"What do you want me to tell Pru if I write?"

"I don't know." His shoulders shiver in his jacket as if the taut little coat is an electric contact; he feels his face cloud, even his breath grow hot. Those white envelopes, the white of the crash helmet she put on, the white of her belly. Space would open up immensely under you after you launched but was not menacing somehow, the harness holding you tight and the trees falling away smaller along the grassy ski trails and tilted meadows below and the great nylon wing responsive to every tug on the control bar. "Tell her to hold on."

Melanie says, "She's been holding on, Nelson, she can't keep holding on forever. I mean, it shows. And I can't stay on here much longer either. I have to visit my mother before I go back to Kent."

Everything seems to complicate, physically, in front of his mouth, so he is conscious of the effort of breathing. "And I gotta get to the Laid-Back before everybody leaves."

"Oh, go. Just go. But tomorrow I want you to help me start tidying up. They'll be back Sunday and you haven't once weeded the garden or mowed the lawn."

Driving Ma Springer's cushy old Newport up Jackson to where Joseph Street intersects, the first thing Harry sees is his tomato-red Corona parked in front, looking spandy-new and just washed besides. They had got it fixed at last. It was cute of the kid to have had it washed. Loving, even. A surge of remorse for all the ill will he has been bearing Nelson gives a quickening countercurrent to the happiness he feels at being back in Mt. Judge, on a sparkling Sunday noon late in August with the dry-grass smell of football in the air and the maples thinking of turning gold. The front lawn, even that awkward little section up by the azalea bushes and the strip between the sidewalk and the curb where roots are coming to the surface and hand-clippers have to be used, has been mowed. Harry knows how those hand-clippers begin to chafe in the palm. When the boy comes out on the porch and down to the street to help with the bags, Harry shakes Nelson's hand. He thinks of kissing him but the start of a frown scares him off his impulse to be extra friendly flounders and drowns amidst the clutter of greetings. Janice embraces Nelson and, more lightly, Melanie. Ma Springer, overheated from the car ride, allows herself to be kissed on the cheek by both young people. Both are dressed up, Melanie in a peach-colored linen suit Harry didn't know she owned and Nelson in a gray sharkskin he knows the boy didn't have before. A new suit to be a salesman in. The effect is touchingly trimmer; -in the tilt of the child's combed head his father is startled to see a touch of the dead Fred Springer, con artist.

Melanie looks taller than he remembers: high heels. In her pleased croon of a voice she explains, "We went to church," turning toward Ma Springer. "You had said over the phone you might try to make the service and we thought we'd surprise you in case you did."

"Melanie, I couldn't get them up in time," Bessie says. "They were just a pair of lovebirds up there."

"The mountain air, nothing personal," Rabbit says, handing Nelson a duffel bag full of dirty sheets. "It was supposed to be a vacation and I wasn't going to get up at dawn the last day we were there just so Ma could come make cow eyes at that fag."

"He didn't seem that faggy, Dad. That's just how ministers talk."

"To me he seemed pretty radical," Melanie says. "He went on about how the rich have to go through a camel's eye." To Harry she says, "You look thinner."

"He's been running, like an idiot," Janice says.

"Also not having to eat lunch at a restaurant every day," he says. "They give you too much. It's a racket."

"Mother, be careful of the curb," Janice says sharply. "Do you want an arm?"

"I've been managing this curb for thirty years, you don't need to tell me it's here."

"Nelson, help Mother up the steps," Janice nevertheless says.

"The Corona looks great," Harry tells the boy. "Better than new." He suspects, though, that that annoying bias in the steering will still be there.

"I really got on 'em abut it, Dad. Manny kept giving it bottom priority because it was yours and you weren't here. I told him by the time you were here I wanted that car done, period."

"Take care of the paying customers first," Harry says, vaguely obliged to defend his service chief.

"Manny's a jerk," the boy calls over his shoulder as he steers his grandmother and the duffel bag through the front door, under the stained-glass fanlight that holds among leaded foliate shapes the number 89.

Toting suitcases, Harry follows them in. This house had faded in his mind. "Oh boy," he breathes. "Like an old shoe."

Ma is dutifully admiring the neatness, the flowers from the border beds arranged in vases on the sideboard and dining-room table, the vacuumed rugs and the laundered antimacassars on the nappy gray sofa and matching easy chair. She touches the tufted chenille. "These pieces haven't looked so good since Fred fought with the cleaning woman, old Elsie Lord, and we had to let her go."

Melanie explains, "If you use a damp brush, with just a dab of rug cleaner -"

"Melanie, you know how to do a job," Harry says. "The only trouble with you, you should have been a man." This comes out rougher than he had intended, but a sudden small vexation had thrown him off balance when he stepped into the house. His house, yet not his. These stairs, those knickknacks. He lives here like a boarder, a rummy old boarder in his undershirt, too fuddled to move. Even Ruth has her space. He wonders how his roundfaced girl is doing, out in that overgrown terrain, in her sandstone house with its scabby green door.

Ma Springer is sniffing the air. "Something smells sweet," she says. "It must be the rug cleaner you used."

Nelson is at Harry's elbow, closer than he usually gets. "Dad, speaking of jobs, I have something I want to show you."

"Don't show me anything till I get these bags upstairs. It's amazing how much crap you need just to walk around in sneakers in the Poconos."

Janice bangs the kitchen door, coming in from the outside. "Harry, you should see the garden, it's all beautifully weeded! The lettuce comes up to my knees, the kohlrabi has gotten enormous!"

Harry says to the young people, "You should have eaten some, the kohlrabi gets pulpy if you let it grow too big."

"It never has any taste, Dad," Nelson says.

"Yeah. I guess nobody much likes it except me." He likes to nibble, is one reason he's fat. While growing up he had many sensitive cavities and now that he has his molars crowned eating has become perhaps too much of a pleasure. No more twinges, just everlasting gold.

"Kohlrabi," Melanie is saying dreamily, "I wondered what it was, Nelson kept telling me turnips. Kohlrabi is rich in vitamin C. "

"How're the crepes cooking these days?" Harry asks her, trying to make up for having told the girl she should have been a man. He may have hit on something, though; in her a man's normal bossiness has had to turn too sweet.

"Fine. I've given them my notice and the other waitresses are going to give me a party."

Nelson says, "She's turned into a real party girl, Dad. I hardly ever saw her when we were here together. Your pal Charlie Stavros keeps taking her out, he's even coming for her this afternoon."

You poor little shnook, Rabbit thinks. Why is the kid standing so close? He can hear the boy's worried breath.

"He's taking me to Valley Forge," Melanie explains, brighteyed, those bright eyes concealing what mischief, Rabbit may never know now. The girl is pulling out. "I'm about to leave Pennsylvania and I really haven't seen any of the sights, so Charlie's being nice enough to take me to some of the places. Last weekend we went into Amish country and saw all the buggies."