"Nelson was wonderful," Pru is telling them. "So caring." Her voice is more musical and throaty than Harry has ever heard it.

He wonders if just lying down does that to a woman: changes the angle of her voice box.

"Yeah, he felt sick about it," Harry says. "We didn't hear the story till this morning."

Nelson lifts his head. "They were at a strip joint, can you imagine?"

"Jesus," Harry says to Janice. "Who's in charge here? What does he want us to do, sit around the house all the time aging gracefully?"

Ma Springer says, "Now we can only stay a minute, I want to get to church. It wouldn't look right I think just to go to the meeting like Reverend Campbell said."

"Go to that meeting, Ma," Harry points out, "they'll hit you up for a fortune. Tracker organs don't grow on trees."

Janice says to Pru, "You poor sweetie. How bad is the arm?"

"Oh, I wasn't paying that much attention to what the doctor said." Her voice floats, she must be full of tranquilizers. "There's a bone on the outside, with a funny name -"

"Femur," Harry suggests. Something about all this has jazzed him up, made him feel nerved-up and defiant. Those strippers last night, some of them young enough to be his daughter. The Gold Cherry, the place was called.

Nelson lifts his head again from burrowing in Pru's side. "That's in the thigh, Dad. She means the humerus."

"Ha ha," Harry says.

Pru seems to moan. "Ulna," she supplies. "He said it was just a simple fracture."

"How long's it gonna be on?" Harry asks.

"He said six weeks if I do what he says."

"Off by Christmas," Harry says. Christmas is a big thing in his mind this year, for beyond it, and the mop-up of New Year's, they're going to take their trip, they have the hotel, the plane reservations, they were discussing it all last night again, after the excitement of the strippers.

"You poor sweetie," Janice repeats.

Pru begins to sing, without music. But the words come out as if sung. "Oh my God, I don't mind, I'm glad for it, I deserve to be punished somehow. I honestly believe" – she keeps looking straight at Janice, with an authority they haven't seen from her before – "it's God telling me this is the price He asks for my not losing the baby. I'm glad to pay it, I'd be glad if every bone in my body was broken, I really wouldn't care. Oh my God, when I felt my feet weren't under me and I knew there wasn't anything for me to do but fall down those horrible stairs, the thoughts that ran through my head! You must know."

Meaning Janice must know what it's like to lose a baby. Janice kind of yelps and falls on the bedridden girl so hard Harry winces, and plucks at her back to pull her off. Feeling the rock of plaster against her breasts, Janice arches her spine under his hands; through the cloth her skin feels taut as a drum, and hot. But Pru shows no pain, smiling her crooked careful smile and keeping her eyelids with their traces of last night's blue closed serenely, accepting the older woman's weight upon her. The hand not captured in a cast Pru sneaks around to pat Janice's back; her fingers come close to Harry's own. Pat, they go, pat pat. He thinks of Cindy Murkett's round fingers and marvels how much more childish and grublike they look than these, bony though young and reddened at the knuckles: his mother's hands had that tough scrubbed look. Janice can't stop sobbing, Pru can't stop patting, the two other women patients awake in the room can't stop glancing over. Moments this complicated rub Harry the wrong way. He feels rebuked, since the official family version is that the baby's dying at Janice's hands was all his fault. Yet now the truth seems declared that he was just a bystander. Nelson, pushed to one side by his mother's assault of grief, sits up and stares, poor frazzled kid. These damn women so intent on communing should leave us out of it entirely. At last Janice rights herself, having snuffled so hard her upper lip is wet with snot.

Harry hands her his handkerchief.

"I'm so happy," she says with a big runny sniff, "for Pru."

"Come on, shape up," he mutters, taking back the handkerchief.

Ma Springer soothes the waters with, "It does seem a miracle, all the way down those stairs and nothing worse. Up that high in those old Brewer houses the stairs were just for the servants."

"I didn't go all the way down," Pru says. "That's how I broke my arm, stopping myself. I don't remember any pain."

"Yeah," Harry offers. "Nelson said you were feeling no pain."

"Oh no, no." Her hair spread out across the pillow by Janice's embrace makes her look like she is falling through white space, singing. "I'd hardly had anything, the doctors all say you shouldn't, it was those terrible tall platforms they're making us all wear. Isn't that the dumbest style? I'm going to burn them up, absolutely, as soon as I get back."

"When will that be now?" Ma asks, shifting her black purse to the other hand. She has been dressed for church since before Nelson woke up and the fuss began. She's a slave to that church, God knows what she gets out of it.

"Up to a week, he said," Pru says. "To keep me quiet and, you know, to make sure. The baby. I woke up this morning with what I thought were contractions and they scared me so I called Soupy. He was wonderful."

"Yes, well," Ma says.

Harry hates the way they all keep calling it the baby. More like a piglet or a wobbly big frog at this stage, as he pictures it. What if she had lost it, wouldn't it have lived? They keep five-month preemies alive now and pretty soon you'll have life in a test tube start to finish. "We gotta get Ma to church," he announces. "Nelson, you want to wake up and come or stay here and sleep?" The boy's head had gone back down onto the hospital mattress again. He used to fall asleep at the kitchen table that way.

"Harry," Janice says. "Don't be so rough on everybody."

"He thinks we're all silly about the baby," Pru says dreamily, dimly teasing.

"No, hey: I think it's great about the baby." He bends over to kiss her goodbye for now and wants to whisper in her ear about all the babies he has had, dead and alive, visible and invisible. Instead he tells her, straightening, "Keep cool. We'll be back after this when we can stay longer."

"Don't not play golf," she says.

"Golf's shot. They don't like you to walk on the greens after a certain point."

Nelson is asking her, "What do you want me to do, go or stay?"

"Go, Nelson, for heaven's sake. Let me get some sleep."

"You know, I'm sorry last night if I said anything. I was skunked. When they told me last night they didn't think you'd lose the baby I was so relieved I cried. Honest." He would cry again but his face clouds with embarrassed awareness that the others have listened. That's why we love disaster, Harry sees, it puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God. Without a sense of being in the wrong we're no better than animals. Suppose the baby had aborted at the very moment he was watching that olive chick with the rolling tongue tug down her tinsel underpants to her knees and peek at the audience from behind her shoulder while tickling her asshole with that ostrich feather: he'd feel terrible.

Pru waves her husband's quavery words and all their worried faces away. "I'm fine. I love all of you so much." Her hair streams outward as she waits to sink into sleep, into more wild prayer, into the dreaming fluids of her own bruised belly. Her stumpy wing of snow-white plaster lifts a few inches from her chest in farewell. They leave her to the company of ex-nuns and shuffle back through the hospital corridors, their footsteps clamorous amid their silent determination to save their quarrels for the car.

"A week!" Harry says, as soon as they're rolling in the Mustang. "Does anybody have any idea how much a week in a hospital costs these days?"