"Are you satisfied with the job Charlie does for you?"

"Absolutely. He knows the ropes better than I do. He knows half the county."

"Yeah, but his health. How much energy you think he has?"

The question has a certain collegiate tilt to it. He hasn't asked Nelson enough about college, maybe that's the way through to him. All these women around, it's too easy for Nelson to hide. "Energy? He has to watch himself and take it easy, but he gets the job done. People don't like to be hustled these days, there was too much of that, the way the car business used to be. I think a salesman who's a little – what's the word? – laid back, people trust more. I don't mind Charlie's style." He wonders if Melanie does. Where are they, in some restaurant? He pictures her face, brighteyed almost like a thyroid bulge and her cheeks that look always rouged, rosy with exertion even before she bought the Fuji, her young face dense and smooth as she smiles and keeps smiling opposite old Charlie's classic con-man's profile, as he puts his move on her. And then later that business down below, his thick cock that blue-brown of Mediterranean types and, he wonders if her hair there is as curly as the hair on her head, in and out, he can't believe it will happen, while the rest of them sit here listening to the rain.

Nelson is saying, "I was wondering if something couldn't be done with convertibles." A heavy shamed diffidence thickens his words so they seem to drop one by one from his face, downturned where he sits in the tired gray sofa with his muskrat cut.

"Convertibles? How?"

"You know, Dad, don't make me say it. Buy 'em and sell 'em. Detroit doesn't make 'em anymore, so the old ones are more and more valuable. You could get more than you paid for Mom's Mustang."

"If you don't wreck it first."

This reminder has the effect Rabbit wants. "Shit," the boy exclaims, defenseless, darting looks at every comer of the ceiling looking for the escape hatch, "I didn't wreck your damn precious Corona, I just gave it a little dent."

"It's still in the shop. Some dent."

"I didn't do it on purpose, Christ, Dad, you act like it was some divine chariot or something. You've gotten so uptight in your old age."

"Have I?" He asks sincerely, thinking this might be information.

"Yes. All you think about is money and things."

"That's not good, is it?"

"No."

"You're right. Let's forget about the car. Tell me about college." "It's yukky," is the prompt response. "It's Dullsville. People think because of that shooting ten years ago it's some great radical place but the fact is most of the kids are Ohio locals whose idea of a terrific time is drinking beer till they throw up and having shaving cream fights in the dorms. Most of 'em are going to go into their father's business anyway, they don't care."

Harry ignores this, asking, "You ever have reason to go over to the big Firestone plant? I keep reading in the paper where they kept making those steel-belted radial five hundreds even after they kept blowing up on everybody."

"Typical," the boy tells him. "All the products you buy are like that. All the American products."

"We used to be the best," Harry says, staring into the distance as if toward a land where he and Nelson can perfectly agree.

"So I'm told." The boy looks downward into his book.

"Nelson, about work. I told your mother we'd make a summer job for you over there on wash-up and maintenance. You'd learn a lot, just watching Manny and the boys."

"Dad, I'm too old for wash-up. And maybe I need more than a summer job."

"Are you trying to tell me you'd drop out of college with one lousy year to go?"

His voice has grown loud and the boy looks alarmed. He stares at his father open-mouthed, the dark ajar spot making with his two eyesockets three holes, in a hollow face. The rain drums on the porch roof spout. Janice and her mother come down from The Waltons weeping. Janice wipes at her eyes with her fingers and laughs. "It's so stupid, to get carried away. It was in People how all the actors couldn't stand each other, that's what broke up the show."

"Well, they have lots of reruns," Ma Springer says, dropping onto the gray sofa beside Nelson, as if this little trip downstairs has been all her legs can bear. "I'd seen that one before, but still they get to you."

Harry announces, "The kid here says he may not go back to Kent."

Janice had been about to walk into the kitchen for a touch of Campari but freezes, standing. She is wearing just her short seethrough nightie over underpants in the heat. "You knew that, Harry," she says.

Red bikini underpants, he notices, that show through as dusty pink. At the height of the heat wave last week she got her hair cut in Brewer by a man Doris Kaufinann goes to. He exposed the back of her neck and gave her bangs; Harry isn't used to them yet, it's as if a strange woman was slouching around here nearly naked. He almost shouts, "The hell I did. After all the money we've put into his education?"

"Well," Janice says, swinging so her body taps the nightie from within, "maybe he's got what he can out of it."

"I don't get all this. There's something fishy going on. The kid comes home with no explanation and his girlfriend goes out with Charlie Stavros while he sits here hinting to me I should can Charlie so I can hire him instead."

"Well," Ma Springer pronounces peacefully, "Nelson's of an age. Fred made space for you, Harry, and I know if he was here he'd make space for Nelson."

In on the dining-room sideboard, dead Fred Springer listens to the rain, misty-eyed.

"Not at the top he wouldn't," Harry says. "Not to somebody who quits college a few lousy credits short of graduating."

"Well Harry," Ma Springer says, as calm and mellow as if the TV show had been a pipe of pot, "some would have said you weren't so promising when Fred took you on. More than one person advised him against it."

Out in the country, under the ground, old Farmer Byer mourns his fleet of school buses, rotting in the rain.

"I was a forty-year-old man who'd lost his job through no fault of his own. I sat and did Linotype as long as there was Linotype."

"You worked at your father's trade," Janice tells him, "and that's what Nelson's asking to do."

"Sure, sure," Harry shouts, "when he gets out of college if that's what he wants. Though frankly I'd hoped he'd want more. But what is the rush? What'd he come home for anyway? If I'd ever been so lucky at his age to get to a state like Colorado I'd sure as hell have stayed at least the summer."

Sexier than she can know, Janice drags on a cigarette. "Why don't you want your own son home?"

"He's too big to be home! What's he running from?" From the look on their faces he may have hit on something, he doesn't know what. He's not sure he wants to know what. In the silence that answers him he listens again to the downpour, an incessant presence at the edge of their lamplight domain, gentle, insistent, unstoppable, a million small missiles striking home and running in rivulets from the face of things. Skeeter, Jill, and the Kent State Four are out there somewhere, bone dry.

"Forget it," Nelson says, standing up. "I don't want any job with this creep."

"What's he so hostile for?" Harry beseeches the women. "All I've said was I don't see why we should fire Charlie so the kid can peddle convertibles. In time, sure. In 1980, even. Take over, young America. Eat me up. But one thing at a time, Jesus. There's tons of time."

"Is there?" Janice asks strangely. She does know something. Cunts always know something.

He turns to her directly. "You. I'd think you'd be loyal to Charlie at least."

"More than to my own son?"

"I'll tell you this. I'll tell you all this. If Charlie goes, I go." He -struggles to stand, but the Barcalounger has a sticky grip.