Ma Springer offers him a cup of coffee but he says, "Dear me, no thank you, Bessie. This is my third call this evening and any more caffeine intake will positively give me the shakes." The sentence travels around a corner and disappears up Joseph Street.

Harry says to him, "A real drink then, Reverend. Scotch? A g-and-t? It's still summer officially."

Campbell glances around for their reaction – Nelson and Pru side by side on the gray sofa, Janice perched on a straight chair brought in from the dining room, Ma Springer uneasy on her legs, her offer of coffee spurned. "Well as a matter offact yes," the minister drawls. "A touch of the sauce might be sheer bliss. Harry, do you have vodka, perchance?"

Janice intervenes, "Way in the back of the corner cupboard, Harry, the bottle with the silver label."

He nods. "Anybody else?" He looks at Pru especially, since in these few days of living with them she's shown herself to be no stranger to the sauce. She likes liqueurs; she and Nelson the other day brought back from a shopping expedition along with the beer sixpacks Kahlúa, Cointreau, and Amaretto di Saronno, chunky little bottles, there must have been between twenty and thirty dollars invested in that stuff. Also they have found in the corner cupboard some créme de menthe left over from a dinner party Harry and Janice gave for the Murketts and Harrisons last February and a little bright green gleam of it appears by Pru's elbow at surprising times, even in the morning, as she and Ma watch Edge of Night. Nelson says he wouldn't turn down a beer. Ma Springer says she's going to have coffee anyway, she even has decaffeinated if the rector would prefer. But Archie sticks to his guns, with a perky little bow of thanks to her and a wink all around. The guy is something of a card, Rabbit can see that. Probably the best way to play it, at this late date A.D. They had figured him for the gray easy chair that matches the sofa, but he foxes them by pulling out the lopsided old Syrian hassock from behind the combination lamp and table, where Ma keeps some of her knickknacks, and squatting down. Thus situated, the minister grins up at them all and, nimble as a monkey, fishes a pipe from his front coat pocket and stuffs its bowl with a brown forefinger.

Janice gets up and goes with Harry into the kitchen while he makes the drinks. "That's some little pastor you've got there," he tells her softly.

"Don't be snide."

"What's snide about that?"

"Everything." She pours herself some Campari in an orangejuice glass and without comment fills with créme de menthe one of the set of eight little cylindrical liqueur glasses that came as a set with a decanter she had bought at Kroll's years ago, about the same time they joined the Flying Eagle. They hardly ever have used them. When Harry returns to the living room with Campbell's vodka-and-tonic and Nelson's beer and his own g-and-t Janice follows him in and sets this cylinder of gaudy green on the end table next to Pru's elbow. Pru gives no sign of noticing.

Reverend Campbell has persuaded Ma Springer to take the Barcalounger, where Harry had anticipated sitting, and to raise up its padded extension for her legs. "I must say," she says, "that does wonders for the pressure in my ankles."

Thus laid back the old lady looks vulnerable, and absurdly. reduced in importance within the family circle. Janice, seeing her mother stretched out helpless, volunteers, "Mother, I'll fetch you your coffee."

"And that plate of chocolate-chip cookies I set out. Though I don't suppose anybody with liquor wants cookies too."

"I do, Mom-mom," Nelson says. He wears a different expression since Pru arrived – the surly clotted look has relaxed into an expectant emptiness, a wide-eyed docility that Harry finds just as irritating.

Since the minister declined to take the gray easy chair, Harry must. As he sinks into it his legs stretch out, and Campbell without rising jumps the hassock and himself together a few feet to one side, like a bullfrog hopping, pad and all, to avoid being touched by Harry's big suede shoes. Grinning at his own agility, the little man resonantly announces, "Well now. I understand somebody here wants to get married."

"Not me, I'm married already," Rabbit says quickly, as a joke of his own. He has the funny fear that Campbell, one of whose little hands (they look grubby, like his teeth) rests on the edge of the hassock inches from the tips of Harry's shoes, will suddenly reach down and undo the laces. He moves his feet over, some more inches away.

Pru had smiled sadly at his joke, gazing down, her green-filled glass as yet untouched. Seated beside her, Nelson stares forward, solemnly unaware of the dabs of beer on his upper lip. A baby eating: Rabbit remembers how Nelson used to batter with the spoon, held left-handed in his fist though they tried to get him to take it in his right, on the tray of the high chair in the old apartment on Wilbur Street, high above the town. He was never one of the messier babies, though – always wanting to be good. Harry wants to cry, gazing at the innocently ignored mustache of foam on the kid's face. They're selling him down the river. Pru touches her glass furtively, without giving it aglance.

Ma Springer's voice sounds weary, rising from the Barcalounger. "Yes they'd like to have it be in the church, but it won't be one of your dressy weddings. Just family. And as soon as convenient, even next week we were thinking." Her feet in their dirty aqua sneakers, with rounded toes and scuffed rims of white rubber, look childish and small off the floor, up on the padded extension.

Janice's voice sounds hard, cutting in. "Mother there's no need for such a rush. Pru's parents will need time to make arrangements to come from Ohio."

Her mother says, with a flip of her tired hand toward Pru, "She says her folks may not be bothering to come."

The girl blushes, and tightens her touch on the glass, as if to pick it up when attention has moved past her. "We're not as close as this family is," she says. She lifts her eyes, with their translucent green, to the face of the minister, to explain, "I'm one of seven. Four of my sisters are married already, and two of those marriages are on the rocks. My father's sour about it."

Ma Springer explains, "She was raised Catholic."

The minister smiles broadly. "Prudence seems such a Protestant name."

The blush, as if quickened by a fitful wind, deepens again. "I was baptized Teresa. My friends in high school used to think I was prudish, that's where Pru came from."

Campbell giggles. "Really! That's fascinating!" The hair on the top of his head, Rabbit sees, is getting thin, young as he is. Thank God that's one aspect of aging Harry doesn't have to worry about: good lasting heads of hair on both sides of his family, though Pop's toward the end had gone through gray to yellow, finer than cornsilk, and too dry to comb. They say the mother's genes determine. One of the things he never liked about Janice was her high forehead, like she might start to go bald. Nelson's too young to tell yet. Old man Springer used to slick his hair back so he always looked like a guy in a shirt collar ad, even on Saturday mornings, and in the coffin they got the parting all wrong; the newspaper obituary had reversed the photo in doing the halftone and the mortician had worked from that. With Mim, one of the first signs of her rebellion as he remembers was she bleached stripes into her hair, "Protestant rat" she used to call the natural color, in tenth grade, and Mom would get after her saying, "Better that than look like a skunk." It was true, with those blonde pieces Mim did look tough, suddenly – besmirched. That's life, besmirching yourself. The young clergyman's voice is sliding from syllable to syllable smoothly, his surprising high giggle resettled in the back of his throat. "Bessie, before we firm up particulars like the date and the guest list, I think we should investigate some basics. Nelson and Teresa: do you love one another, and are you both prepared to make the -eternal commitment that the church understands to exist at the heart of Christian marriage?"