"That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?"

Nelson's eyes get dark and swarmy, the way they do whenever his father mentions God. The conversation keeps sticking, it doesn't flow, Harry keeps thinking how he is falling, the kid is like a weight on his chest. Come on, he says to himself, try. You only live once.

"Pru told me you were up all night with worry."

"Yeah, well, she exaggerates, but sort of. I don't know why I can't sleep down here. It all feels phony to me, and there's all this stuff back in Brewer I should be tending to."

"Like at the lot? Between holidays is a slow week usually. Everybody's feeling broke after Christmas."

"Well, yeah, and other stuff. I keep feeling hassled."

"That's life, Nelson. Hassle."

"I suppose."

Harry says, "I been thinking about our conversation, about Toyotas being so dull. Give 'em credit, they're trying to sex the line up. They're coming out with this Lexus luxury sedan next fall. V-8 engine even."

"Yeah, but they won't let us regular dealerships handle it. They're establishing a whole new retail network. Let 'em, it's going to flop anyway. The Japanese aren't Italians. Luxury isn't their bag."

"I forgot about that separate Lexus network. I tell ya, Nelson, I'm not quite with it. I'm in a fog."

"Join the crowd," Nelson says.

"And oh yeah – the stat sheets. I've been thinking about that. Are you having trouble moving the used? Don't get greedy. Ten per cent markup is all you should expect, it's worth shaving the profit just to keep the inventory flowing."

"O.K., Dad. If you say so. I'll check it out."

The conversation sticks again. Roy squirms in his father's grip. Harry is falling, the light is just a skin of the dark, thinner than an airplane's skin, thinner than an aluminum beer can. Grab something, anything. "She's turned out to be quite a fine woman, Pru," he volunteers to his son.

The boy looks surprised. "Yeah, she's not bad." And he volunteers, "I should try to be nicer to her."

"How?"

"Oh – you know. Clean up my act. Try to be more mature."

"You always seemed pretty mature to me. Maybe too, early on. Maybe I didn't set such a good example of maturity."

"All the more reason, then. For me, I mean."

Does Harry imagine it, or is there a stirring, a tiny dry coughing, behind the curtain next to him, in the bed he cannot see? His phantom roommate lives. He says, "I'm really getting anxious about you making your plane."

"Sorry about that, by the way. I feel crummy leaving. Pru and I were talking last night, if we ought to stay a few more days, but, I don't know, you make plans, you get socked in."

"Don't I know it. What could you do, staying? Your old man's fine. He's in great hands. I just have to learn to live with a not so great heart. A bum ticker. Charlie's done it for twenty years, I can do it." But then Rabbit adds, threatening to pass into the maudlin, the clingy, the elegiac, "But, then, he's a wiry little Greek and I'm a big fat Swede."

Nelson has become quite tense. He radiates a nervous desire to be elsewhere. "O.K., Dad. You're right, we'd better get moving. Give Grandpa a kiss," he tells Roy.

He leans the boy in, like shovelling off a wriggling football, to kiss his grandfather's cheek. But Roy, instead of delivering a kiss, grabs the double-barrelled baby-blue oxygen tube feeding into Harry's nose and yanks it out.

`Jesus!" Nelson says, showing emotion at last. "You all right? Did that hurt?" He whacks his son on the bottom, and sets him down on the floor.

It did hurt slightly, the sudden smarting violence of it, but Harry has to laugh. "No problem," he says. "It just sits in there, like upside-down glasses. Oxygen, I don't really need it, it's just one more perk."

Roy has gone rubber-legged with rage and collapses on the shiny floor beside the bed. He writhes and makes a scrawking breathless noise and Nelson bends down and hits him again.

"Don't hit the kid," Harry tells him, not emphatically. "He just wanted to do me a favor." As best he can with his free hand, he resettles the two pale-blue tubes one over each ear as they come from the oxygen box hung on the wall behind him and resettles the clip, with its gentle enriching whisper, on his septum. "He maybe thought it was like blowing my nose for me."

"You little shit, you could have killed your own grandfather," Nelson explains down at the writhing child, who has to be hauled, kicking, out from under the bed.

"Now who's exaggerating," Harry says, "I'm tougher to kill than that," and begins to believe it. Roy, white in the gills just like his dad, finds his voice and lets loose a yell and tries to throw himself out of Nelson's grasp. The rubber heels of nurses are hurrying toward them down the hall. The unseen roommate suddenly groans behind his white curtain, with a burbly, deep-pulmonary-trouble kind of groan. Roy is kicking like a landed fish and must be catching Nelson in the stomach; Harry has to chuckle, to think of the child doing that. On one grab: deft. Maybe in his four-yearold mind he thought the tubes were snakes eating at his grandfather's face; maybe he just thought they were too ugly to look at.

Full though his arms are, Nelson manages to lean in past the tangle of life-supporting connections and give Harry's cheek the quick kiss he meant Roy to bestow. A warm touch of mustache. A sea-urchin's sting. The watery monster stirring behind the bed curtain releases another burbling, wracking groan from the deeps. Alarmed nurses enter the room; their cheeks are flushed. The head nurse looms, with her waxy woven tresses, like oodles of black noodles or packets of small firecrackers.

"Oh yeah," Harry thinks to add as Nelson hurries his yelling, writhing burden away, down the hall, toward Pennsylvania. "Happy 1989!"

II. PA

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

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