"Why don't they just keep living in sin right here?" Harry asks. "We don't mind."

"We do indeed," Ma says, sounding smothered.

"Hey Dad," Nelson calls, "could you bring me another beer?"

"Get it yourself. My hands are full." Yet he stops in front of Pru and takes up the little liqueur glass. "Sure it's good for the baby?"

She looks up with an unexpected coldness. He was feeling so fatherly and fond and from her eyes he is a dumb traffic cop. "Oh her eyes yes," she tells him. "It's the beer and wine that are bad; they bloat you."

By the time Rabbit returns from the kitchen, Campbell is allowing himself to be brought around. He has what they want: a church wedding, a service acceptable in the eyes of the Grace Stuhls of this world. Knowing this, he is in no hurry. Beneath the girlish lashes his eyes are as dark as Janice's and Ma's, the Koerner eyes. Ma Springer is holding forth, the little rounded toes of her aqua sneakers bouncing. "You must take what the boy says with a grain of salt. At his age I didn't know what I believed myself, I thought the government was foolish and the gangsters had the right idea. This was back in Prohibition days."

Nelson looks at her with his own dark eyes, sullen. "Mommom, if it matters so much to you, I don't care that much, one way or another."

"What does Pru think?" Harry asks, giving her her poison. He wonders if the girl's frozen stiffness of manner, and those little waits while her smile gets unstuck, aren't simply fear: it is she who is growing another life within her body, and nobody else.

"I think," she responds slowly, so quietly the room goes motionless to hear, "it would be nicer in a church."

Nelson says, "I know I sure don't want to go down to that awful new concrete City Hall they've built behind where the Bijou used to be, some guy I know was telling me the contractor raked off a million and there's cracks in the cement already."

Janice in her relief says, "Harry, I could use some more Campari."

Campbell lifts his replenished glass from his low place on the hassock. "Cheers, good people." He states his terms: "The customary procedure consists of at least three sessions of counseling and Christian instruction after the initial interview. This I suppose we can consider the interview." As he addresses Nelson particularly, Harry hears a seductive note enrich the great mellow voice. "Nelson, the church does not expect that every couple it marries be a pair of Christian saints. It does ask that the participants have some understanding of what they are undertaking. I don't take the vows; you and Teresa do. Marriage is not merely a rite; it is a sacrament, an invitation from God to participate in the divine. And the invitation is not for one moment only. Every day you share is meant to be sacramental. Can you feel a meaning in that? There were wonderful words in the old prayer book; they said that marriage was not `to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God.' " He grins, having intoned this, and adds, "The new prayer book omits the fear of God."

Nelson whines, "I said, I'd go along."

Janice asks, a little prim, "How long would these sessions of instructions take?" It is like she is sitting, in that straight-backed dining-room chair, on an egg that might hatch too soon.

"Oh," Campbell says, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling, "I should think, considering the various factors, we could get three of them in in two weeks. I just happen, the officious clergyman said, to have my appointment book here." Before reaching into the breast pocket of the seersucker coat, Campbell taps out the bowl of his pipe with a finicky calm that conveys to Harry the advantages of being queer: the world is just a gag to this guy. He walks on water; the mud of women and making babies never dirties his shoes. You got to take off your hat: nothing touches him. That's real religion.

Some rebellious wish to give him a poke, to protest the smooth bargain that has been struck, prompts Harry to say, "Yeah, we want to get 'em in before the baby comes. He'll be here by Christmas."

"God willing," Campbell smiles, adding, "He or she."

"January," Pru says in a whisper, after putting down her glass. Harry can't tell if she is pleased or displeased by the gallant way he keeps mentioning the baby that everybody else wants to ignore. While the appointments are being set up she and Nelson sit on that sofa like a pair of big limp Muppets, with invisible arms coming up through the cushions into their torsos and heads.

"Fred had his birthday in January," Ma Springer announces, grunting as she tries to get out of the Barcalounger, to see the minister off.

"Oh Mother," Janice says. "One twelfth of the world has January birthdays."

"I was born in January," Archie Campbell says, rising. He grins to show his seedy teeth. "In my case, after much prayerful effort. My parents were ancient. It's a wonder I'm here at all."

The next day a warm rain is beginning to batter the yellowing leaves down from the trees in the park along Cityview Drive as Harry and Nelson drive through Brewer to the lot. The kid is still persona non grata but he's asked to check on the two convertibles he crunched, one of which, the Royale, Manny is repairing. The '72 Mercury, hit twice from the side, was more severely damaged, and parts are harder to get. Rabbit's idea had been when the kid went off to school to sell it for junk and write off the loss. But he didn't have the heart not to let the boy look at the wrecks at least. Then Nelson is going to borrow the Corona and visit Billy Fosnacht before he goes back to Boston to become an endodontist. Harry had a root canal job once; it felt like they were tickling the underside of his eyeball. What a hellish way to make a living. Maybe there's no entirely good way. The Toyota's windshield wipers keep up a steady rubbery singsong as the Brewer traffic slows, brake lights burning red all along Locust Boulevard. The Castle has started up again and yellow school buses loom ahead in the jam. Harry switches the wipers from Fast to Intermittent and wishes he still smoked cigarettes. He wants to talk to the kid.

"Nelson."

"Unhh?"

"How do you feel?"

"O.K. I woke up with a soreness in my throat but I took two of those five-hundred-milligram vitamin Cs Melanie talked Bessie into getting."

"She was really a health nut, wasn't she? Melanie. We still have all that Granola in the kitchen."

"Yeah, well. It was part of her act. You know, mystical gypsy. She was always reading this guru, I forget his name. It sounded like a sneeze."

"You miss her?"

"Melanie? No, why would I?"

"Weren't you kind of close?"

Nelson avoids the implied question. "She was getting pretty grouchy toward the end."

"You think she and Charlie went off together?" _ "Beats me," the boy says.

The wipers, now on Intermittent, startle Rabbit each time they switch across, as if someone other than he is making decisions in this car. A ghost. Like in that movie about Encounters of the Third Kind the way the truck with Richard Dreyfuss in it begins to shake all over and the headlights behind rise up in the air instead of pulling off to one side. He readjusts the knob from Intermittent to Slow. "I didn't mean your physical health, exactly. I meant more your state of mind. After last night."

"You mean about that sappy minister? I don't mind going over to listen to his garbage a couple times if it'll satisfy the Springer honor or whatever."

"I guess I mean more about the marriage in general. Nellie, I don't want to see you railroaded into anything."

The boy sits up a little in the side of Harry's vision; the yellow buses ahead pull into the Brewer High driveway and the line of cars begins to move again, slowly, beside a line of parked cars whose rooftops are spattered with leaves the rain has brought down. "Who says I'm being railroaded?"