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

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

"Why have I never seen them before?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah – why is that?"

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

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

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

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

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

"I've been doing some gardening."

"If you can call it that."

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

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