"You can't lead trump until after the third trick," Harry reminds her.

"Oh, foolish." She takes the ace back and stares at her cards through the unbecoming though fashionable eyeglasses she bought recently – heavy blue shell frames hinged low to S-shaped temples and with a kind of continuous false eyebrow of silvery inlay. They aren't even comfortable, she has to keep touching the bridge to push them up on her little round nose.

Her agony is so great pondering the cards, Harry reminds her, "You only need one point to make your bid. You've already made it."

"Yes, well… make all you can while you can, Fred used to say." She fans her cards a little wider. "Ali. I thought I had another one of those." She lays down a second ace of clubs.

But Janice trumps it. She pulls in the trick and says, "Sorry, Mother. I only had a singleton of clubs, how could you know?"

"I had a feeling as soon as I put down that ace. I had a premonition."

Harry laughs; you have to love the old lady. Cabined with these two women, he has grown soft and confiding, as when he was a little boy and asked Mom where ladies went wee-wee. "I used to sometimes wonder," he confides to Bessie, "if Mom had -ever, you know, been false to Pop."

"I wouldn't have put it past her," she says, grim-upped as Janice leads out her own aces. Her eyes flash at Harry. "See, ifyou'd have let me play that diamond she wouldn't have gotten in."

"Ma," he says, "you can't take every trick, don't be so greedy. I know Mom must have been sexy, because look at Mim."

"What do you hear from your sister?" Ma asks to be polite, staring down at her cards again. The shadows thrown by her ornate spectacle frames score her cheeks and make her look old, dragged down, where there is no anger to swell the folds of her face.

"Mim's fine. She's running this beauty parlor in Las Vegas. She's getting rich."

"I never believed half ofwhat people said about her," Ma utters absently.

Now Janice has run through her aces and plays a king of spades to the ace she figures Harry must have. Since she joined up with that bridge-and-tennis bunch of witches over at the Flying Eagle, Janice isn't as dumb at cards as she used to be. Harry plays the expected ace and, momentarily in command, asks Ma Springer, "How much of my mother do you see in Nelson?"

"Not a scrap," she says with satisfaction, whackingly trumping his ten of spades. "Not a whit."

"What can I do for the kid?" he asks aloud. It is as if another has spoken, through him. Fog blowing through a window screen.

"Be patient," Ma answers, triumphantly beginning to run out the trumps.

"Be loving," Janice adds.

"Thank God he's going back to college next month."

Their silence fills the cottage like cool lake air. Crickets.

He accuses, "You both know stuff I don't."

They do not deny it.

He gropes. "What do you both think of Melanie, really? I think she depresses the kid."

"I dare say the rest are mine," Ma Springer announces, laying down a raft of little diamonds.

"Harry," Janice tells him. "Melanie's not the problem."

"If you ask me," Ma Springer says, so firmly they both know she wants the subject changed, "Melanie is making herself altogether too much at home."

On television Charlie's Angels are chasing the heroin smugglers in a great array of expensive automobiles that slide and screech, that plunge through fruit carts and large panes of glass and finally collide one with another, and then another, tucking into opposing fenders and grilles in a great slow-motion climax of bent metal and arrested motion and final justice. The Angel who has replaced Farrah Fawcett-Majors gets out of her crumpled Malibu and tosses her hair: this becomes a freeze-frame. Nelson laughs in empathetic triumph over all those totalled Hollywood cars. Then the more urgent tempo and subtly louder volume of the commercial floods the room; a fresh palette of reflected light paints the faces, chubby and clownish side by side, of Melanie and Nelson as they sit on the old sofa of gray nappy stuff cut into a pattern and gaze at the television set where they have placed it in the rearranged living room, where the Barcalounger used to be. Beer bottles glint on the floor beneath their propped-up feet; hanging drifts of sweetish smoke flicker in polychrome as if the ghosts of Charlie's Angels are rising to the ceiling. "Great smash-up," Nelson pronounces, with difficulty rising and fumbling the television off.

"I thought it was stupid," Melanie says in her voice of muffled singing.

"Oh shit, you think everything is stupid except what's his name, Kerchief."

"G. I. Gurdjieff" She has a prim mode of withdrawal, into mental regions where she knows he cannot reach. At Kent it became clear there were realms real for others not real to him not just languages he didn't know, or theorems he couldn't grasp, but drifting areas of unprofitable knowledge where nevertheless profits of a sort were being made. Melanie was mystical, she ate no meat and felt no fear, the tangled weedy gods of Asia spelled a harmony to her. She lacked that fury against limits that had been part of Nelson since he had known he would never be taller than five nine though his father was six three, or perhaps before that since he had found himself helpless to keep his father and mother together and to save Jill from the ruin she wanted, or perhaps before that since he had watched grownups in dark suits and dresses assembling around a small white coffin, with silvery handles and something sparkly in the paint, that they told him held what had been his baby sister, born and then allowed to die without anybody asking him; nobody ever asked him, the grownup world was like that, it just ground on, and Melanie was part of that world, smugly smiling out at him from within that bubble where the mystery resided that amounted to power. It would be nice, as long as he was standing, to take up one of the beer bottles and smash it down into the curly hair of Melanie's skull and then to take the broken half still in his hand and rotate it into the smiling plumpnesses of her face, the great brown eyes and cherry lips, the mocking implacable Buddha calm. "I don't care what the fuck his dumb name is, it's all bullshit," he tells her instead.

"You should read him," she says. "He's wonderful."

"Yeah, what does he say?"

Melanie thinks, unsmiling. "It's not easy to sum up. He says there's a Fourth Way. Besides the way of the yogi, the monk, and the fakir."

"Oh, great."

"And if you go this way you'll be what he calls awake."

"Instead of asleep?"

"He was very interested in somehow grasping the world as it is. He believed we all have plural identities."

"I want to go out," he tells her.

"Nelson, it's ten o'clock at night."

"I promised I might meet Billy Fosnacht and some of the guys down at the Laid-Back." The Laid-Back is a new bar in Brewer, at the comer of Weiser and Pine, catering to the young. It used to be called the Phoenix. He accuses her, "You go out all the time with Stavros leaving me here with nothing to do."

"You could read Gurdjieff," she says, and giggles. "Anyway I haven't gone out with Charlie more than four or five times."

"Yeah, you work all the other nights."

"It isn't as if we ever do anything, Nelson. The last time we sat and watched television with his mother. You ought to see her. She looks younger than he does. All black hair." She touches her own dark, vital, springy hair. "She was wonderful."

Nelson is putting on his denim jacket, bought at a shop in Boulder specializing in the worn-out clothes of ranch hands and sheep herders. It had cost twice what a new one would have cost. "I'm working on a deal with Billy. One of the other guys is going to be there. I gotta go."

"Can I come along?"

"You're working tomorrow, aren't you?"