Her eyes glance down, the demure plane of her cheek reddened as if he's slapped her. "Too many I suppose," she says.

"No bother to me," he assures her, "I'm not the mailman. He recently upped and died, by the way. Not your fault, though."

She lifts her eyes, a flourishing green.

Pru is pregnant. One of the few advantages of not having been born yesterday is that a man acquires, like a notion of tomorrow's weather from the taste of the evening air, some sense of the opposite sex's physiology, its climate. She has less waist than a woman so young should, and that uncanny green clarity of her eyes and a soft slowed something in her motions as she turns away from Harry's joke to take a cue from Nelson bespeak a burden beyond disturbing, a swell beneath the waves. In her third or fourth month, Rabbit guesses. And with this guess a backwards roll of light illumines the months past. And the walls of this house, papered with patterns sunk into them like stains, change meaning, containing this seed between them. The fuzzy gray sofa and the chair that matches and the Barcalounger and the TV set (an Admiral) and Ma Springer's pompous lamps of painted porcelain and tarnished brass and the old framed watercolors sunk to the tint of dust from never being looked at, the table runners Ma once crocheted and her collection of brittle bright knickknacks stored on treble corner shelves nicked and sanded to suggest antique wood but stemming from an era of basement carpentry in Fred Springer's long married life: all these souvenirs of the dead bristle with new point, with fresh mission, if as Harry imagines this intruder's secret is a child to come.

He feels swollen. His guess has been like a fist into him. As was not the case with Melanie he feels kinship with this girl, is touched by her, turned on: he wants to be giving her this baby.

In bed he asks Janice, "How long have you known?"

"Oh," she says, "about a month. Melanie let some of the cat out of the bag and then I confronted Nelson with it. He was relieved to talk, he cried even. He just didn't want you to know."

"Why not?" He is hurt. He is the boy's father.

Janice hesitates. "I don't know, I guess he was afraid you'd be mad. Or laugh at him."

"Why would I laugh at him? The same thing happened to me."

"He doesn't know that, Harry."

"How could he not? His birthday keeps coming around seven months after our anniversary."

"Well, yes." In her impatience she sounds much like her mother, setting the heel of her voice into each word. The bed creaks as she flounces in emphasis. "Children don't want to know these things, and by the time they're old enough to care it's all so long ago."

"When did he knock the girl up, does he remember that much?"

"Weren't you funny, guessing so quickly she was in a family way? We weren't going to tell you for a while."

"Thanks. It was the first thing that hit me. That baggy sweater. That, and that she's taller than Nelson."

"Harry, she isn't. He's an inch taller, he's told me himself, it's just that his posture is so poor."

"And how much older is she? You can see she's older."

"Well, a year or less. She was a secretary in the Registrar's office -"

"Yeah and why wasn't he fucking another student? What does he have to get mixed up in the secretarial pool for?"

"Harry, you should talk to them if you want to know every in and out ofit all. You know though how he used to say how phony these college girls were, he never felt comfortable in that atmosphere. He's from business people on my side and working people on yours and there hasn't been much college in his background."

"Or in his future from the way it looks."

"It's not such a bad thing the girl can do a job. You heard her say at supper she'd like him to go back to Kent and finish, and she could take in typing in their apartment."

"Yeah and I heard the little snot say he wanted no part of it."

"You won't get him to go back by shouting at him."

"I didn't shout."

"You got a look on your face."

"Well, Jesus. Because the kid gets a girl pregnant he thinks he's entitled to run Springer Motors."

"Harry, he doesn't want to run it, he just wants a place in it." "You can't give him a place without taking a place from somebody else."

"Mother and I think he should have a place," Janice says, so definitely it seems her mother has spoken, out of the dark air of this bedroom where the old lady's presence was always felt as a rumble of television or a series of snores coming through the wall.

He reverts to his question, "When did he get her pregnant?"

"Oh, when these things happen, in the spring. She missed her first period in May, but they waited till they got to Colorado to do the urine test. It was positive and Pru told him she wasn't going to get an abortion, she didn't believe in them and too many of her friends had had their insides messed up."

"In this day and age, she said all that."

"Also I believe there's Catholicism in her background, on her mother's side."

"Still, she looks like she has some common sense."

"Maybe it was common sense talking. If she goes ahead and has the baby then Nelson has to do something."

"Poor little devil. How come she got pregnant in the first place? Don't they all have the Pill, and loops, and God knows what else now? I was reading in Consumer Reports about these temporary polyurethane tube ties."

"Some of these new things are getting a bad name in the papers. They give you cancer."

"Not at her age they wouldn't. So then she sat out there in the Rocky Mountains hatching this thing while Melanie kept him on a short leash around here."

Janice is growing sleepy, whereas Harry fears he will be awake forever, with this big redhead out of the blue across the hall. Ma Springer had made it clear she expected Pru to sleep in Melanie's old room and had stomped upstairs to watch The Jeffersons. The old crow had just sat there pretty silent all evening, looking like a boiler with too. much pressure inside. She plays her cards tight. Harry nudges Janice's sleepy soft side to get her talking again.

She says, "Melanie said Nelson became very hard to manage, once the test came back positive – running around with a bad crowd out there, making Pru take up hang gliding. Then when he saw she wouldn't change her mind all he wanted to do was run back here. They couldn't talk him out of it, he went and quit this good job he had with a man building condominiums. Melanie I guess had some reasons of her own to get away so she invited herself along. Nelson didn't want her to but I guess the alternative was Pru letting her parents and us know what the situation was and instead of that he begged for time, trying to get some kind of nest ready for her here and maybe still hoping it would all go away, I don't know."

"Poor little Nelson," Harry says. Sorrow for the child bleeds upward to the ceiling with its blotches of streetlight shuffling through the beech. "This has been Hell for him."

"Well Melanie's theory was not Hell enough; she didn't like the way he kept going out with Billy Fosnacht and his crowd instead of facing us with the facts and telling us why he really wanted to go to work at the lot."

Harry sighs. "So when's the wedding?"

"As soon as it can be arranged. I mean, it's her fifth month. Even you spotted it."

Even you, he resents this, but doesn't want to tell Janice of the instinctive bond he has with this girl. Pru is like his mother, awkward and bony, with big hands, but less plain.

"One of the reasons I took Mother to church this morning was so we could have a word with Reverend Campbell."

"That fag? Lordy-O."

"Harry you know nothing about him. He's been uncommonly sweet to Mother and he's really done a lot for the parish."