Rabbit Remembered

Chapter 4

"O.K., O.K., I lost it," Ronnie admits to Janice. "There was no reason to be rude, people can't help how they got born."

"You should call and apologize." This incident has given her an edge, and anger enough to use it. He had seen in the girl this dead woman he had fucked, and moved toward her, and made an assault in his frustration. This did not speak well of what his wife meant to him. What she meant, she saw when she cleared her head, was a kind of revenge on Harry, and the possession of this house. This is my house, he had said, but it was not, it was her house, the house she had been raised in, the house her mother's pride had cleaned and polished and her father's money had maintained. They were surrounded by Koerner and Springer things; the Angstroms and the Harrisons had contributed hardly a stick of furniture, they were nobodies in the county, they would leave nothing behind but their headstones.

"I'm not ready," Ronnie tells her. "I can't trust myself to do the right thing. She's a Clinton-lover, for Chrissake. She must hang around with a bunch of North Brewer weirdos."

He wanted to fuck the girl, Janice perceives, and is wife enough to feel sorry for him, thinking of his burdensome prick that hangs at such loose ends below his furry pot belly, a prick with a flat upper side, a heavy mournful club, circumsized, unlike Harry's. Nowhere to hide its head. "Then call Nelson at least," she says.

"We don't know where he is, do we?" He is correctly guessing that she knows more than he. A long weekend has gone by since Thanksgiving. Nelson came over while Ronnie was at church Sunday. Ronnie faithfully goes to that no-name fundamentalist church beyond Arrowdale that he and Thelma used to attend. Once when Janice asked him why he bothered, he snapped, "The same reason anybody goes. Because we're all sinners." Janice felt this as a slap in her face. Harry would never have said it; he never thought he sinned. She tries not to hate Thelma now that she is dead but she shouldn't have to share both husbands with her. Janice has inherited Episcopalianism from her mother but without Bessie Springer's habit of attendance. There has been for years too much to do on a Sunday morning, her women's tennis group at the Flying Eagle in the summer and in the winter her sessions on the Stepmaster at the Fitness Center at the dying mall on the way to Brewer. She is determined not to get fat like Mother. Her trim little figure is the thing she likes best about herself. Anyway, Mother had friends to go with after Daddy was gone-Grace Stuhl, Amy Gehringer-and Janice has none. So she stays home Sunday mornings with the Brewer Standard in all its color-printed sections while her husband communes with the dead.

Knowing this, Nelson called five minutes after Ronnie stepped out the door and was there in his car fifteen minutes later. He took away two armfuls of clothes and said he'd be back for one of the television sets and a couple of upstairs chairs when he had a place of his own. He was sleeping on Annabelle's floor over on East Muriel Street until he could begin to look for a room on Monday. She was fine, just cried a lot because all of the Harrisons hated her. He had told her that Georgie didn't hate her, and the others were out of touch with their true feelings. Anyway, it had been his mistake. Another mistake, he realized, had been hanging on in this house so long, for lack of a better idea and having the delusion that his mother needed him. "You don't need me, Mom. You're doing fine. Ronnie's fine, for being a fat-headed bozo. Tell him sometime that he was good to put up with me so long."

She couldn't argue, really. She loved Nelson for all they had been through together but she was past the age when she could oblige his neediness. She and Ronnie left alone tended to each other's needs, one of which, never stated, was getting ready for death, which could start any time now. A pain in the night, a sour number on the doctor's lab tests, and the skid would begin. They had seen their spouses go that way. She had felt her baby slip from her soapy hands and for some few seconds be unfindable in the tub's opaque gray water. If there was any truth in what the churches said she would be reunited with her baby, not so far from now. Death had that to offer her.

She had given Nelson a piece of mince pie that she had saved in the freezer for him and said how sorry she was about what had happened. Everybody felt terrible about it, except Deet and the three children, she guessed. "No," Nelson said, "it was clarifying. It showed me what a pipsqueak leech I tend to be. There was no reason to drag you all in, my sister is something that concerns Dad and me, not you."

That was yesterday. She tells Ronnie now, "You could call him at work." He understands it as a command, for his having overstepped.

It is not an easy call to make, but no worse than hounding a prospect into buying insurance. You construct a shell for yourself, and speak from within it. "Nelson, got a minute?"

"A minute, yes." He has the Relationships group in ten minutes.

"Listen, I feel rotten about the way I spoke to Annabelle."

His using her name offends Nelson, but he listens.

"I must have been drunk," Ronnie goes on.

"Were you that drunk? Mentioning her mother's cunt?" The clients at the Center may be dysfunctional but they have rabbit ears. Through the open door of his tiny office Nelson sees several heads out in the milieu turn, including that of Rosa, who talks to Jesus. She is with a new client, a forty-seven-year-old female obsessive-compulsive. During the intake he was struck by the new client's hands, so painfully scrubbed and chapped, and the fingernails nibbled down to the pink parts. Pru had had such long red hands, he remembers-gawky in the wrists, tender at the tips.

"Look," Ronnie's voice presses on, "I'm calling to say I'm sorry, you're not supposed to make it harder."

"I'm not? Some would say that you owe the apology not to me but to Annabelle."

"I don't trust myself to talk to her. Her being such a bleeding heart for Clinton still pisses me off."

"Was it really Clinton that pissed you off? Tell me, Ronnie, when you looked at her, what did you see?"

"I saw a bleeding-heart broad too big for her miniskirt."

"Anything else? Come on. Help yourself. Think."

"I saw Ruth Leonard back in the Fifties. She'd fuck anybody."

"More. Who else did you see?"

Ronnie is silent, but his silence conveys less animosity than an attempt to think. This is the best conversation Nelson has ever had with Ronnie. His moving out has done that, in just four days. For the first lime, Ronnie owes him some respect. "You want me to say your father," he comes up with.

"Only if it's true."

"It's true. She has more of him in her than you do. Stop asking all these questions trying to make me spill my guts. You're sore at me and always have been because I ball your mother."

"Are you sure about that? Maybe I like you for it; I can't do it. The fact is, I don't dislike you, Ronnie. You don't threaten me the way you did Dad, for some reason. I like you. I like the way you take care of Mom and care about that big homely barn of a house. You're a caring guy. Insurance salesmen are caring guys, worrying about the loved ones when the breadwinner packs it in. You try to make the dead effective just like I try to make the crazy effective. We're not hotshots but we're responsible citizens. What bugs you about Clinton is that he seems to get away with everything. The same with my father. Let me tell you something, Ronnie, something I've observed: nobody gets away with anything. Those that escape punishment inflict it on themselves. We all do it. We keep our own accounts."

Ronnie is silent, weighing this, looking for the hook. "What b.s.," he says at last. "Nellie, you've become a bullshit artist."

"Another reason I like you, Ronnie," Nelson rushes on, the insight having just come to him with a force that needs to be vented, "is that you and I are about the last people left on earth my father still bugs. He bugs us because we wanted his good opinion and didn't get it. He was worse than we are but also better. He beat us out. You look at Annabelle and see living proof that he beat you out- you may have fucked Ruth but he knocked her up and he stares out of her face at you. Right?"

"You've lost me," Ronnie admits. "Tell me, what does this kid do for you?"

"Me, it's like she's something my father left me to take care of, and I don't have a clue how to do it. Thanksgiving wasn't the answer. Your sons sure weren't the answer."

Ron Harrison's voice becomes pious. "Nellie, I'm going to speak the truth in love. What I say is going to help you. She's a slick little twat and can take care of herself. Let me tell you something that will shock you. Back in the kitchen, I turned her on. She wanted me to ball her. I felt it, and I had to get ugly, for everybody's sake. I sacrificed myself."

"Talk about bullshit," Nelson says, and hangs up. While he has been on the phone so long, Rosa and the new client have been scared off, horrified by what they have overheard. He ventures out into the milieu after them, to find out what they wanted, and to show them how sane and normal and trustworthy he basically is.

From: Dad [nelsang.harrison@qwikbrew.com]Sent: Friday, December 10, 1999 5:11 PMTo: royson@buckeyemedia.comSubject: change of address

Dear Roy-Sorry to let your messages and jokes accumulate. The one about how many Texas A amp; M students does it take to screw in a light bulb is funny but it seems a little heartless, seeing that twelve young people were killed making that bonfire pile and most were freshmen who had just been told to do this by people who should have known better. Remember when you get to college to trust your own judgment. I wasted a lot of time at beery frat foolishness at Kent State until your mother took me in hand. She was a little older than I and had more of a realistic upbringing.

The reason I have been slow to answer lately is that I moved out of the house where your grandmother and Mr Harrison live, so I don't have daily access to this computer and am using it now on the sly when they are both out at the mall doing Christmas shopping and then maybe a movie, either the new James Bond or new Tom Hanks. Some rude words at Thanksgiving prompted my departure but I've been thinking of it for some time. Your mother and I used to discuss it while you and Judy were growing up there but we never got around to it, the rent was too good ($0.00).

For somewhat more than that amount ($85 a week, so tell your mother I have this new expense) I have rented a big front second-story room on Almond Street, just off Elsenhower Avenue three blocks from the underpass, where you and Judy and Mom if she wants can stay when you come east after Christmas. We can put mattresses on the floor and borrow sleeping bags from the two girls who live in the other half of the second floor here. They are both in their twenties and what we used to call secretaries but have titles like administrative assistant and corporate input organizer. I hardly ever see them but can hear them with their obnoxious dates sometimes late at night.

I have been living on Almond Street only a week but am pretty happy. The apartment comes with a cable television set and other essential furnishings and a bathroom with shower. There's no kitchen but your grandmother stood me to a little microwave, a 1.2-cubic-ft. Magic Chef, for coffee in the morning and a TV dinner at night. There's a 7-Eleven just down the street. This used to be the landlady's daughter's room until she married and moved away, so there are a lot of frilly nice touches left over.

When you come you must meet your new aunt, a half-aunt if there is such a thing, Annabelle. She is shy but very nice, and knows all about you. Those protests in Seattle reminded me of when I was about your age and people were protesting everything, rioting in the streets. Policemen were called pigs and the President was called worse, just like now. I suppose things move in cycles.

I'm glad your birthday went nicely and I'm sorry it slipped my mind. Let me know what you would like for a present and we can get it when you visit. Your own cell phone seems a bit much even if other kids have them. There is a monthly charge, you know, that you would be responsible for. You can keep using this for your e-mail to me but as I say I can't answer easily. At work they don't want you to use the computers for private e-mail. But I have a phone in my apartment: 610-846-7331. Call me when you feel like a chat. Love to you and all those fabulous Akron Angstroms, Dad.

He is not surprised when Pru calls the next evening. Her voice is lighter, more girlish than he remembers. "Nelson, what got into you to leave your mother's at last?"

"It felt crowded. Ronnie's a prick, like my father always said."

"This so-called sister-did she put you up to it?"

"No, Annabelle would never apply pressure that way."

"Well, she got you to do something I never could."

"Oh? You were never that clear. You were ambivalent, like me. It was a free ride, with a built-in babysitter."

She pauses, checking her memory against his. He can picture her lips, drawn back in thought in her bony face, like an astronaut's when the G's of force begin to tug. She says, "Maybe it was Pennsylvania I needed to get out of. It's all very dear and friendly, but there's this thick air or whatever, this moral undertone. I think Judy is better off without all that to rebel against."

"And Roy?"

"He's scary, of course, spending so much time at the computer, but a lot of his friends are like that too. Where you and I see a screen full of more or less the same old crap, they see a magic space, full of tunnels and passageways and pots of gold. He's grown up with it."

He is being invited, he realizes, to talk as a parent, a collaborator in this immense accidental enterprise of bringing another human being into the world. "Yeah, well, there's always something. TV, cars, movies, baseball. Lore. People have to have lore. Anyway, Roy has always been kind of a space man."

"He masturbates like crazy, though. There's all this porn on the Internet. And he doesn't have the housekeeping sense to wipe up the sheet with a handkerchief."

Nelson sighs, seeing sex loom ahead for Roy as a dark and heartless omnivore. "Well, yes. He thinks it doesn't show. I thought the same thing, I guess. How's your life, by the way, in the romance department?"

He wouldn't have dared ask a week ago, but moving out has given him a fresh footing with not only his stepfather but his estranged wife. Pru is a year older than he and that year has figured in their relationship from the start, making her seem a greater prize when they dated at Kent State, enlarged by adult features like a secretary's salary and a car (a salt-rotted tan Valiant) and an apartment of her own up in Stow and knowing how to fuck, muscling her clitoris against his pelvic bone and coming matter-offactly as if it was her woman's plain right. But then once they were married that year's difference became an embarrassment, as if he had just switched mothers. No wonder she and Dad got together. Then in recent years the year's difference had swung back to mattering less, a slightly awkward fact like her also being left-handed, once they outgrew the year when she was forty and he only thirty-nine. He was forty-one when she left him, leaving in the muggy heat of August to enroll the children in Akron schools. She had complained for years about living with his mother and Ronnie and about his dead-end job babysitting these pathetic dysfunctionals, boosting his own ego at their expense, caring more about them than he did about his own wife and children, but what it boiled down to in his baffled mind was something she once shouted, her green eyes bright as broken glass in her reddened face: My life with you is too small! Too small. As if being a greaseball lawyer's input organizer and easy lay was bigger. But the size of a life is how you feel about it. Pru was one of seven children and, though her father, a former steamfitter, is dead of too many Buds and her wispy little lace-curtain-Irish-Catholic mother sits in assisted-living housing, she has six siblings and their broods to give her a big noisy theatre to do an aunt act in. Whereas Aunt Mim had only him. And now Annabelle.

"It's great, Mr. Nosy," says Pru. "Actually, I've given Gekopoulos notice, beginning next year. I'd like something more having to do with people, maybe in public relations. Slapping up injury claims and divorce settlements out of glossarized boilerplate isn't exactly non-repetitive."

He suppresses the insight that life as a whole isn't exactly non-repetitive. "It doesn't sound as if the job uses all your abilities."

"Well, thanks, but what abilities? somebody might ask. Still I have this crazy idea I must be good for something. I mean, I can be pleasant. People like me, at least at first. Maybe I should enlist with Judy in stewardess school. Except my palms get all sweaty whenever I fly. I hate how long it takes to land, skimming in over all these highways and cemeteries."

She is spending Christmas with her mother and siblings and then driving to him, all the way across the great Commonwealth, its mountains and quarries, its mills and farms, along the Turnpike for eight or nine hours, Judy spelling her at the wheel, Roy playing video games at every rest stop. "When you come here after Christmas, where do you all want to sleep?" he asks. "I have only this one room. You could stay with Mom and Ronnie and I'll have the kids here in sleeping bags. Or is Judy too old for that?"

"Let's think about it," Pru says. "The basic thing is they see their father."

"Right. But can I say something? It'll be nice for me to see you, too."

"Uh-huh," she says, her tone Akron tough-girl flat.

"Let's try to have some fun when you come," he urges. "Life is too short."

"I'll put on Roy," she says. "Judy's out."

"How's it going?" he asks his son.

"O.K., good," is the guarded answer. Roy has always had this strange deep voice that takes Nelson by surprise. Judy he had no trouble loving from the start-her solemn hazel gaze, little square feet, her ankles flexible as wrists, the little split bun between her legs. Roy with his stern stare and upjutting button of a penis had a touch of the alien invader, the relentless rival demanding space, food, attention.

"You got my e-mail, I guess."

"Yeah. Thanks."

"How's school going?"

"Good."

"Are you learning anything exciting?"

"Not really. The teacher in Computer Skills showed us some faulty programming in Windows 98. He thinks Bill Gates is holding the Net-surfing technology back at this point and the government is right."

This may have been the longest utterance he has ever heard from Roy. He says, "Well, you're way ahead of me. You're more at home with this stuff than I'll ever be."

"It's easy. It's all Boolean logic."

"Is there anything you want to do in Diamond County? Shop at the outlets? Eat at the restaurant on top of Mt. Judge? Go visit that limestone cave again? They may close it in the winter, actually." As he runs through this bleak list it occurs to him that there is nothing to do in Diamond County-just be born, live, and die.

But Roy's grave, resonant voice has picked up speed and purpose. "Dad, you may not know this but one of the greatest new biotech companies in the world is in Diamond County. In Hemmigtown, you know where that is?"

"Yes, I know." Nelson is wearying of being an attentive father. His son is a nerd, he realizes, a bore to his classmates and a nag to his teachers.

"Genomics dot com. They're famous on the Internet. They're learning how to transplant genes so you can make viruses that will eat people's diseases. And counteract the parts of a cell that cause aging. And all this neat stuff."

"Roy, it sounds horrible, frankly. If nobody dies, where will all the new bodies go? But I'll check into it. You want to visit?"

"Well, I'd like at least to go look at the outside of the building."

"If you go inside, you might catch a virus."

"They wouldn't let you into that part of it."

"As I say, I'll look into it. I'm thrilled they're doing something here that you've heard of."

The boy is warming up. "Dad, did you know that eventually computer chips won't be manufactured at all, they'll be grown, like bacilli in a petri dish? Single ions will act as transistors."

"Roy, I don't want to keep you from your homework."

"Yeah. O.K. Goodbye." And the receiver rattles down before Nelson has time to say, "I love you."

Christmas lights are up in Brewer, from a string of multicolored miniature twinkle-bulbs swagged in the window of the 7-Eleven on Almond Street to the green-and-red-floodlit concrete eagles at the top of the twenty-story county courthouse. Nelson can see this top, with its red-lipped flagpole, from his apartment's side window if he presses his face against the glass. In the commercial area around the Center, Discount Office Supplies has arranged conical stacks of reams of paper and automatic pencils and boxes of computer disks in its display window and drenched them with tinsel and confetti, and PrintSmart has duplicated a picture of a wreath on one sheet each of all the colored papers it can supply and hung these on a long string like wash, like laundry for a rainbow world. Within the Center, the clients, under staff supervision, have made a brave attempt to keep the holiday blues away with cotton snow and lo-glo electric candles in the windows and a seven-foot tree as overloaded with handmade decorations as a disturbed mind is with inappropriate thoughts.

Nelson can walk home from work now, and enjoys these ten blocks west from Weiser Street past the old cough-drop factory, deserted but still smelling of menthol after all these years, and through the blocks of row houses put up, a block at a time, by workingmen's savings-and-loans associations in the century before this one, which is down to its last days. Some of the present residents have decorated their little porches and fanlighted doorways and front windows with a Catholic or Pentecostal fervor -doubled and tripled strands of gaudy colored bulbs and thick fringes of tinsel and here and there a plaster creche or an oleograph image of the adult Jesus as if to say this is what the starlit baby came to, the bearded God-Man born to be crucified.

Already they know Nelson at the 7-Eleven, and he knows the people who man the counter and guard the till: the slangy, hefty bleached blonde who sometimes has her little brown boy doing homework over in the corner behind the ten-cent photocopy machine; the frowning white girl with indifferent skin and close-cropped hair and a single tuft dyed green, always reading a fat college textbook and acting annoyed if you say anything friendly; the oldish man with a pleading, watery-eyed look and a very modest command of English, some kind of refugee from Communism's evaporated empire; the alarmingly big black guy, his head shaved, who has a rap and hip-hop station turned loud on the radio and is usually on the phone talking unintelligibly in Caribbean English; the tiny Hispanic girl with frizzy hair and a silver tongue-stud. They hardly notice now when Nelson comes in around five-thirty and buys his microwave dinner for the night and a half-pint carton of milk for his cereal, to sit overnight on the windowsill. The December nights have been so unseasonably warm, the milk quickly sours.

Nelson finds TV stupid but likes the technicolor fire of it, the way it flares up within a few seconds of his coming in the door and punching the remote. A genie when you rub a lamp, a multitude of genies. He watches until he feels his intelligence being too rudely insulted or his patience being too arrogantly tested by the commercials, which interrupt at an ever-greedier ratio whenever the program gets interesting. Yet some commercials he waits for eagerly. There is the Nicoderm commercial that features this neat-looking woman about his age, with a slight crimp in her chin indicating maturity and experience, in a straight-shouldered dress, telling you what a sensible, efficient method this patch provides for quitting smoking. He loves the level, not-quite-smiling way she looks at you, implying that once you quit she and you will go on together on a purified basis. And he loves even more the younger woman advertising Secret Platinum, "the strongest deodorizer you can buy without a prescription." She is dark-complected and with utterly no fat on her except in her quite full lips, and as her pitch progresses, and her body jigs and jags across the screen, she sweats in growing torrents and at the commercial's climax pops a muscle, cocking her arm with a devilish sideways look right out at him. She works out hard and would fuck hard, the implication is. He needs a woman, Christ. Some nights, like in the joke his son e-mailed him, there isn't enough skin left to close his eyes. He tries to analyze himself: why do these two women in the commercials get to him? Both are strong, he sees. He wants a woman who will take over. The possibilities at work for him are poor: clients are off-bounds and your colleagues should be, even if they were more appealing than plain, earnest Katie Shirk, or pouty, snotty Andrea, the art therapist, or Elenita, the Dominican receptionist, with her hair dyed orange and heaped on her head in woolly skeins like Sideshow Bob in The Simpsons, or Esther, who is Jewish and older than he and married to a downtown lawyer and too strong. In the bars he used to go to, the girls have gotten too much younger than he, so young they seem silly, like those two on the other side of the wall. They really do say "like" and "you know" and come down funny on the ends of their words like Valley Girls, tucking the "r"s down deep into their throats. He thinks they are putting him on, imitating Lisa Kudrow, but it's just the way they naturally talk. When one of the two girls on the other side of his wall stops giggling and her voice and the rumbly one of a date entwine with fewer and fewer words into silence and animal sounds, he cannot feel too jealous; it's like undressing a Barbie doll in his mind, and finding her smooth and stiff, no nipples and the legs don't bend.

He is waiting for some woman to call. Mom calls, to check on how he is, but there is more and more space between her calls. Local real estate is lively, as if at the end of the year-the century, the millennium, the world as we've known it-people are agitated and looking for some sort of renewal by changing shelter. She herself is looking forward to Florida, where she still has the condo in Deleon, once Christmas and the visit from her grandchildren is over. "To be frank, Nelson, I almost dread it, it will seem so peculiar, with you not in the house."

He is firm. "Ronnie acted like a prick to my sister, and those other Harrisons weren't much better. You were O.K., but just barely. After all, you were married to Dad for thirty-three years."

"Well, his having a love child doesn't sweeten my memories necessarily."

He smiles at the quaint phrase "love child." Nelson has always been close to his mother. It was drummed into him that he took after the Springers-little and dark-eyed, and something of a smooth operator like his grandfather, and he wonders now if he shouldn't let go of that. This sudden sister, this love child, is a chance to draw closer to Dad, the Angstrom side within him.

Yet his third lunch with Annabelle at The Greenery feels like a pullback. Elm Street is bleak in December, and part of the bleakness is the uncanny warmth, over sixty today, wiping out any anticipation of a white Christmas and rousing the same fear of global warming as this summer's drought. The planet is being cooked. The oceans will rise, the croplands will become deserts. The Greenery seems demoralized. The only Christmas decorations up are some flattened white spheroids of a glimmering ersatz material in the window and against the mirrors behind the counter: not round real Christmas balls but ones in two-and-a-half dimensions, like some computer graphic. Once again he apologizes to Annabelle for his extended family's bad behavior.

"It was bound to be awkward," she says. "I never should have gone."

"My mistake. I couldn't imagine anybody's not seeing you as I do."

"And how is that, Nelson?"

"As a lovely person," he says. A love child. He has an impulse to put his hands on hers where they rest, short-nailed and broad, on the Formica tabletop. She pulls her hands back as if reading his mind.

"I'm not such a lovely person, Nelson," she says. "I've done things, and had them done to me."

"We all have," he says. As the words leave his mouth they sound lamely big-brotherish to him. 'That's life," he adds, which is also dumb. But what was she talking about, exactly?

"I think," Annabelle says, "we should rest easy for a while. You're living alone and have things to sort out with your family. I'm not really your family."

Like those white Christmas balls that aren't really balls. "You are, dammit."

"I'll be going away before Christmas and some days after. That girl I mentioned, we were at St. Joe's together, she and her husband have invited me to go with them to Las Vegas, and, you know, I figured why not, I've never been there or hardly anywhere. They say if you don't gamble everything else is pretty cheap. There are all these fantastic new buildings you can wander around in for free."

"Hey, you must look up my Aunt Mim. Your Aunt Mim. Your father's sister. Seriously. I told her about you and she was enthusiastic. She's a real card, honest. She runs a beauty parlor out there. I don't know what name she uses now, she's had husbands, but Miriam Angstrom is her maiden name and I'll give you her number to call. I'll call her and warn her. Please do it. Please. It won't be awkward, I know. Aunt Mim is a real sport." It relieves him to think of Annabelle taken care of on the holiday, so he can sneak over to Ronnie and Mom's without a bad conscience. He wonders if everybody has a conscience like his, crimped early and always uneasy.

'I don't want to, Nelson. It'll be one more thing."

"Suit yourself," he says, sharply. She has rejected one of the few things he could give her, a treat and treasure out of his own genes. 'I'll leave her number on your machine but not tell her you're coming." The dispirited atmosphere inside The Greenery is getting to him. He and this half-stranger keep running out of things to say. Finally he asks her, resorting to television news, "So what do you think? Should the little Cuban boy be sent back to his father in that miserable country or kept in Disney World?"

"Sent back to his father."

"I agree." It was as uncanny as the weather, the way he and she agreed about everything.

The phone does ring one evening, while he's watching a Star Trek rerun. It's not a woman but a male voice from the past, Billy Fosnacht. "I got the number from your mother. I heard from little Ron Harrison you moved out. His wife is one of my patients."

"What a bitch she is. She's far Christian right."

"If you knew her jawbone like I do, you'd feel sorry for her. It's chalk. I've done three implants, with my fingers crossed."

Billy went to dental school in Boston, near Boston, Tufts it was called. He and Nelson, friends in childhood, saw each other around Brewer in Nelson's bad-boy days, up at the Laid-Back and other local hangouts, but since Nelson got clean ten years ago there's been a fading away. "What's an implant?" he asks.

"Nellie, how can you not know what an implant is? It's what I do. It's an osseous-integrated artificial tooth. The best ones are made in Sweden. You pull the real tooth, which is rotten by now right down to the root, otherwise you'd set a gold post in the root and crown it, and you open up the gum and insert a titanium screw with an inner thread as well as an outer, and if the bone bonds with it in five or six months you screw a fake tooth into it and the bite is as good as new. Better than new. I do three, four a day. It's the only time I'm happy, when I'm doing implants."

"You're not happy, Billy?"

"Forget I said that. I'll fill you in later. Let's have lunch. On me. I'm flush, and no wife to spend it for me."

Billy has learned a new way of talking-punchy, self-mocking, rapid. In their shared boyhood he had been four months older, a few inches taller, and the one to get the latest kiddie-fad for a present first. His mother and Dad had a little episode in the sexual mess of the Sixties, everybody splitting up back then. Since then Mrs. Fosnacht has died of breast cancer and Billy's father-a weedy little guy who used to run the music store above the old Baghdad movie theatre on Weiser Street, where the great hole in the ground is now-faded south to New Orleans, where jazz came from. The old playmates' conversation reveals that, though their clienteles rarely overlap, they both work at giving fresh starts to members of the Brewer population, and that in middle age both are at personal loose ends. "Sure," says Nelson, of lunch.

They agree to meet downtown, at the restaurant on Weiser Square that was Johnny Frye's Chophouse many years ago and then became the Café Barcelona and then the Crêpe House and then Salad Binge and now under new management has been revived as Casa della Pasta, pasta supposed to be good for your arteries while having a little more substance than salads or crêpes. The day they meet, as it turns out, is the one after the day when Charles Schulz announced he was ending Peanuts and Jimmy Carter went down to Panama to give them the Canal.

"He got to give it away twice," Billy points out. "Once when he was President and now when he's a has-been. You notice Clinton's too smart to show his face. In ten years the Red Chinese will control it, just you watch. Those spics'll sell it off."

Nelson's father within him winces when anyone threatens to disparage Clinton or any sitting President. Dad had never much liked Billy, complaining about the boy's fat lips. Yet, seeing him, Nelson cannot but warm: here is a partner in his childish dreams, the conspiracy of imagined speed and triumphant violence that boys erect around themselves like a tent in the back yard under the scary stars. Billy, who used to be heavy like his wall-eyed, doomed mother, has become weedy like his father, though taller. His hair, a curly black like neither of his parents', has thinned back from his brow even more decidedly than Nelson's straight hair, its convict cut. Billy has a bald spot at the back of his head the size of a yarmulke. There was always something about Billy that kept people from taking him absolutely seriously, and that light something has become Jewish, quick-tongued and self-mocking and hypochondriac, caught from his teachers and colleagues in prosthetic dentistry. Yes, he says, his dad is still alive, filling in on clarinet in so-called Dixieland bands, though being white is a big disadvantage, and making ends meet in various fishy ways. Yes, he, Billy, has been married-twice, in fact, once to a nice girl from Newton he met up there in New England and then to one of his assistants in his practice down here. The second marriage broke up the first and then developed its own twinges. She was twelve years younger and he didn't want to go out as much as she did and she got tired of his night sweats and yelling out in his sleep and his moods.

"Moods?" Nelson asks.

"Depressed, irritable, could't sleep. Weekends I'd be so beat and bored I'd pray for an emergency to call. Tooth-structure loss I could handle. Wives," he goes on. "They shut down without even knowing they're doing it. The fancy stuff goes and then even the basics are cut back to once a week, then twice a month, and then just holidays and trips abroad. Portugal, Austria, Acapulco-all that way just to get a little nooky from my lawful wedded."

"Well, in my case," Nelson begins, but Billy overrides him: "And then when you suggest maybe this marriage isn't working, they act stunned and tell their lawyers to go for all they can get, this isn't their idea."

Years of dealing with people with their mouths immobilized has made Billy an easy conversational partner, needing very little prompting. "Yelling out in your sleep?" Nelson asks.

The waitress, who looks just a little like the sweaty olive-skinned beauty in the Secret Platinum commercial, interrupts with the day's specials. Billy orders bowties with diced shrimp, and Nelson the mushroom ravioli. Both decline wine in favor of water. "Have the sparkling Pellegrino, it's hyper expensive," Billy says. "This is on me, remember." He tells Nelson, "Yeah, awful dreams. In one of them I'm crammed into the trunk of a car, my face right up against the jack, and I can see the car-you know how in dreams you can see things from inside and out both-being slid into a river, like that mother did to those kids in South Carolina years ago. In another dream I'm in one place and my house is burning in another, and I can't get to it, even though I can see the flames burning through the floor right at my feet." He pauses. "So-what do you think?"

So-this is why he's asked Nelson to lunch, to get free therapy. It wasn't just those good old days tenting out in the back yard. Nelson grudges being a wise man outside the treatment center. He says, "We don't do dreams much in therapy any more. There's no time. The insurance companies want fast action-in because of some crisis, 'Here, take these pills,' out. The second dream, though, has an obvious reference. The night I was staying over at your apartment with your mother and puppy and our house burned down in Penn Villas a mile away."

Billy puffs his lips out suspiciously, and his eyes pop a little, too. "When was that? How old were we?"

"Twelve, maybe you were thirteen. Are you serious, you've forgotten it?"

"Well, when you mention it, it kind of comes back, but as a news item mostly. Listen, Nelson. Forget the dreams. I have attacks in the middle of the day. I break out in a sweat like I'm on a treadmill, I can feel my heart doing double time. I think about death, about being sealed in a little lead box and the whole universe going on, rotating, exploding, whatever the hell all it does, on and on and eventually pooping out while I'm still in there, totally forgotten. I'm going to die, I can't get it out of my head. You have to wear these latex gloves now and I have the fantasy a little drop of blood is going to seep through from some gay guy's gums and give me AIDS. All it takes is one little drop from a micro-abrasion. It's taking the pleasure out of doing implants."

Nelson has to laugh, his old friend is so self-obsessed, so solemn in his mental misery. Does he want his fingernails, his nostril-hairs, to last forever? "By our age, Billy, we should have come to terms with this stuff."

"Have you?"

"I think so. It's like a nap, only you don't wake up and have to find your shoes." He is being hard-hearted; there is agony here, even if Billy is a comical old friend. Not only are his lips fat, his nose has gotten fat; it sits there in the middle of his face like something added, its flesh faintly off-color. Nelson advises, more compassionately, "Believe in God and the afterlife if that would help. There's some evidence-people who've gone through an NDE are absolutely convinced and can hardly wait to get back to the other side."

"God," Billy sneers. "How can you believe in God after the Holocaust? What did God do to help my mother? They cut off her tits and she still died."

Nelson remembers Mrs. Fosnacht, her helpless outward-turned eye, her wide-open look and big friendly untidy body with a slip usually showing and shoes that bulged at the sides as if they hurt. She had been nice; she had thought Nelson was a good influence on Billy. "Anxiety disorders," he offers, "level off, usually. The human organism gets tired of sustaining them and finds a distraction."

"Nellie, I can't do tunnels. I'm not that crazy about bridges, either, especially the Running Horse, the way it arches up. But how can I go to conferences in New York if I can't do a tunnel? I have to go all the way up to Fort Lee and sweat it out on the George Washington."

"You're lucky," Nelson tells him. "There aren't any tunnels around Brewer."

"No, but there are underpasses. I have to force myself to drive through that one at Eisenhower and Seventh. I have zero tolerance for being enclosed. Even here, you notice, I had to get the chair nearer the exit. Airplanes-I haven't been on one since Moira and I split up. They're tin tunnels that go five miles high."

"How did you handle these fears," Nelson asks, "when you were married?"

Billy lifts his hands, superclean and with wrinkled tips from being so much in latex gloves, to let the waitress put his mound of bowties and diced shrimp in front of him. "Shoshana," he answers, "was kind of jittery herself, and I was the stabilizer. With Moira, like I said, we flew all these places to get her to put out, and I would take a couple of stiff belts in the airport lounge."

The waitress sets down Nelson's hot ravioli, the steam fragrant of mushrooms, of secretive gray-black fungoid growth, of damp earth, of greenhouses.

Billy talks on: "Maybe I was too young in my married period to think I was really going to die. I mean really, totally-zip-zero. You will be nada. I can't eat." He puts his fork down.

Nelson picks up his own fork, saying, "It's a concept the mind isn't constructed to accept. So stop trying to force it to. Come on, eat. Enjoy. Have I told you, Billy, I've discovered I have a sister? No, I'm not kidding."

Christmas for Nelson feels least phony at the Center. These unsettled psyches and unwashed bodies, burdens to society and to their families, who in many cases have abandoned them to a life of shelters and halfway houses, respond to the dim old tale-the homeless couple tainted by a mysterious pregnancy, the child born amid straw and dung, the secret splendor sensed by shepherds and donkeys and oxen standing mute in their stalls. Glenn, he of the blue eyelids and glittering nostril-stud, can play the piano, a skill left over from a closeted adolescence; he extracts the sturdy standard carols from the out-of-tune upright's keyboard while obese Shirley displays a small silvery voice and Dr. Howard Wu a brassy, enthusiastic baritone. The doctor's joining in, with Esther Bloom a conspicuous good sport beside him, singing the Christian words, emboldens the clients: the substance-dependent and delusional, the phobic and borderline, Rosa with her new friend the compulsive nail-biter, whose name is Josephine Foote, and Jim the lusty, swag-bellied addict, who belts out every first line from memory, but then his brain lets go. Nelson is pleased to see Michael DiLorenzo here, letting his cool be thawed, sharing a song sheet with little black Bethleen, a bipolar. The boy's lips move but his ale-dark eyes beneath their handsome brows are elsewhere, muddled and shuttling out of rhythm; he has not shaved this morning, which Nelson takes as a good sign, that his mother's nagging is letting up. All in their ragged fashion get with it, taking comfort in the organized noise, the approach to melodic unison, the illusion of a happy family here before the tree crammed with artifacts produced in Andrea's art sessions. There are cookies and cake and ice cream after the sing, and little presents from the staff, all bought at Discount Office Supplies-phallic four-color ballpoint pens for the men and vaginal pocket diaries for the women. In turn there filters up from the clients to this and that staff member shy tokens, enigmatic thanks for care given. Nelson receives from Josephine an intricate collage, mounted on a lacquered black board, of smiling faces cut from magazine advertisements and arranged, bodiless, as thick as flowers in a bouquet. Or is it more of a snowflake scissored together of smiles? Dr. Wu receives a pagoda made of matchsticks, and a lumpy arch of colored clays which Jim explains is a rainbow, pointing to the "pot" at one end. Everyone, onlooking, laughs. The basement floods with the warm faith that the world beyond these old elementary-school walls is friendly, remembers them, wants them to be well and to rejoice.

This is Christmas Eve, a Friday. Next day, Christmas at Mom and Ronnie's seems perfunctory. Nelson drives over to Mt. Judge in the morning, retrieving the Corolla from the curb on Almond Street, where it sits parked for days. The 7-Eleven is open, even as children are opening the presents brought by an omniscient, omnipresent Santa Claus. Weiser Square and the city park are deserted but for a blowing plastic bag and a vagrant stooped pedestrian studying his shadow on this wanly sunny holy day. The mall before the viaduct is a dead-empty lake of striped asphalt. GREEN MILE TOY II ANNA KING GALAX QUEST.

Mom is hard to give to and always was. He used to give her candy, knowing she'd right away let him share it. As he got older his mind had to keep darting away from dainty things, underwear and stockings for her legs that he knew she was proud of. In his childhood they were held up with garters attached to a girdle and had darker widths at the top that were stirring to glimpse. Pantyhose on the other hand had that darker patch in the crotch, shaped like a big lima bean. Once in his teens he gave her some L'eggs and even they, pulled filmy from their egg-shaped containers, made him blush. This year he is strapped-eighty-five a week for his room, three sixty a month to Pru as child support, extras like the mini-fridge he bought to keep his milk from going sour don't leave much from a weekly salary hardly four C's after everybody's tax bite-so he settles on a dozen Top-Flites for Ronnie, even though Dad always said he had a sledge-hammer swing, and for Mom a Better Your Bridge computer program, imagining her up there using the machine in the little room that used to be Mom-mom Springer's sewing room. But Ronnie says, here in this living room where everything has been pushed around to make room for the Christmas tree, that he doesn't want to risk overloading his hardware and crashing the whole memory with all his financial records in it, back to the Seventies.

To ease this rejection, Mom says, "Honestly, Nelson, I doubt if I could use the program, it looks too complicated, I have trouble following even what Doris explains to me, so patiently every time."

"All right, I'll take it back," he snaps, "and get you something else. How about a sexy nightie?" To him she has given flannel pajamas and a cable-knit maroon sweater, as if to keep him warm away from her presence.

Ronnie has come up with a strange gift, some kind of a needle:

The Art of Happiness, by the Dalai Lama and an American doctor. Nelson is startled because, in unwrapping, the saintly Asian on the jacket at first peek suggests his late father, not so much physically as in the aura of sly alertness, a tentative tricky lovable something in the guarded smile. Ron explains, in his insurance-selling voice, "I thought since you disdain the Christian religion maybe something along other lines would appeal to you. It's very important, Nelson, to have a spiritual outlet in our lives. There's a tremendous, worldwide upwelling of spirituality to greet the new millennium."

He sounds like he's quoting somebody. Nelson checks the book for any mark to indicate it had been remaindered, and sees none. Ronnie paid full price for this odd gift. "The Dalai Lama," Nelson says. How kindly the tentative, watchful face, in its tinted square glasses, smiles out at him: a father he might have had. "Thanks, Ron," he says. "I'll look into it during my lonely nights." Maybe it's a peace offering but there's no need; after that phone conversation after the Thanksgiving blow-up Nelson feels right with Ron, as right as he'll ever get. Ron is just one more or less well-meaning American bozo, balling Mom or not. Once the testosterone goes, you're left with a limp and a spiritual outlet.

He wants to get out of the house before Ron Junior and Margie and the three kids arrive for the midday feast. He's feasted enough with these people for one year. Alex is staying in Virginia with his broken family but Georgie is coming over from New York on the Bieber bus. Ron and Mom tell Nelson again he would be more than welcome to stay, they'll set another place, but after Thanksgiving he knows that wherever he's at home it's not with his stepbrothers.

At the door, his mother says, "Oh, I nearly forgot. Some woman called early this morning. That Esther who runs your clinic. I said to her, didn't she know this was Christmas morning? She said she did, but she'd like you to call her nevertheless. She was quite short with me; these Jews are so touchy."

"I can't imagine why. I'll call her from my place. Thanks, Mom. Merry Christmas. My love to all those other Harrisons." He kisses her little dry cheek and thinks how she seems to be shrivelling. Osteoporosis, like they keep advertising on television. Everything leaches our bones. The neighbor couple are out in the side yard with their boy and his new, red-runnered sled, though there's not a flake of snow on the grass. The sun makes all the decorations on the way back to Brewer, all the lights and tinsel and the plastic Santa Clauses and red-nosed reindeer, look washed-out, leached of joy. He stops at the 7-Eleven and picks up a frozen shepherd's pie and coffee in a seasonal plastic cup with a holly-leaf-and-berry pattern. They make pretty good coffee, actually. Drawing on his slender social-work Spanish, he says "Feliz Navidad" to the frizzy-haired girl behind the counter. She responds with a smile, dazzling in her dusky face, and a ribbon of responding Spanish of which Nelson only understands "Muchath graciath, theňor, "the "s"s thickened by her tongue-stud.

Back in his room, Nelson sips the coffee and dials Esther's home number. He gets the husband-a mellifluous, condescending, lawyerly voice. He is rich; Esther doesn't need the money; she runs the Center because she loves mankind. When she comes on she sounds subdued, even shaky. "Nelson, I thought you should know, since you worked with the DiLorenzo boy."

"Know what?" But the flutter of premonition has already risen in his chest. He just saw Michael yesterday, at the fringe of the crowd around the piano, trying to join in. He had wished him a happy holiday. The boy had responded, "O.K., sir," and looked away. He had neglected to shave. But he had begun to participate in groups, overcoming his distaste for the other clients. He wanted to get better.

"He committed suicide. In the night. They found him this morning. DiLorenzo himself called the Center. He was in shock but talked about suing us and Birkits."

That inner space where he had once felt a knife sliding as he tried to empathize with Michael turns more slippery; Nelson feels he is reaching down to bring something back but his hands are soapy and he cannot bring it back, it sinks. You will be nada. "Oh my God," he tells Esther. "No. How did he do it?"

"With a plastic suit-bag. Tied around his neck with a necktie. Sending his parents some kind of message, you could theorize. 'You want dry-cleaning, here's dry-cleaning.'"

"We lost him. I feel I lost him."

"Nelson, don't be egotistical. We do our best, but we can't do it all. I just wanted you to hear about Michael before it's in the Sunday papers. Everybody uses Perfect; it'll be news." She is brave and crisp but her Center has taken a blow, a black mark.

"How serious do you think the father was about suing?"

"Who knows? The man is a doer, he needs to act."

"He kept an appointment with us the day of the hurricane. He trusted us. I should have spotted something, I did drop a note to Howie about the meds. The Trilafon wasn't quieting the voices."

"Don't do this to yourself, Nelson. It is not your fault."

That's what they all say. That's what he said to them. But when she hangs up the boy is still dead. Sealed under black glass, gliding feet first to nowhere. Nelson pictures Mrs. DiLorenzo lying in a darkened room, the daughters flying in from their disrupted Christmases, the girlishly handsome young face smeared on the inside of an adhesive bubble like an astronaut's helmet. The strength it must take not to rip the smothering plastic with your fingernails, the furious determination to smother the voices and silence their obscenities.

He feels too sick, too sunk, to eat. He needs to call somebody, but Annabelle is in Las Vegas and Pru is in Ohio and should be allowed to have her Christmas with their children and her family. Mom is entertaining her born-again step-children by now. Celebration has stifled all but a little of the traffic noise that usually permeates the city, though out on Eisenhower Avenue a few scoffers and loners roar by. The end of this very short day has begun to darken his windows before he has the heart to microwave the shepherd's pie and turn on the Oahu Bowl. Hawaii beats Oregon, twenty-three to seventeen, and on the six-o'clock news Jerry Seinfeld has married at last, the Hubble Space Telescope is back in working order, and some Sikhs have hijacked an Indian plane for no clear reason and are jerking it all around the sky. Michael DiLorenzo is not mentioned. He is strictly local news.

"Hi. You're back. How was Las Vegas?"

"Nelson, it was a blast. It's the future or something. My girlfriend and her husband talked me into gambling and I won two hundred dollars one night and lost it the next, of course."

"I bet you didn't call my aunt Mim."

"Well-surprise, surprise-I did, and she couldn't have been sweeter, or funnier. She remembered my mother dimly, from some encounter in a bar that used to be down on Running Horse Street, and had a lot to say about my father. Our father."

"Yeah? What?"

"Oh, what a caring older brother he was, and how hard he worked to perfect his basketball skills. I mean, it didn't just come to him naturally. And how supportive and non-judgmental he always was of her, even after she became a hooker."

"She said that?"

"Sure, why not? She said my mother was never a real hooker, because she wasn't organized in her approach. She even got us into O, at the Cirque du Soleil, if that's how you pronounce it. It beats anything you could ever see in New York-underwater ballet and bungee jumpers and a boat that rises right up into the air! I was absolutely riveted."

"Well," he complains, "while you were having such a great time, I ate Christmas dinner alone and had a young client over at the Center commit suicide."

"Oh, Nelson, no! How terrible! Was he one of yours?"

"We don't divide them up that way, but I had counselled him. I thought he was getting better-more engaged, and reporting no auditory hallucinations. Shows how little I know."

"Well, you shouldn't blame yourself," Annabelle went on in her practical, kind, slightly out-of-focus voice. "We're caregivers, not miracle workers. Just before I went away Mr. Potteiger died. He was eighty-six and terribly frail, with hardly any use of his legs, but such a sharp, frisky mind. He used to flirt! One morning I showed up at his rooms, he was in elderly housing over toward Oriole, and a little Post-it note on the door said he'd passed away. Just those words. 'Passed Away.'"

"It's not exactly the same," Nelson begins to explain, but she cuts him short.

"How's your lovely family? Did they arrive?"

"Yeah, sort of."

"Sort of?"

"Judy didn't come. She wanted to stay with her boyfriend in his apartment, the roommate is off for the holidays skiing in Colorado, and then go with him, the boyfriend, to this big millennial blast in formal clothes in some fancy home the boyfriend knows the son of up in Silver Lake, old rubber money. The guy sounds like a real sponge."

"I knew you'd say 'sponge'!"

"She and Pru had a big fight about it and finally Pru gave up. After all the kid will be twenty next month, and she didn't ask to go to Akron, she's just trying to make the best of the situation her messed-up parents handed her. She drove all the way herself, Pru, just with Roy; she was beat when she arrived, about nine o'clock Monday night, they had kept stopping at what used to be Howard Johnson'ses." It makes him weary just to think about his aging, uncontrollable family.

"Where are they staying?"

"What's with all these questions? At Mom's. It's too small and crummy here, and the morning traffic out on Eisenhower shakes the place." He does not tell her that last night, Tuesday night, he went over after work for a dinner Pru had made in Mom's kitchen and stayed the night in his old room at the back of the house, while Pru took Judy's old room in front and Roy the little room with the computer, on a cot. They all just fell into place, except that he wanted to be in bed with Pru, or at least see her in her underwear, and had tossed and turned. There were too many people in his head, like that Christmas plaque Jo Foote had made him. Among other things he was afraid if he fell asleep he would see that man practicing chip shots in the back yard again.

"That's sad, Nelson," his sister was saying. "Roy at least should be over with you."

"Yeah, but I have to work, the Center is shorthanded this week, the suicide has driven the clients crazier. And Roy and Ronnie get along oddly great. They talk about megabytes and RAMs and sit up there at the computer all day, cruising the Internet for God knows what. Filth, probably. Last night Ron took him to a high-school basketball game. I guess there's this holiday tournament on in the county, a big deal, girls' and boys' teams both."

"And how do you feel about your daughter's not coming to visit? Are you hurt?"

"Relieved, in a way. She's gotten to be a handful. She's a redhead, like her mother."

"But she needs to see her father."

"Pru told her that, and Judy said if he doesn't care enough about me to come out here why should I go there and miss an event that only comes once every thousand years? She doesn't seem to think it'll happen in Brewer, only in Akron."

"Well," Annabelle says primly, "it doesn't sound very satisfactory. When am I going to meet Pru, and my dear little nephew?"

"That's what we need to talk about. What are you doing Friday night?"

"That's the-"

"I know. The last of the last."

"I was just going to go to bed and let it all wash over me."

"Yeah, me too, but Pru is as bad as her daughter. She wants to do something. I didn't want you to come to Mom's house ever again, not after Thanksgiving, but maybe we could swing by that evening and pick up Pru and say hello to Roy and go out to a meal and a movie. I don't want to go to any dance or anything."

"You with two women? That's weird, Nelson."

"No kidding. I agree. But there's this guy I used to play with as a kid, my best friend you could say, now he's a dentist who does Swedish implants, who called me up for lunch the other week and really seems a kind of lost soul. He was married twice but isn't now. Suppose he joined us? His name is Billy Fosnacht."

"It still sounds weird. Two people I never met, and you."

"Listen, do you trust your brother or not? You'll have no problem with Pru, everybody likes her, she used to be beautiful, and Billy's a kind of loser-my father used to call him a goon-but it's not like it's a date, he'll just be along. He makes great money, by the way. You have any better plans? Like with that girlfriend and her husband? Or have they seen enough of you lately?" This is cruel, perhaps.

She doesn't say yes or no. She says, "They say there may be terrorist attacks."

"In Brewer? On what, the pretzel factories?"

"The mayor of Seattle cancelled their celebration today."

"He has the Space Needle to worry about."

"Nelson, I hope you know what you're doing." This is Annabelle's way of agreeing.

"No," he says, feeling cheerful for the first time this terminal week, "I don't, frankly."

"And this is my son, Roy."

Annabelle says in auntly fashion, "What a tall boy! It's wonderful to meet you, Roy."

They are all, including Billy Fosnacht, bunched awkwardly in the living room, crowded in the insufficient space between the cut-plush sofa and cobbler's-bench coffee table on one side and the Christmas tree and the Zenith television with its jumbly crown of knickknacks on the other. Pru and Annabelle have shaken hands like two big cats brushing whiskers, and Ronnie and Mom have been excessively friendly to this round-faced girl who first appeared at the door in September. Annabelle is wearing a short red dress with a high collar and a diagonal zipper across the bosom, and dark net stockings on her prominent legs-all a little whorish, Nelson thought when he picked her up in his Corolla on East Muriel Street. Maybe Ronnie sensed something. Pru has found a dove-colored shot-silk dress with a boxy jacket that makes her hips look not too wide and sends out zigzags of shimmer; the gray goes from silver to a kind of purple when she moves. She has thickened in the waist and jaw and has crow's feet and tiny creases on her cheeks and even chin that come and go when she smiles her crooked, dissatisfied smile. Nelson can't remember if her nose was always so hooked, with so sharp a point. The long-limbed, green-eyed beauty he and his father had both desired is cobwebbed over with a certain gauze of age and disappointment yet those who remember can see through it; he thinks for forty-four she is holding up pretty well. Her hair, once lank and long and carrot-colored, wears a tint now that looks suspiciously even and shiny next to Annabelle's many-colored shaggy do, which she is letting grow out, making her solid white neck look less naked. Pru sees Billy as one of the gang who nearly ruined Nelson back in the Laid-Back days and greets him coolly, though in fact Billy was never a big user; his parents had crumped out early and he had had to take care of himself. Mom in her nervousness and maybe boosted by some tipple before dinner squeals "Billy Fosnacht!" and embraces him almost in tears, blurting, "I loved your dear mother so!"

Roy is taller than his grandmother and about the same height as Nelson and Ronnie and Pru and Annabelle, but he will get taller; at fifteen his growth spurt has years to go. The dark Springer genes have overruled the Angstrom pallor in the boy's hair and brows and the long curved eyelashes, like his father's but without the deepset wary look. His upper lip is fuzzy and his ears stick out and his eyes are bright; the new century is his. He puts his knuckly hand in Annabelle's competent soft one and tells her, "My sister is sorry not to meet you this time. She had a message I was to give you: your father was a doll."

"A doll?" Annabelle smiles.

"A neat guy, I think she meant. He died when she was eight so she has a lot more memories of him than I do."

Nelson interposes, "She remembers Dad's saving her life once in Florida, in a Sailfish that capsized. Another way to frame it would be that he nearly killed her."

"Nelson," Pru says in half-hearted wifely rebuke.

Roy volunteers, "I remember going to visit him in the hospital once, the high white bed and all these tubes going in and out of him. Also how when there was any candy or nuts around you had to compete with him for them-he'd steal a candy bar right out from under your nose."

This is a success; everyone laughs. Roy gives his mother's slightly lopsided grin, and Annabelle says, "Thank you so much, Roy. You've helped make him real to me."

"We'll have to have you over for dinner in the new year," Ronnie tells her, in a rehearsed voice, not quite looking at her. "I got a ton of Rabbit stories even Janice hasn't heard."

"We have a reservation at the Lookout," Nelson intervenes. To his elders he explains, "That's the fancy new restaurant in the old Pinnacle Hotel. When I called at first they said they were full up. But Billy got us into the first sitting, at seven."

"The maître d's upper-right bicuspid is all mine," Billy explains. "We had to go back in; the first didn't take. Some people burst into tears when that happens."

"Oh, how beautiful you all look!" Janice exclaims, as something in the occasion, the sudden clumping here of strands going back deep into her time on earth, brims over for her. "You all go and have a gorgeous time!" The teariness conjured by remembering Peggy Fosnacht, earnest wall-eyed clumsy Peggy, who had been Peggy Gring when Janice and she were young, blurs her survey of the four adult children, her son among them, and the mother of her grandchildren, all so touching, dressed up to greet this particular calendrical doom, with Harry and Fred and Mother and little Becky all squeezed inside them somehow, the DNA. "Just think," she says, "the next time we see each other, the year will have all those zeros in it! I can't stand it!"

"O.K., Mom," Nelson says nervously.

Ronnie says, husbandly-expansive, covering for her tears, pompously proud of them, "Young Bill Gates here and I are going to have a great time making hotdogs and popcorn and watching the boob tube, watching the future roll our way. It's been 2000 for hours in Fiji and Japan-no Y2K problems in Sydney or Tokyo as far as they can tell. Paris was spectacular a half-hour ago and at seven it's going to hit London, Blair and the Queen and their dumb Dome. For most of the world, midnight is already history! Time is relative, as Einstein pointed out. Isn't that right, Roy?"

"Sort of like that," the boy says, embarrassed by so crudely approximate a truth.

"It stretches," Ronnie obnoxiously insists. "Like a condom." Go to church all he wants, this guy is never going to get his brains out of his pants.

They are de-inhibiting together. Billy announces, "I keep thinking of all those that didn't quite make it. JFK Junior, Payne Stewart, and the other day the Lone Ranger, poor guy."

"God bless you, Billy!" Janice exclaims, burbling out of some chaotic reserve of sorrow that Nelson, dry-eyed, sees into as into a dark well at whose bottom his own head in silhouette glimmers in a disk of reflected sky. Under the pressure of the momentous impalpable event almost upon them they all kiss, Nelson Roy and Janice Pru and Billy Mrs. Angstrom (as he still thinks of her) and Ronnie Annabelle, who tries to deflect him to a cheek but is nailed on the mouth-the same cushiony kind of lips, he cannot but remember, that Ruth once sucked him off with, down in a shack on the Jersey Shore, salt air making everything sticky, the odors of sex tossed everywhere like their clothes, she going at it as if leisurely reducing a Popsicle, stopping and starting and giving him the eye up across his bare belly with its sheen of golden hairs. They all kiss, kiss there by the door, the door with its rasping, failing bell and oval brass knob burnished by uncountable hands, by uncountable comings and goings in the twentieth century, at 89 Joseph Street. The house across the street, Nelson sees, is ablaze as if for a party; in the upper front room the young woman of the house passes preoccupied in a glitzy blouse, her mouth moving with urgent words he cannot hear.

Hurry, they mustn't be late, the maître d' will give their table away; they scramble in an exclamatory tumble into Nelson's off-white Corolla parked at the curb, as excited as teen-agers to be out and off. The plan is the meal and then a movie, not one of the four at the tired mall on the way into Brewer, though as they pass Billy says wistfully in the back seat, "I'd love to see Galaxy Quest. One of my hygienists says there's a great sex scene where one of the humans makes out with an extraterrestrial female who turns back into, like, an octopus when she gets excited."

"Nice," says Annabelle, in the back seat with him.

He goes on, "The most heartbreaking death at the end of this year to my mind, though, was that woman up in a nursing home in Allentown yesterday who was the world's oldest person, it turns out. A hundred nineteen. If she'd hung on just two more days she would have lived in three different centuries."

"I guess that'd be worth doing," Pru says dryly, not quite accepting of Billy yet. She is intent beside Nelson, silently helping him drive. She senses he is stressed. He is thinking of Michael DiLorenzo, another who didn't quite make it into the third millennium.

"Did any of you know," Billy asks, "that the world's oldest person was a Pennsylvanian?"

Annabelle waits for Pru or Nelson to say something rude, and when they don't allows, "I'm not surprised. Old people love this state. Only Florida has more, proportionally."

The movie Nelson wants them to see is American Beauty, cited the year's best by a number of big-city critics, but assailed by several of Pennsylvania's defenders of decency, and now playing at a second-run, cut-price theatre called Instant Classics, out beyond the old fairgrounds. And they do see it, getting back into Nelson's car at twenty past eleven in a state of some coziness after five hours together, sitting through the movie and before that making polite talk at the restaurant, thinking up topics, steering the two men away from childhood reminiscences, the women talking about their career dissatisfactions, each of the four in private scared of the millennial moment, trying to absorb its significance from the air, the tepid snow-free air. The view during the meal, up on Mt., one table back from the windows but nevertheless grand, displayed on reality's wide screen Brewer's grid stretching beneath them to the black swerve of the river and the few great holding tanks still not dismantled and the suburbs receding with an everdimmer radiance toward lights that show scattered on wooded indigo hills, the home lights of Diamond County.

Back in the Corolla, the movie uneasily digesting on top of the dinner with its wine and smoked oysters, Pru says, "Well, I didn't think that was so great. Could you believe that ending? I couldn't. Stars at night from a field, his grandmother's hands-that guy never acted like a man who had ever noticed his grandmother's hands or anything except his own selfish itches and threatened ego."

From the back seat Billy contributes, "I must say it made me feel better about death. Didn't Kevin Spacey look happy, dead?"

"He looked spacy," Nelson says. "He looked like a freeze-frame. That's what death is, a freeze-frame. Hey, where do you want to go now? I've run out of ideas. We have half an hour. There's stuff downtown, I know. They've put a heated tent for a Christian-rock concert in the big hole on Weiser above Sixth, where the housing project has stalled. We could go and mill about."

"Ugh," Billy says.

The parking lot at Instant Classics is tricky to get out of, five rows of cars feeding into one exit lane, and Nelson is never very sure of himself on this side of Brewer. They have put in some new bypass highways and mall-access roads that confuse him. He somehow thought they would spontaneously know where to go. Why does everything always fall on him? He says, "I wonder if we could get into the Laid-Back."

Pru says, "That old druggie hangout of yours?"

"It's all clean," Billy pipes up. "It's changed owners, after the last set got busted and put in jail. No drugs now. No smoking of any sort."

"Do I turn right or left up here to get back on 222?" Nelson asks.

Annabelle hears him but can only say, "I used to work out this way at a nursing home but everything's changed."

"Try right, it's easier," Billy says.

As Nelson follows this directive he hears behind him Annabelle ask in a soft sympathetic searching voice she has never used with her brother, "Billy, do you think a lot about death?"

"All the time, how did you know?"

"The way you kept flinching in the movie."

"I thought that neurotic kid with the videocam was going to kill somebody, maybe the girl he was spying on."

"Wasn't she a hard-hearted horror?" Nelson chimes in. '"Kill my father. Do it.'" He remembers Michael DiLorenzo confessing that he wanted to kill his parents, and that Michael killed himself, maybe so he wouldn't do it. Nelson tastes the dead iron at the core of even green planets. No fresh start, no mercy. The headlights are picking up flecks, sparks like mayflies; it can't be snow, so it must be flying dirt.

"I didn't like her," Annabelle announces. "I identified more with the other one, the pretty one who acted like a tramp but then turned out to be a virgin."

"And the whole gay business made me upset," says Billy.

"I thought it was very overdone and unconvincing," Pru states, her profile almost haggard in the strokes of oncoming headlights, as the tangled traffic burns above asphalt hard to see, the arrows and lines obscure.

"Boy," Billy rattles on, "they sure gave you enough blood on the wall when he got shot."

Annabelle chimes in, "I loved the routine the cheerleaders did with the bowler hats."

"Pure Fosse," says Billy. "I was afraid somebody's house was going to get burned down, either the hero's or the military man's next to it."

"It was a picture, really, when you think about it," Pru persists, "of cheap shots at everybody. Advertising, the military, blah blah. Oh come on."

"That was so nice," Annabelle continues on her track, "when she is willing but he doesn't sleep with her and makes her a hamburger instead." Nelson has never heard her voice like this, free-associating and childishly trusting. Maybe this evening isn't such a failure as it felt. He has the persistent sensation that there is one more person in the car than the four of them.

"Hey Nelson," Billy's voice whines from the back seat. "Aren't you on this road the wrong way?"

He had been wondering why the traffic was so thin. They have become the only car on the highway, speeding between dark slopes of farmland and distant Christmas lights.

"You're heading toward Maiden Springs!" Billy tells him. "Brewer is behind us!"

"Son of a fucking bitch," Nelson says. "I asked for directions coming out of the parking lot and nobody helped."

"Nelson, you've lived here all your life," Pru points out.

"Yeah, but not around the fairgrounds. I hate this area. The fair always depressed me, the way the school made us go every September."

"Me, too," Billy says. "I was terrified of the freaks. And those rides used to do a job on my stomach. I remember once with Belly Majka in one of those that roll you around opposite each other being afraid I was going to throw up in her face."

"Take the next exit," Pru says, in a low, sharply aimed wife's voice. "Go left at the overpass and then right to get you back on the highway going the other way."

"I know how to reverse direction," Nelson snaps at her.

"And the animals in cages," Billy goes on. "I have a nightmare about being in a cage that gets smaller and smaller, like an egg slicer."

"You poor dear worried thing," Annabelle says silkily.

Pru says to Annabelle, as Nelson angrily whips the car up and around the exit ramp, "I think that was unrealistic, too. Most men would have just screwed her anyway. I mean, he'd been dreaming about almost nothing else."

But it is hard for her to break into the cocoon of mutual narcissistic regard being woven in the back seat. From the little overpass road, dark farmland seems to stretch in every direction, broken only by a Gulf station, its towering oval sign aglow, level with the profile of the hills. Nelson asks the back seat, "What do you think, Annabelle? How far would the older man have gone? The father figure?"

Her gentle voice arrives: "Nelson, what are you asking?"

"How far did Mr. Byer go with you? My gut tells me," he says, recklessly wheeling through the entrance ramp and heading down the highway toward where Brewer's dome of light stains the sky, "he went pretty far. That's why you're always saying what a great guy he was. He wasn't. He was into touchy-feely. A good thing he died when you were sixteen, it might have got a lot worse."

"Baby," Pru says to her husband, but there is no stopping him, now that he and the Corolla are headed in the right direction. He needs to undress his sister, in front of Billy.

"And your mother was no help, was she? She was a savvy old tramp, she must have guessed. She'd been through the mill, why not you, huh?"

"That's not true!" Annabelle cries. "She never knew anything! And he never-what's the word?-"

"Penetrated," Nelson offers.

"Exactly!" she says. "He just groped, all in the name of parental affection, of course." This bit of sarcasm pries her open; she makes a strange shuddering prolonged sound of upheaved regret, then pours out, sobs making her gasp, "I didn't dare ask him to stop, he'd handled me since I was a baby, it didn't seem right, yet how could it be very wrong? It was as if he couldn't help it, he was, like, sleepwalking. He'd tuck me in afterwards."

"He knew what you didn't know," Nelson points out. "That he wasn't your real father. And your mother knew it loo."

"She had no idea what he was doing, I'm positive. But it was so much a relief when he died that I blamed myself. It had got to be a secret between us, as if I wanted it too, when I hated it!" Her tears are coming freely now, pent-up, accusing. Nelson squints into the high headlights, trucks and those fucking SUVs, that afflict his eyes from behind and ahead. The traffic is hurrying in both directions toward some disaster, the end of time as they've known it. Annabelle goes the next step, crying, "I felt I'd killed him! Good for me!" Her round face flashes in his rearview mirror, one teary eye meeting his.

"Right," Nelson says calmly. "It really screwed you up with men since, didn't it? How come, do you think, you've never married?"

"Oh stop it!" she protests. "Why do you want me married, why do you care?" She sinks back, sobbing now with a muffled, burbling quality that suggests Billy is comforting her. Nelson can't risk turning his head to look into the back seat; his sensation of a fifth person in the car is so strong he needs to strengthen his grip on the steering wheel.

Billy says, "Great going, Nelson. So that's psychotherapy."

"It helps to get things in the open," he sulkily says. "Then you go from there." He stares ahead. He has always disliked this flat side of Brewer, as opposed to the tilting Mt. Judge side. Serve-yourself gas stations with ranks of pumps, fast-food franchises with plastic mini-playgrounds for obese toddlers, dismal six-store strip malls, carpet and linoleum outlets, vegetable stands boarded up for the winter, cutesy Amish cut-outs beckoning ignorant tourists from the inner cities to Real Pa. Dutch Cuisine. He knows where he is now. If he stays on this new improved 222 a bypass will hurl him right around Brewer southwest toward Lancaster and the Turnpike; instead he turns off, by the mattress warehouse with the Aurora Massage Parlor tucked in behind, on old Route 111, which runs parallel to the river, the silhouette of Mt. Judge far to their right, crowned by the distant lights of the Pinnacle Hotel, where they had been, the four of them, sitting and eating and making polite conversation, a few hours ago. Time does wonders.

Pru says, twisting her head to talk to Annabelle, "So you got pawed. So did I. My father was a crumb-bum, when you think about it. It's not the end of the world." She is tough. Her nose looks sharp as a witch's in profile but he senses her bulk, her body in the shimmery silk dress and rust-brown overcoat, as radiating warmth. Her long hands lie idle in her shadowy lap. He reaches down to adjust the car heat, and his own hand and Pru's knees show similarly pale in the dash-light glow. He remembers how once when she was new to their family she surprisingly comforted him by telling him, Why, honey. I think from what I've seen your parents are quite fond of each other. Couples that have stayed together that long, they must have something.

In the back seat, his sister is sniffling and Billy is saying, "Easy, easy. We're talking ancient history."

The road has stoplights now, and up ahead somebody, a car dealer or club owner, has gone to the expense of renting a bank of spotlights; three of them stir the sky to the limits of the local haze.

"We are passing," Nelson announces in a tour guide's droning tone, "the former site of Springer Motors Toyota Agency, now derelict."

Mom sold the acreage and building to a computer-components company that never took off; a sudden turn in technology left it behind. By inner moonlight Nelson sees the ghosts of his father and himself and Charlie Stavros and Elvira Ollenbach standing at the boarded-up windows looking out at Route 111 for customers that will never come.

"My father's!" Annabelle says, sitting up with a rustle. "I remember. With Jamie. He bought an orange Corolla, eventually."

"It was my mother's, more," Nelson says. "It's sad to see. The company that bought it from her is still in bankruptcy proceedings, ten years later. They've probably forgotten that they own it. I heard a Barnes and Noble was interested, to make a superstore."

The spotlights are a little farther down Route 111, in front of what was once a Planter's Peanuts store and became, added on to, a disco in the Seventies. The tall thin silhouette of Mr. Peanut outside, a twelve-foot billboard, became a nearly nude dancing girl with her naughty parts covered by bubbles, but that was too sexist to last. Now the humanoid shape holds a cowgirl in short white skirt and high white boots advertising PURE COUNTRY MUSIC. Country music keeps coming back. Or is it just slow to go away? The parking lot looks only half full. People with sense are staying home tonight, exhausted by the hype, petrified of fanatic Arabs sneaking in from Canada.

"Hey, Nellie," Billy pipes up. "It's getting close to midnight, and we're nowhere."

"I know, I'm going as fast as I can. If you hadn't got me lost-"

"Did Nelson ever tell you the story," Pru asks Annabelle, "how he lost the agency up his nose?"

"No, not really." Her voice sounds dried out, for now.

"Say, thanks a lot," Nelson complains to his wife.

"Siblings should have no secrets," Pru says, and makes, he knows without looking, that prudish little mouth of hers, as if sucking on something tart. "Nelson wasn't always such a saint."

"He was a pill of a sissy, in fact," Billy contributes, making the fun rougher. "A real little mamma's boy, terrified of his father, who was a pretty nice guy, actually."

"Unlike yours," Nelson tells him. "What a sleazebag."

"Very musical, though," Billy tells Annabelle. "He could play anything, any instrument, by ear."

"Oh, I've always wanted to be able to do that!" she responds, snuggling from the way her voice squeezes down. Does Nelson imagine it, or is there the purr of a zipper being unzipped, that long diagonal zipper on the front of her dress? His sister giggles, and a hand is lightly slapped.

Nelson drives the Corolla through West Brewer. Those new-style icicle lights hang like bright napkins from the little porches of the row houses that slant down to the river and the Weiser Street Bridge. The Bridge has old-fashioned lamp standards, yellow glass balls and iron curlicues going green with age, but the light falls cold and contemporary from tall violet tubes on aluminum stems. At the far end of the bridge sits an upscale coffee bar that used to be a black hangout, Jimbo's Friendly Lounge, before the blacks were chased out of South Brewer by gentrification. Then there unrolls beneath the wheels of the Corolla Brewer's main drag in all its Yuletide glory: the trees rimming Weiser Square are looped with necklaces of white lights, scribbles in three dimensions. The square, an open farmer's market originally, was decades ago blocked to form an ill-advised pedestrian park to revive the downtown, but it turned into a dangerous forest, and by a newer plan has been reopened to automobile traffic. They pass Fourth Street, and the bronze statue of Conrad Weiser in Mohawk headdress in the center of the traffic circle at Fifth Street. Trolley cars used to go east, west, north, and south from this point, to amusement parks and picnic groves. The human traffic thickens; the city fathers have laid on a Millennium Ball in the atrium of the glass-enclosed mall between Fifth and Sixth on the left side of the street, as well as the Christian-rock concert a block up on the right, in the great hole. A dim din penetrates the car windows.

"Hey Nelson," Billy says. "The Sunflower Beer clock says it's midnight! Here it's the millennium and we're all stuck in this little Jap jalopy! Nothing's moving!"

"Don't panic," Nelson tells him. "That clock never told the right time. The Laid-Back is only up at Ninth, we'll be there in a minute."

Then Nelson sees the dire occur: at the intersection of Sixth and Weiser, where Kroll's Department Store used to be, two cars ahead of them, the traffic light goes out. Hanging high above the asphalt, the light was green, and now is dead. Not red, dead. The sticky traffic halts completely. Revellers, mostly Hispanic kids in jeans and windbreakers, dart among the cars. A shout is going up, but here and there, as if nobody knows exactly what is happening. The cars behind them honk, in celebration or exasperation. The streetlights flicker.

"Oh my God," Annabelle says, "terrorists just like they said," and begins to cry again.

"It's a little glitch," Billy says, feigning calm, though this must feel like a tunnel to him. "These lights are all on computers."

"Son of a bitch!" Nelson says. Decades of wrongs, hurts, unjust deaths press behind his eyes. He pushes down on the window locks. Hooded kids with sparkle dust on their faces are crowding around the Corolla, and looking up the street toward Mt. Judge. The city's fire alarms begin to wail; church bells are dully ringing. At the top of Mt. Judge, fireworks ignite, one slow bloom after another, mingled with staccato gashes, potassium white and barium green, sodium yellow and chlorine blue, dying, blossoming, dying in drifts of dismissed sparks as the dull concussions thud through the windshield. "We're missing it!" he cries.

The Corolla was the third car from the intersection when the traffic light went out. The first car glided through, unaware of the breakdown, and the next waited for the car on the right to come out and cut across. Sixth is one-way here, so there is no traffic from the left. The cars behind are in the dark, but up this close to the intersection the problem and its solution are plain: take your turn, in democratic American style. The car ahead of Nelson, a little cherry-red specimen of the remodelled VW Beetle, cute as a bug, with oval slant taillights like Disney animal eyes, creeps out and through, and the car on the right, a serious, four-ring, square-cut tan Audi, takes its turn like a good citizen. Then it is Nelson's turn, his dirty white Toyota's turn, to pass through the doused light and continue on, up Weiser toward the mountain and its fireworks, past where Kroll's used to be and where Mom and Dad got together (if they hadn't, he would not exist, think of that) and on across Seventh, where mile-long trains of coal would drag through from Pottsville to Philly and once upon a time there was a Chinese restaurant, and on up to look for a parking space in the blocks beyond the Laid-Back, around where Dad used to set type for the Verity Press. It will be jolly, to walk, the four of them, out in the air. He has an image of a frozen Daiquiri, or should it be a Margarita, with salt all around the rim?

"Hey!" he exclaims. Tailgating the Audi, a black-and-silver Ford Expedition, a huge SUV with truck wheels and a side mirror the size of a human head, keeps coming, trying to barrel through out of turn, against all decency and order. Some brat of the local rich, beered-up and baseball-hatted, with his smirking airhead buddies, gives Nelson a glazed so-what stare. Nelson sees red. "That fucker," he says. This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. Pru shrieks when she realizes that Nelson's foot is firm on the accelerator and that nothing short of ramming into the Expedition will stop their forward motion. Its fat high bumper-two-tone, the lower half chrome-reflects their right headlight in a flaring smear; she braces for the bump, the crazed windshield, the crumpled metal, the thud of pain. But the cocky brat in the baseball cap sees with widened eyes that Nelson isn't kidding; and brakes hard, so his buddies' empty heads all bounce in unison. The Corolla skims by, still accelerating, missing by an inch. The dig-out smell of hot rubber fills the interior. The couple in the back seat cheer, a bit breathlessly. "I hate SUVs," Nelson explains. "Pretentious gas-guzzlers, they think they own the road."

High in the tinted windshield, so it looks greenish, a ball of twinkling fire expands. The Christian-rock music thumps away in the vast illumined excavation on their right. Nelson shivers, as if a contentious spirit is leaving him. And now Pru is attacking him, trying to hug him, her nose poking into his cheek, her breath fluttering warm on his neck. "Oh honey, that was great, the way you made that asshole chicken out. I think I wet my pants."

"Me, too, almost," says Annabelle.

"It's funny about death," Billy contributes from the back seat. "When you actually face it, it's kind of a rush."

To Nelson Pru says, so softly the others could hear only if they were to ignore each other and listen hard, "Let's not hang around too long at the Laid-Back. I thought I'd stay at your place tonight."