"How many years, would you say?"

When she shrugs her shoulders, Ma's old bed shakes. "More than you'd think. That crowd around Slim was always doing pot and uppers – gays don't give a damn, they have all this money only for themselves. Maybe two years ago Nelson became a big enough user on his own to need to steal. At first he just stole from us, money that should have gone into the house and stuff, and then he started stealing from you – the company. I hope you send him to jail, I really do." She has been cupping her hand beneath the cigarette, to catch the ash, and now she looks around for an ashtray and sees none and finally flips the butt toward the window, where it sparks against the screen and sizzles out on the wet sill. Her voice is hoarsening and finding a certain swing, a welling up. "I have no use for him any more. I'm scared to fuck him, I'm scared to be legally associated with him. I've wasted my life. You don't know what it's like. You're a man, you're free, you can do what you want in life, until you're sixty at least you're a buyer. A woman's a seller. She has to be. And she better not haggle too long. I'm thirty-three. I've had my shot, Harry. I wasted it on Nelson. I had my little hand of cards and played them and now I'm folded, I'm through. My husband hates me and I hate him and we don't even have any money to split up! I'm scared – so scared. And my kids are scared, too. I'm trash and they're trash and they know it."

"Hey, hey," he has to say. "Come on. Nobody's trash." But even as he says it he knows this is an old-fashioned idea he would have trouble defending. We're all trash, really. Without God to lift us up and make us into angels we're all trash.

Her sobbing is shaking the bed so badly that in his delicate postop state he feels queasy. To quiet her big body he reaches out and pulls her toward him. As if expecting his touch, she huddles tightly, though a blanket and a sheet are between them, and continues sobbing in a bitter, lower register, her breath hot on his chest, where a pajama button has come undone. His chest. They want to carve it up. "At least you're healthy," he tells her. "Me, all they need to do is nail down the coffin lid. I can't run, I can't fuck, I can't eat anything I like, I know damn well they're going to talk me into a bypass. You're scared? You're still young. You've got lots of cards still. Think of how scared I feel."

In his arms Pru says in a voice gone calm again, "People have bypass operations all the time now."

"Yeah, easy for you to say. Like me telling you people are married to shits all the time. Or you telling me people have their kids turn out to be dope-addict embezzlers all the time."

A small laugh. A flash of light outside and, after some seconds, thunder. Both listen. She asks, "Does Janice say you can't fuck?"

"We don't talk about it. We just don't do it much lately. There's been too much else going on."

"What did your doctor say?"

"I forget. My cardiologist's about Nelson's age, we were all too shy to go into it."

Pru sniffs and says, "I hate my life." She seems to him to be unnaturally still, like a rabbit in oncoming headlights.

He lets the hand of the arm around her broad back move up across the bumps of the quilted robe and enter the silken cave at the nape of her neck, to toy with the warm hair there. "I know the feeling," he says, content to toy, aware through the length of his body of a cottony sleepiness waiting to claim him.

She tells him, "You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like you."

"Maybe he did. You don't get to see what a bastard I can be."

"I can imagine," she says. "But people provoke you."

He goes on, "I see a lot of myself in the kid." The nape of her neck tingles under his fingers, the soft hairs rising to his electricity. "I'm glad you're letting your hair grow long," he says.

"It gets too long." Her hand has come to rest on his bare chest, where the button is unbuttoned. He pictures her hands with their pink-knuckled vulnerable raw look. She is left-handed, he remembers. The oddity of this excites him further. Not waiting too long to think about it, he with his free hand lifts hers from his chest and places it lower, where an erection has surprisingly sprouted from his half-shaved groin. His gesture has the pre-sexual quality of one child sharing with another an interesting discovery – a stone that moves, or a remarkably thick-bodied butterfly. The eyes widen in the dim face inches from his on the pillow. Tiny points of light are caught in her lashes. He lets his face drift, on the tide of blood risen within him, across those inches to set their mouths together, carefully testing for the angle, while her fingers caress him in a rhythm slower than that of his thudding heart. As the space narrows to nothing he is watchful of his heart, his accomplice in sin. Their kiss tastes to him of the fish she so nicely prepared, its lemon and chives, and of asparagus.

Rain whips at the screen. The leak onto the windowsill accelerates its tapping. A brilliant close flash shocks the air everywhere and less than a second later a heart-stopping crack and splintering of thunder crushes the house from above. As if in overflow of this natural heedlessness, Pru says "Shit," jumps from the bed, slams shut the window, pulls down the shade, tears open her bathrobe and sheds it, and, reaching down, pulls her nightie up over her head. Her tall pale wide-hipped nakedness in the dimmed room is lovely much as those pear trees in blossom along that block in Brewer last month were lovely, all his it had seemed, a piece of Paradise blundered upon, incredible.

III. MI

BY MID-JUNE the weeds have taken over: burdock and chicory stand three feet tall along the stony dry shoulders of Route 111, and the struggling little yew hedge meant to dress up the base of the Springer Motors display window has crabgrass and purslane spreading through the rotting bark mulch, which hasn't been renewed for a couple of years. It's one of the things Harry keeps making a mental note to do: call the landscaping service and renew the mulch and replace the dead yews, about a third of them, they look like hell, like missing teeth. Across the four-lane highway, its traffic thicker and faster than ever though the state still holds to the fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit, the takeout restaurant called the Chuck Wagon has been replaced by a Pizza Hut, one of the six or so around Brewer now. What do people see in it? All those gummy wedges of dough and cheese, that when you try to eat them pull long strings out in front of your face. But, on Saturdays when in the weekend mood Benny runs over and brings back an order for whoever wants it, Harry allows himself a pepperoni with peppers and onions but no anchovies, please. Like little snails stuck in the mud.

Today is not Saturday, it is Monday, the day after Father's Day. Nobody sent Harry a card. He and Janice have visited Nelson twice, for family therapy at this gloomy big rehab center in North Philly, full of banisters and bulletin boards and a damp mimeograph smell that reminds him of the basement Sunday school he went to, and both times it was like a quarrel around the kitchen table only with a referee, a lean pale colored woman with fancy spectacles and one of these sweet churchgoing smiles Harry associates with the better type of Philadelphia black. They go over the old stuff -the baby's death, the mess in the Sixties with Janice moving out and Jill and Skeeter moving in, the crazy way Nelson got himself married to this Kent State secretary an inch taller and a year older than he, a Catholic furthermore, and the kind of crazy way the young couple moved into the old Springer house and the older couple moved out and in fact lives half the year in Florida, all so the kid can run wild with the car agency; Harry explains how from his point of view Nelson's been spoiled rotten by his mother because of her guilt complex and that's why the kid feels entitled to live in never-never land with all these fags and druggies and let his wife and children go around in rags. When he talks, the mocha-colored therapist's smile gets even more pious and patient and then she turns to one of the others, Nelson or Janice or Pru, and asks them how they feel about what they've just heard, as if what he's saying isn't a description of facts but a set of noises to be rolled into some general mishmash. All this "talking through" and "processing" therapists like to do cheapens the world's facts; it reduces decisions that were the best people could do at the time to dream moves, to reflexes that have been "processed" in a million previous cases like so much shredded wheat. He feels anticipated and discounted in advance, whatever he says, and increasingly aggravated, and winds up telling Janice and Pru to go next time without him.