too good a time, always laughing, always busy at the house, always telling each other things. Michael was like a little prince, detached."

"Don't listen to her, Mr.-"

"Angstrom. Nelson if you'd rather."

"Don't listen to her, Nelson. He was fine. He played sports, got the good marks, ran for student council. Said no to drugs, booze. An altar boy, too, until he was fifteen, and we didn't push that. In America religion becomes your own business. Likewise I told him, 'Michael, listen, you want to forget the dry-cleaning business, be some kind of professional-a doctor, lawyer, whatever, sit behind a desk using your smarts-that's O.K. with me, and Mamma too. Whatever makes you happy. This is America.' But no, he wanted to learn dry-cleaning, summers, after school, it was what he loved. From me there was absolutely no pressure."

"There was pressure," Mrs. DiLorenzo tells Nelson. "Joe needed him to carry on and he knew it. That he didn't come out and say it made it worse. The girls, they married and got out of here. They'd had enough of it, the chemicals, the presses, the hours until seven, eight. Only one of them even stayed in the state, and she's way out near Pittsburgh, a nice suburb up along the Allegheny. Their husbands, what do they care about dry-cleaning? It was all on Michael, and he knew it. He snapped. Men don't want their whole lives mapped out for them. They want adventure. Isn't that right, Mr. Nelson?"

"She's crazy," Mr. DiLorenzo confides. "He didn't want adventure. He wasn't like these young hoodlums these days, their heads full of, what do they call it, hip-hop, grabbing guns and going off to shoot their classmates to make the evening news. Shooting their parents, no respect for anything under the sun. He wanted to carry on the family business. There was no pressure. At Penn he was taking chemistry to be on top of the best, the newest solvents, the most environmentally sensitive as we say now. Disposal of used cleaners is the number-one headache in this business; a single cancer lawsuit can wipe you out-defending against it, even if you win. I love America, but not its justice system."

"Joe, there was pressure." To Nelson Mrs. DiLorenzo explains, "My husband, he slaved to build up Perfect. He began by doing dirty work for this old Jew in South Brewer, just a basement in a row of houses, a little dark slot, his equipment crowded into the back, a shed built illegally, fifty cents an hour if he got that, Joe was always being chiselled. When the Jew died Joe borrowed to buy the business from the widow and named it Perfect Cleaners himself."

"It's prettier in Italian, perfetto" Mr. DiLorenzo said, drawing out the word, "but this is America. Things want to be perfect here. Don't mind Maria-Jake was good to me, he taught me the trade. Had me out on the vats first, breathing in carbon tetrachloride before the switch to petroleum solvents, then had me as a finisher, on the steam presses, and then a spotter, that takes skill-you can ruin a silk blouse, a fine wool suit. After a while it was going so good I opened a branch in West Brewer, and then one up in Hamburg, and two years ago this industrial acreage came up for sale in Hemmigtown. For a long time I'd been wanting to build a bigger plant, with summer fur storage and equipment to take anything, to take even old lace tablecloths, they get yellow with age, very fragile, and big velvet curtains where you could choke on their dust, some of these mansions in Perm Park and up along Youngquist, the owners never-"

Nelson has heard enough about dry-cleaning. "And you were counting on Michael to take all this over someday."

"Someday, not now. Maybe ten years, maybe less. We have a little place in Florida, the winters here aren't so good for Maria-"

"Don't blame me if you want to go to Florida and stick the poor boy with all these plants, all these employees and their benefits-"

DiLorenzo takes this up enthusiastically, telling Nelson, "It's socialism without being called that. It's putting everybody smaller than Perfect out of business-the benefits, the insurance. There used to be a cleaner every other block. I shouldn't complain, it's good for the bigger outfits that can absorb it, but still you hate to see it. Setting out the way I did back then, with no assets to speak of, I couldn't do it now."

"He slaves" his wife says, "and he wants to lay it all on Michael. He wants to go to Florida and look at the girls on the beach and make himself dark as a black."

"The boy was eager, I mean it, with no pressure from me."

"Joe, the boy felt pressure. Even his senior year, he was drifting away, into his own world. He was bringing home B's."

Nelson intervenes, to stop their love feast. They love each other, and the child of their hearts is Perfect. "Michael is very angry with himself," he tells them, "for what he calls letting his family down. But, I keep trying to tell him, it's not his fault. It's not your fault either. It's no one's fault."

"What is it then?" Mr. DiLorenzo asks simply, of this invisible invader, his son's destroyer.

Good question. "It's a," Nelson says, "it's a disorder of the nervous system, having to do with dopamine flow, with the chemical control of the synapses' tiring."

"I often wondered about that," Michael's mother breaks in. "When he was so young, thirteen, fourteen, working with his father summers, inhaling all those poisons."

"Get sensible, Maria," her husband says, hoarse from his talking. "Look at me, inhaling all my life."

"It's not that kind of chemistry," Nelson says. "I'm no doctor, I don't really understand it, brain chemistry is very complex, very subtle. That's why we don't like to assign a diagnosis of schizophrenia without six months of following the client and observing his symptoms continuously. What we do know about the disease-the disorder-is that it quite commonly comes on in young men in their late teens and early twenties, who have been apparently healthy and functional up to then. Michael does fit this profile. A breakdown early in college is pretty typical." He looks down at the yellow pencil still in his hand. On the upper edge of his vision, the faces of the parents before him, it seems to Nelson in a little hallucination of his own, rise like balloons whose strings have been released, but without getting any higher.

"What can we do?" Mrs. asks, her voice fainter than he has heard it before.

"Is there no hope?" Mr. asks, heavier, the chair under him creaking with the accession of weight, hopelessness's weight.

"Of course there is," Nelson says firmly, as if reading from a card held in front of him. "These neuroleptic medications do work, and they're coming out with new ones all the time. Michael's hallucinations have diminished, and his behavior has regularized.

Now-where YOU can help-he must learn to take advantage of our resources here, and to assume responsibility for his own medications, the prescribed daily dosages."

"He says they make him feel not like himself," his mother says. "He doesn't like who he is with the medicines."

"That's a frequent complaint," Nelson admits. "But, without nagging, without seeming to apply pressure, remind him of what he was like without them. Does he want to go back to that?"

"Mr. Angstrom, I know you don't like to make predictions," the father says, manly, ready to strike a deal, "but will these medications ever get his head so right he can go back to work- keep a schedule, pass his courses?"

Another good question. Too good. "Cases vary widely," Nelson says. "With strong family and environmental support, clients with quite severe psychotic episodes can return to nearly normal functioning."

"How near is nearly?" the father asks.

"Near enough," Nelson says carefully, "to resume independent living arrangements and perform work under supervision." To have a room in a group home and bag groceries at a supermarket that has an aggressive hire-the-handicapped policy. Maybe. "Keep in mind, though, that many tasks and daily operations that are obvious and easy for you and me are very difficult for Michael at this point. He not only hears things, he sees and smells and even touches things that get between him and reality. Yet it's not oblivious psychosis-he knows his thoughts aren't right, and knowing this torments him."

The two wearily try to take this in. Their appointment is winding down. They hear the rain lash at the loose-fitting elementary-school windows in a tantrum, in a world unhinged.

"It's a heartbreaker," says Mr. DiLorenzo. "All those years since the boy was born, I thought I was building it up for him. Building up Perfect."

"Don't look at it so selfishly," his wife says, not uncompanionably. "Think of Michael. Suddenly, where did his life go? Down the drain into craziness."

"No, no," Nelson urges, almost losing his therapeutic poise. "He's still the child you raised, the child you love. He's still Michael. He's just fallen ill, and needs you more than most young men need their parents."

"Need," Mrs. DiLorenzo says, the one word left hanging in air. She pushes herself up, holding on so her black-beaded purse doesn't slip from her lap.

"What we need," her husband amplifies, rising with her, sighing through his nose, "is peace. And a vacation. And it doesn't look as though we're going to get any. Ever." Like jellyfish changing shimmering shape in the water, their faces have gone from fear for their son to fear of him, of the toll he will take.

Nelson doesn't argue. The interview has shaken him but he thinks it was healthy that some of these facts were faced. Schizophrenics don't get wholly better. That movie starring the Australian as a pianist who keeps playing because some dear good loving woman has taken him on: a sentimental crock, mostly. They don't relate. They don't follow up. They can't hold it together. It makes you marvel that most people hold it together as well as they do: what a massive feat of neuron coordination just getting through the dullest day involves. These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is. They don't bother him as normal people do. There are boundaries. There are forms to fill out, reports to write and file, a healing order. Each set of woes can be left behind in a folder in a drawer at the end of the day. Whereas in the outside world there is no end of obligation, no protection from the needs and grief of others. Disorganization takes its toll: a flopped marriage and two fatherless children in Ohio, Judy at nineteen defiant and estranged and Roy at fourteen trying to keep in touch via e-mail and Pru up to who knows what, the bitch has shut him out, him still living with Mom and Ronnie like some agoraphobic mental cripple himself. Here at the treatment center, he has his role to play. The clients respect him. They sense in this short, neat forty-two-year-old in his striped tie and clean white shirt a pain that has been subdued, sins that have been surmounted, absorbed, brought into line. When he has a free moment, as he does today after the DiLorenzos leave, he joins the clients in the milieu-he partakes of their society.

This central gathering space, with its sagging upholstery and skinny-legged card tables and rickety floor lamps that yet give off light, smells of coffee and cough drops and unfresh bodies and of the meal-baked beans and ham, with Dutch-fried potatoes, from the odors-being cooked in the kitchen a room away. At one of the card tables Shirley, a fifty-year-old morbidly obese depressive, is playing dominoes with Glenn, a suicidal, substance-abusing homosexual of about thirty-five. Glenn is flagrant. He wears fake diamond studs in his earlobes and another above his nostril wing; he blues his eyelids with a vivid grease and rouges beneath his eyes like a geisha girl. His pigtail always looks freshly braided. Nelson doubts that anyone who takes such pains with his appearance would be truly suicidal; Glenn just knows that the surest way to get official attention, with benefits, is to claim suicidal impulses. This pseudo-Christian society will knock itself out to keep you going, whatever the taxpayer cost. Esther Bloom disagrees. Gays are gay but they are also men, she says. Women flirt; they make emotional noise. When men get serious about suicide, they do it, not just futz around with inadequate doses of barbiturates or showy but shallow slashes on the wrist. The most successful group of suicidals, statistics show, are men who have suffered business reversals. Next best are men who feel dead already.

But Glenn is alive now, and in a good mood. He and Shirley- whose massive body, bales of dough-colored flesh, emits from its unwashed creases an odor that seems terrible until it surrounds you completely-clack down the white-dotted black tiles with a vigor that punctures the milieu as if with gunshots. A few other clients have gathered to watch. Nelson stands there puzzling at the patterns being made. If he ever played dominoes, he's forgotten it. At the Mt. Judge playground, the pavilion sheltered checkers and Chinese checkers, and he and Billy Fosnacht used to play marbles in a circle in the dirt, in that year or two before Billy's estranged parents got him a minibike and the boyhood phase of innocently modest consumption ended. Nelson feels forlorn, watching Shirley and Glenn cackle and stymie each other, extending and halting the speckled snake that winds its angular way across the metal card table. "Back to the boneyard, sap!" Shirley cries, her mirth sending sympathetic eddies through the onlookers, an idle ring transfixed within the orbit of her familiar BO.

"I'll boneyard you, you little sweetheart!" Glenn says. "Take that!" He slaps a double five crossways at one end of the domino snake.

"What does that mean?" Nelson asks. "Putting the double sideways?"

Glenn squints up askance, one blued lid half lowered, his nostril-stud catching on one facet the fluorescent light overhead. "Didn't you ever play dominoes, Nels?" he asks. For all his gay makeup, he has a rough voice, a Brewer street voice, deeper than you expect, and pugnacious. His tone suggests that Nelson is having a boundary problem.

Maybe so. The other clients are listening, alert as children with nothing else to do. But he has been trained to be frank, direct, and fearless, within the therapeutic persona. "Well, if I did, I've forgotten. The objective is what?"

"To kill time," Glenn says.

"You poor baby," says Shirley to Nelson. "Were you an only child?"

Nelson hesitates. Watch those boundaries. "I had a sister. She died as a baby."

This shocks them, as he knew it would. They have their own problems, that's what they're all here for, not to hear his. Shirley offers, "We'll teach you, dearie, when this game is over." Her vast face holds a trace, a delicate imprint like a fern in shale, of the face she had as a young woman. There is a small straight nose and a pointy chin-a triangular bit of bone in the fat.

"Morons can play it," Glenn says in rough encouragement.

One of the likable things about dysfunctionals is that they don't hold grudges. They don't stand on any imagined dignity, they are focused on the minute or two of life in front of them. As he sits there for twenty minutes taking domino lessons from a mountain of a woman in a stained muu-muu, and being coached by a rouged pervert with three glass studs in his face-a fourth, brass, sits on the upper edge of Glenn's plucked eyebrow-Nelson feels his inner snarls loosening, including the knot of apprehension about his lunch date, crazily enough, with a girl out of nowhere who claims to be his sister.

Outside the Center, the rain still comes down but is thinner; it is swirled and rarefied by the wind into a kind of white sunshine. There is no point in putting up an umbrella, it would be popped inside out. Instead, he runs, slowing whenever he feels his shirt getting sweaty inside his raincoat, staying close to the brick buildings, and the facades redone in Permastone, on the south side of Elm Street. Plastic store signs bang and shudder overhead, tin mailboxes swing by one screw beside the front doors of four-story town houses turned into apartments, empty aluminum Mountain Dew cans rattle along in the gutter, leaves swish overhead as gusts plow them like keels through upside-down waves. The elms lining this street died long ago; the Bradford pears the city replaced them with have grown big enough to need cutting back from the electric wires. There are fewer people out on the sidewalk than usual but those that are are oddly blithe. A black couple in yellow slickers stands in a doorway smooching. A skinny Latina clicks along in high square heels and blue jeans and a pink short-sleeved jersey, chatting into a cell phone. Is this a hurricane or not? The weather is being snubbed. People are in rebellion at having it hyped on TV SO relentlessly, to bring up ratings.

He runs past one of those few surviving front-parlor barbershops, where two old guys are waiting their turn while a third sits under the sheet to his neck, all three thin on top, and the barber makes four. Dad didn't want to wait around and become an old guy. He didn't have the patience. The wind traces oval loops through sheets of rain. The clouds above the roofs and chimneys trail tails like ink in water. The odds are less than fifty-fifty, he figures, that his date will show up on such a wild day. He hopes she doesn't; it will get him off the hook.

But there she is, waiting outside The Greenery (Salads, Soups, and Sandwiches) under a sky-blue umbrella, wearing not fat white shoes as she promised but penny loafers with little clear plastic booties snapped over them, like bubble-wrapped toys. "Hi. I'm Nelson," he says, more gruffly than he intended, perhaps because he is panting from running. "You shouldn't have waited outside, you'll get soaked," he goes on in his nervousness, starting their acquaintance on an accusatory note.

She doesn't seem to mind. Her mild eyes, their blue deepened by the blue of the umbrella, take him in as she defends herself: "But it's so exciting out. Feel the electricity in the air? I heard on the radio driving here the eye is over Wilmington."

"I bet it's soon downgraded to just a tropical storm. North Carolina is where it really hit. Pennsylvania never gets the real disasters."

"Well, that's good, isn't it?" Annabelle asks.

Their heads are at the same level. He is short for a man and she is slightly above average for a woman. He wonders if a Passerby would spot them as siblings. "Come on, let's go in" he says, still breathless.

There are six or so other customers, and the last of three booths is free. The interior has that cloakroom scent from long ago of wet clothes and childish secrets. The tidy, self-reliant way Annabelle takes off her white raincoat and red scarf and hangs them up on the peg-hooks by the unmarked door to the restrooms touches Nelson; she is an old maid already. But the bright-eyed flounce with which she sits down and slides her way to the center of the table in the booth suggests that she is still hopeful, still a player in whatever the game is.

The waitress, too middle-aged for her short green uniform, comes over from behind the counter and hands them menus prettily printed with leafy borders but already smudged and tattered by many hands. "Also," she tells them, "we've added hamburgers and hot dogs."

Nelson says, "I thought those were against your principles."

She is lumpy and sallow but not above being amused. "They were, but people kept asking for them. We still won't do pizzas and French fries."

"Way out," Nelson says. Laconic responses have become, these eight years, his professional habit, but this occasion will demand more: he will have to give, to lead. To be a provider.

"I love healthy food," says Annabelle Byer.

"Do you know already?" the waitress asks. "Or would you like a few minutes?" Nelson has been coming here once or twice a week since the place opened last spring, but she is showing him new deference now that he has appeared with a companion. Annabelle is a little round-faced and bland compared with the narrow-hipped Latina in high heels and jeans, but she is not an embarrassment as a date; she could be a colleague at the Center, like Katie Shirk.

"I know," he tells the waitress. "A cup of that broccoli soup you make-"

"It's not a cream soup," the waitress interrupts. "It's a clear soup, some of the customers call it watery."I want it," Nelson insists, "and then the spinach salad, with raspberry vinaigrette, and don't go easy on the bacon bits."

"That's just what I want," Annabelle says, more gleefully than Nelson thinks she needs to. The waitress is writing. "You said do go easy on the bacon bits, or don't?"

"Don't,"Nelson and Annabelle answer in unison. Nelson adds,"And, to drink, in view of the horrible weather, a cup of hot tea. Not herbal, caffeine. Lipton's if you have it."

"Me, too," his sister says. He is beginning to see the downside of having one.

"Don't you have any ideas of your own?" he asks her."Almost nothing but. If you'd have let me order first, as you should have, you'd be seeming to copy me. "

"I'd have thought of something different. Their lo-cal Caesar with strips of range-fed chicken can be terrific."I love healthy food."

"You said that."Well, I'm nervous. This is strange, meeting your brother at last, and it was your idea."

"Yeah, and showing up giving my mother the scare of her life was your idea. Sorry about your mother, by the way."

"Thank you. She didn't seem scared, yours. Almost feisty, you could say. She thought I was after her money."

"Well, what else? Not that she has that much." He feels, what he had not expected, at ease enough with this person to be combative, as if they had rehearsed their competition years ago. "You and I met, by the way," he says. "Twenty or so years ago, at a party in an apartment along Locust Boulevard. The hosts were a couple called Jason and Pam and a fag they lived with called Slim." He wouldn't say "fag" at work-he has worked with a number of gays, on both sides of the client-caregiver divide, and has no problem with it, once he outgrew the fantasy that they were going to grab his crotch -but being with this girl brings out an older, less p.c. self. "I was with my wife. She was very pregnant, and got drunk and fell down the stairs." The memory still shames him: he had given Pru the bump that sent her off-balance, and the image of her skidding down the metal-edged stairs, with the legs of the orange tights she had on splayed wide like a sexual invitation on the edge of disaster, has stayed with him as a turning point in his life. I must do better than this, he had thought at the time.

"I don't remember any of that," Annabelle says with her annoying, faintly defiant blandness.

"I remember you" he accuses, "and thinking how nice you were. I admired your ear. You were going with a boy called Jamie and worked at some old people's place out around the old the fairgrounds."

"Sunnyside," she says. "My ear?" she asks. Self-consciously she touches her right ear, exposed by the fluffy short-cut hair there. Her hair, a touch damp from waiting in the rain, is brown, with auburn highlights that seem natural and a fair amount of gray sprinkled in. Time is pressing on her though her face pretends not to feel it.

"It hadn't been pierced." He doesn't say it reminded him of his own. He had also liked the way she bulged toward him in certain places, her plump upper lip and the fronts of her thighs when she stood. Some would say she is heavy now but in this county the men are accustomed to that. How had she avoided getting married?

"My mother wouldn't let me," Annabelle was saying. "I guess it was superstitious of her, she said she liked me natural, the way I had been born. Boy, I wonder what she would say with some of the girls now. Even the young nurses, the body piercing, navel, nipple, you name it. I ask them, how can it be sanitary, and they say their boyfriends like it. One more thing to play with, I guess." She blushes and lowers her eyes.

The soup comes, the flowery thin soup The Greenery cooks up with broccoli florets and frothy bean sprouts and slices of water chestnut so thin as to be transparent. Nelson and Annabelle bow their faces into the heat of the soups and realize that their time together is being consumed. "I'm sorry," she says, "I don't remember that party better. Maybe I was stoned."

"No, no, it was me who was stoned. Stoned or wired, that's what I usually was back then. After my father died I got religion, more or less, and earned the certificate to be a mental-health counsellor. Don't you think it's strange, by the way, how both you and I are caregivers?"

"Not if we're related," she says. "I believe in genetics. And health care is an expanding field, as the world fills up with people that would have been dead a hundred years ago. Everybody winds up needing care, pretty much."

"Yeah, you wonder if it's worth all the effort. I mean, you're keeping these Alzheimer's wrecks going when they don't even know enough to thank you, and I knock myself out to keep a bunch of depressive loonies from killing themselves, when if they did it it would save the government a fair amount of money."

She looks at him, her mouth prim until she swallows the spoonful of soup, and says, "Nelson. You don't mean that. In the abstract, you can feel that way, but not when you're face to face with the patient. I go on these teams Hospice sends around. Even at the very end, there's something in there, a soul or whatever, you have to love."

"Especially when you're being paid to love it," he says, wondering if one of the water-chestnut slices has gone bad. A specialty place like this, you don't get the turnover to keep the produce fresh; they give it one more day than they should. The other customers here when they entered are one by one leaving, though a small cluster hangs this side of the door, waiting for a sudden sideways squall of rain to let up. The ceiling lights glow as if evening is coming on, though it's not yet one o'clock.

"Tell me about him," Annabelle demands.

"Who?" Though he knows.

"Our father."

Nelson shrugs. "What's to say? He was narcissistically impaired, would be my diagnosis. Intuitive, but not very empathic. He never grew up. It occurred to me just now, passing a bunch of old guys in a barbershop coming over here, that he died when he did because he wanted to. Those of us around him were begging him not to die but he wouldn't listen." Nelson has rephrased Pru's sleeping with his father just out of the hospital as a way of begging him not to die. Not a bad reframe, he thinks.

"Why didn't you want him to die, if he was so awful?"

"Did I say he was awful? He was careless and self-centered, but he had his points. People liked being around him. He was upbeat.

Since he never grew up himself, he could be good with children, even with me when I was little. The smaller they were, the better he related. He was a better grandfather than a father, since he could clown around and have no direct responsibility and not give you a sinking feeling. Me he kept giving a sinking feeling. I mean, he did things, too. He ran away from Mom to shack up with your mother. He got involved with a megalomaniacal black guy and a masochistic runaway while girl and got our house burned down. He had a crush on this nitwit young wife of a friend of my parents when they were in a country-club phase. Then he had a long secret affair with his oldest friend's wife. I say friend, but in fact he and Ronnie always hated each other. I mean, this is not a constructive personality we're talking about."

"Yet you didn't want him to die."

"What do you want me to say? Hell, he was the only father I had. What am I supposed to do, wish him dead?"

Annabelle smiles. Her soup bowl is empty. "Some would say that would be normal."

"That Oedipal crap, you mean? Freud is fun to read, but in the workplace he doesn't hack it. Nobody in the business uses Freud any more." But he is more stunned by her saying that than he shows. Would be normal. He had wanted his father to live, to continue to take care of him, to be a shelter however shaky. There is a louder scream of wind outside, old tropical storm Floyd. The ceiling lights flicker and then go out.

At the same moment, the waitress brings their salads. "Oops," she says. "Can you two lovebirds see to eat, or shall I hunt up some candles?"

"We can see enough," Nelson says. In the gloomy light, flickering as the wind outside lashes the trees, Nelson leans forward and softly explains to his sister, "He was tall, about eight inches taller than me, and had an athlete's nice easy way of carrying himself. It pained him that I wasn't more like him. He had been a wonderful basketball player in high school, back when it was still a white game."

"That doesn't exactly make a life, does it though?" Annabelle asks, lifting the first forkful of salad to her face. She has a slightly eager way of eating, keeping her mouth closed in a satisfied smile as she chews, her upper lip shiny with salad oil.

"That's what everybody kept telling him all his life," says Nelson. "But I don't know. At least it was something, to remember about yourself. I have nothing like that to remember about myself."

"What about your family?" she asks, before taking the next bite, being careful to keep the bacon bits balanced on the piece of spinach.

"They left me. My wife, Pru, who you saw pregnant that time at the party that you've forgotten all about, left me over a year ago and took the kids. Back to Ohio, where she's from. Akron. I met her when I was a student at Kent State." He doesn't say she was a secretary, and older than he; he is embarrassed about that. "My girl, Judy, is nineteen, twenty next January, and off everybody's hands except a bunch of boyfriends', and the boy, Roy, and I keep in touch by e-mail. He's fourteen and knows more about computers than I ever will."

"Why did she leave? Pru."

"I don't know. I guess I disappointed her. She thinks I'm a pipsqueak."

She waits to finish chewing and says urgently, "Nelson, you're not. You're a caring, intelligent man."

"Yeah, well. You can be that and a pipsqueak too. I can be frustrating. Pru always wanted us to get a house of our own and I could never see the point, my mother sitting on all those rooms over in Mt. Judge. I didn't want to leave her alone. My mother."

"But now she's married."

"Yeah. But then I didn't want to leave her alone with my pretty awful stepfather. Hey-do I sound normal, or do I sound sick? When I'm over with my sickos I don't have to listen to myself. I just let them talk. Boy, do some of them babble! Everybody thinks their little story is the story of the universe."

The waitress comes back from the kitchen and puts an unlit candle in a pottery holder on the booth table and lights it. "You didn't have to do that," Nelson tells her. "We're about to go."

"Why go?" The waitress saunters to the door and looks out its half-window at the whipped, glistening city. "Pitch black in the east," she says. "Over behind the courthouse." A cardboard sign tucked into the molding says on this side in Day-Glo letters CLOSED. She takes this sign and reverses it so that CLOSED faces the street. The couple in the booth hear the lock click. "The stove and grill are out," the waitress explains.

Nearer, Nelson hears this other female voice, as soft, as transparent as the voice inside his head, say, "Tell me more about your father, as you saw him." The girl is trying so hard to be sweet. Maybe she is sweet. But Nelson dislikes talking about his father. It pulls something too obscure and precious out of him. When he tries to think back to what it was like growing up he keeps getting a picture of his father and him in the front seat of a car, both of them having nothing to say but the silence comfortable, the shared forward motion satisfying. Nelson is being driven somewhere. To the piano lessons that gave him butterflies because he never practiced enough during the week, as Mr. Schiffner with his lavender shirts and tiny Hitler mustache always detected. To soccer practice when he was in that weekend league of middle teens and had hopes of being a star, small but agile. To Billy Fosnacht's or some other friend's, there weren't that many, for a sleepover. Meanwhile his father's big head was happy with his daydreams and his hands were light and pale on the steering wheel, with big translucent moons on the nails, usually one hand while the other absent-mindedly patted and stroked the back of his head in a gesture that maybe went back to the days when teenagers had wet ducktails, like Sal Mineo or James Dean in the old rebel movies Nelson could watch on TV. His father had been a rebel of a sort, and a daredevil, but as he got older and tame he radiated happiness at just the simplest American things, driving along in an automobile, the radio giving off music, the heater giving off heat, delivering his son somewhere in this urban area that he knew block by block, intersection by intersection. At night, in the underlit ghostliness of the front seat, their two shadows were linked it seemed forever by blood. To Nelson as a child his own death seemed possible in so perilous a world but he didn't believe his father would ever die.

"I saw him, eventually," Nelson says, "as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. Mom-mom-my grandmother on my mother's side, the Springers-would always say how I resembled Fred, her husband. He was on the shortish side like me, and sharp at business stuff, and bouncy. But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way."

"I loved my father, too," says Annabelle, "the man I thought was my father. He could fix anything-you know how around a farm everything is always breaking down, he never let on he was flummoxed, just would sigh and settle down to it. He had this wonderful confident, calm touch-with my mother, too, when she'd let her temper fly. Whenever the excitable of my patients get to acting up, I try to think of him and act like he'd act."

Nelson's inner ear tells him there is something wrong with this. He is being sold something. But it may be that his ear is jaded, hearing all day about families, dealing with all the variations of dependency and resentment, love and its opposite, all the sickly inturned can't-get-away-from-itness of close relations. If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence.

"He sounds great," he grunts. "Every time my father tried to fix anything around the house, it got broken worse." He hears these words and wonders if they are fair. He remembers his father digging in a garden he had made in the back yard, even building a little wire fence to defend the vegetables against rabbits. He remembers his father on one of their car trips somewhere pleading with him not to get married, not to get himself trapped in marriage, even though Pru was pregnant and the wedding day set: he shocked his son by suggesting an abortion and offering to pay her off. I just don't like seeing you caught, you're too much me.

I'm not you! I'm not caught!

Nellie, you 're caught. They've got you and you didn't even squeak.

He had fought his father off, accused him of being jealous, denied the resemblance the old man was pushing. You don't necessarily have to lead my life, I guess is what I want to say. Well, he hadn't, exactly, and marrying Pru hadn't worked out, exactly, but what pains Nelson now is seeing that his father had been trying as far as his narcissism allowed to step out of his selfish head and help his son, trying to shelter him from one of those disasters that most decisions entail. He had tried to be a better father than Nelson could give him credit for, even now. He says with an effort, "But he wasn't all bad. We used to have great games of catch in the back yard. And he'd take me to Blasts games out at the stadium. Once we even drove down to Philly for a Flyers game, somebody had given him tickets."

"I met him, you know. At the car lot. He seemed nice. Of course I had no idea he was my father, but he acted fatherly, And funny."

"What did he say funny?"

"Nelson, how can you expect me to remember?" And then it comes to her. The bright June day, the Toyota agency tucked over on Route 111 across the river, the drive with Jamie at the wheel, and the heavy tall middle-aged salesman with his pale fine hair in the front. He sat in the death seat, Annabelle in the back. She says, "It was the time of the gas shortage. He said all the hardware stores in Brewer were selling out of siphons and soon we'd all be standing in line for everything, even Hershey bars, I forget how that came up. It was like he didn't really care if we bought a car or not."

"He didn't. The only job he ever gave a damn about was operating a Linotype machine like his own father. Then Linotypes got obsolete."

"That's sad," his daughter says.

The waitress is standing there in her green apron. "Could I interest either of you in any dessert?"

Nelson said, "I thought you closed up."

"Yes well, I did, but the cook's still out back, he thinks the power may be coming back on. For dessert we have tofu, honied oatcakes, puffed goat cheese baked in little ramekins, and lo-cal frozen yogurt. That's lo-cal, not local. And lately we've put in some home-baked pics, since people kept asking. They are local. Let me see-shoo-fly, lemon meringue, and apple crumb. We may have a piece of the rhubarb still left. We can't warm them, though, as long as the power's out."

She is the mother, it comes to Nelson, that he and Annabelle have in common. The waitress is pure Brewer, her face squarish and asymmetrical, like a bun pleasantly warped in the oven. Good-humored suffering-sore feet, errant sons, daily complaints- radiates through her uniform. And yet, though this woman feels old to him, she is possibly not much older than they are- somewhere in her forties.

"The apple crumb sounds good," he says, not wanting this lunch to end. For what happens next? It's not like a first date, where a second or third leads to fucking.

"I shouldn't," his sister declares, "but let me try the honey oatcake."

The waitress says, lowering her voice confidentially, "It tends to be a little dry. My advice would be to have it with a scoop of the frozen vanilla yogurt. On the house. If the power stays off, it'll all be melting anyway."

"You're wicked," Annabelle tells her. Her plump face beams, her eyes shine like a birthday child's as she assents. She still has, after living twenty years in the city, a country-girl innocence that, if she is taken as his date, embarrasses Nelson. In his embarrassment he studies the wall above the booths, whose theme is greenery-ferns and bushes and overhanging branches, brushed on in many forest shades. What he has never noticed before, all those noons grabbing a bite at the counter, is that a pair of children are in the mural, in the middle distance with their backs turned, a boy and a girl wearing old-fashioned German outfits, pigtails and lederhosen, holding hands, lost.

"So," he says. "I don't think I've told you much about my-our- father. Mom has a lot of photos and clippings back at the house- would you like to look them over sometime?" He wants to give her her father, his father, but when he holds out his hands the dust pours through them, too fine and dry and dead to hold. Time has turned the spectacular man to powder, in just ten years.

"I don't think your mother wants me in the house again," says Annabelle.

"Of course she does," he says, knowing she doesn't, and adding, "It's my house, too," when it isn't, yet.

"I thought one of you said green tea," the waitress says, putting down two cold desserts and two steaming cups. "The water was still hot, and they all claim it's good for you. The Japanese live longer than anybody. They had on Sixty Minutes last Sunday these two female twins, over a hundred years old each, that are like rock stars to them."

"Green is great," Nelson says, to chase this motherly woman away. When the siblings have their privacy back, he says to his sister, "This is great, meeting you. I just wish my father could have known you. He hated not having a daughter."

"That's unusual, a bit. Weren't all men his age male chauvinists?"

"He wasn't crazy about males, me included. I think he saw other men as competition. For the women. He was very scared of his homoerotic side. He suppressed it. His only male friend, really- do you want to hear this?"

"Oh, yes."

"-was a car salesman who was screwing my mother for a while. That made it all right somehow, to have a little male intimacy. Charlie, that was the guy's name, he died too, a couple years ago. Another lousy ticker, though unlike Dad he went the full route- triple bypass, pig valves, pacemaker, God knows what all. It worked for a while, but not forever, as you would know, being a nurse. My mother kept in touch with him, even married to Ron. That generation, once they"-he rejects the obvious verb-"once they went to bed together, they didn't get over it." This has taken him a long way sideways. It's true, what the psych instructors at Johnson Community said, if you let somebody talk enough, everything comes out, underside first. "So Dad and Charlie are up there in Heaven," he ironically concludes, "seeing us get together."

"When will we get together again, I wonder," Annabelle says, unironically. She has this frontal mode, part of her innocence.

How innocent can you be, at the age of thirty-nine, in the year 1999?

"Soon," he promises. He wonders what he has taken on. "I want to work something out. You should meet more people than just me."

"Oh?"

"Sure," Nelson says in confident, big-brother style. In the same style he signals to the waitress, who has been standing behind the counter, looking out at the storm through the window beside the tall aluminum urns of cooling coffee and hot water.

"I keep waiting for branches to fall," she tells them, "but they don't, quite."

"Pennsylvania can't afford a good hurricane," he kids her. "We should all move to the Carolinas." He hungers for a hurricane, he realizes-for an upheaval tearing everything loose.

The twilight gloom in the place does seem to be lifting. Nelson cups his hand behind the flame and blows out the candle. The waitress brings their bill handwritten on the back of a menu card torn in half: S11.48. "I hope you have the right change, because with the power out I can't get into the cash register to make any."

Nelson looks into his wallet and has one one and the rest twenties. The MellPenn ATMs only dish out twenties, encouraging consumers to spend faster. New bills, too. He hates how big Jackson's face has gotten, and the way it's off-center. His expression is more wimpy. They've turned this old Indian-killer into a Sensitive New Age Guy. It looks like play money.

Annabelle sees Nelson hesitate and asks, "Do you want some money from me?"

"Absolutely not."

The waitress may have been motherly, but he's damned if he's going to leave her an $8.52 tip. Nor does he want to take Annabelle's money: it would give the whole encounter a pipsqueak flavor. He is trapped, pinched, squeezed between impossible alternatives: dysfunctional. He could put it on a credit card but that, too, takes electricity. "You could owe me to next time," his sister mildly says. He ignores her and stares into his wallet at the edges of gray-green money as if a miracle will sprout.

And it does: the lights come on. The machinery of the place begins to hum all around them. "I'll have to open up again," the waitress complains. She taps off a dot-matrix slip and he takes a five and two ones out of the change. "Thank you, sir. You two have a nice rest of the day, now."

Brewer is still a place where a tip of more than ten percent wins some gratitude. "Good lunch," Nelson tells her. "Good and healthy. Lots of crumbs on the pie, like my grandmother used to bake."

"Come again," she says, but automatically, moving on sore feet to wipe their booth table and reset it with paper placemats.

Outside, the wind is bright again, whirling the droplets off the Bradford pear trees. Annabelle's booties glisten; she ties the red scarf beneath her chin, making her face look graver and slimmer. A spattering hits it, and she winces, then smiles. She doesn't know what to expect next. He wants to hand her the world but doesn't know quite how. "That was fun," he tells her. "We'll be in touch." And he kisses her on the cheek, tasting the rain, imagining her skin as half his, thinking, My sister. Mine.

"She's Dad's, all right," he tells his mother. "That same weird innocence, that way of riding along."

"She wasn't just riding along the day she came here," Janice says. "She was determined, that little scruffy hairdo and showing off her legs right up to the crotch."

"How would you like to have her here again? Invited this time, with some other people."

"What other people? What am I supposed to say-this is my dead husband's bastard daughter from forty years ago? It was humiliating enough at the time, that whole nightmare, Nelson. I don't see why I should put myself through it again. I can't believe you're asking me-aren't social workers supposed to be so sensitive?"

"Not to their own families, necessarily. Mom, she's family. We can't just ignore her, now that we know she exists. Just a family dinner, maybe with Ronnie's boys."

Of the three sons Ronnie and Thelma had, two are presently unmarried. Georgie, the middle one, lives in New York, though his dreams of being a chorus-line dancer are faded. Alex, the oldest and nerdiest and most successful, lives in Fairfax, Virginia, he and his wife having divorced. Alex is no Bill Gates but he has done well and is about Annabelle's age. Ron Junior, the youngest, dropped out of Lehigh after two years and is settled in as carpenter for a local construction company. He married a local girl; they have three kids under ten. Nelson doesn't see that much of his stepbrothers except when Georgie, escaping from the stresses of the Big Apple, has to crash in the big front bedroom that until Pru pulled out had been Judy's room. But they generally gather for Thanksgiving, a meal that Thelma always put on in grand style and that Ronnie insists Janice continue with, though she will never be the cook Thelma was. The first Mrs. Harrison had been a schoolteacher and brought to her housewifely duties a sense of order and measure and respect for the holidays, and also a flair, a flourish of excess. It must have been this excessive part of her that latched on to Harry, loving him to her own disgrace. Janice dreads the turkey-how big to buy it, how long to cook it, at what temperature-and never gets it right. Either the breast is so dry that the slices crumble under Ronnie's carving knife, or the joints are bloody and the children at the table make noises of disgust. Family occasions have always given Janice some pain, assembling like a grim jury these people to whom we owe something, first our parents and elders and then our children and their children. One of the things she and Harry secretly had in common, beneath all their troubles, was dislike of all that, these expected ceremonies. Mother had been a great churchgoer and Daddy Lagged along but Janice always felt uncomfortable, on the edge of crying when the organ blasted in, especially after Becky died and God had done nothing that terrible time to help. She and Harry were happiest, really, when they were in Florida, just the two of them in Valhalla Village, golf for him and tennis for her and separate sets of friends and most meals taken at the perfectly adequate and pleasant restaurant there, Mead Hall with its modernistic Viking decor.

Janice's brow wrinkles. "I don't quite see it, Nelson, as being anything but forced and awkward. Just because this dead slut wished this girl on us-"

"Mom, she's my sister. Listen. If she can't be a guest in this household, maybe the time has come for me to move out. Pru always said I should anyway, for my self-respect."

"She did? Pru said that?" Janice had imagined that she and her daughter-in-law had shared the house pretty well, all those years after Harry died and they agreed to sell the Penn Park house Harry had loved. She had been off most of the day doing real estate, and Teresa had had to be home with the children and naturally had cooked the meals and did housework and some light outdoor work. It was only right, instead of paying rent. After Ronnie came into the household, it was never so easy. There were currents. Ronnie had his own ideas about how things should be done, in the kitchen and everywhere else. The way Thelma had always taken care of him, he was particular. Thelma spoiled men: it was a kind of malice, and lasted after her.

Poor Nelson. He has this bee in his bonnet-doing something for this girl nobody knows. It clutches at Janice's heart, to think that he always wanted more of a family than they could give him-a bigger, happier one. He had loved her parents because from them descended this sense he craved of a clan operating in the world, this big stucco house a fort of sorts. The boy had wanted her and Harry's happiness so. When they quarrelled even without much meaning it his little face would go white with worry like a bubble trying not to burst. And all this healing he still wants for everybody, it makes her heart gripe to think of how they must have hurt him.

"I don't know, Nelson." Janice yields. "Maybe at Thanksgiving. She'd get lost in the crowd."

"Mom, that's forever away."

"Close enough for us to get used to the idea. I'll have to approach Ronnie. I know he'll be dead set against it."

But when, that night or the next, in their bedroom, she describes to her husband Nelson's silly sad desire, and puts forth her Thanksgiving suggestion expecting it to be knocked aside, Ronnie says, his voice dragged into a more youthful, thuggish register, "Well, I guess it wouldn't kill us. I'd be interested to see how Ruth Leonard's daughter turned out."

He pronounces her name, which Janice always has trouble remembering, so easily; it brings home to her that Ronnie and this slut had been lovers, some weekend down at the Jersey Shore, back before Harry got to know her himself, which had always galled him, though Janice could never see that he had the right to mind. But Harry had been like that: he thought he had a lot of rights, just by being his wonderful self.