"It seems hard on Mother," Janice says in that weak voice she gets, lovemaking. "She'll be leaving us this place some day and I know she expects we'd stay in it with her till then."

"She'll live for another twenty years," Harry says, sinking his middle finger in. "In twenty years you'll be well over sixty."

"And wouldn't it seem strange to Nelson?"

"Why? It's what he wants, me out of the way. I depress the kid."

"Harry, I'm not so sure it's you that's doing it. I think he's just scared."

"What's he got to be scared of?"

"The same thing you were scared of at his age. Life."

Life. Too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday. "Well he shouldn't have come home if that's the way he was going to feel," Harry says. He's losing his erection.

"He didn't know," Janice says. He can feel, his finger still in her, that her mind too is drifting away from their flesh, into sad realms of family. "He didn't know you'd be so hard on him. Why are you?"

Fucking kid not thirteen years old and tried to take Jill from him, back in Penn Villas after Janice had gone. "He's hard on me," Harry says. He has ceased to whisper. Ma Springer's television set, when he listens, is still on – a rumbling, woofing, surging noise less like human voices than a noise Nature would make in the trees or along the ocean shore. She has become a fan of the ABC eleven-thirty special report on the hostages and every morning tells them the latest version of nothing happening. Khomeini and Carter both trapped by a pack of kids who need a shave and don't know shit, they talk about old men sending young men off to war, if you could get the idiotic kids out of the world it might settle down to being a sensible place. "He gets a disgruntled look on his face every time I open my mouth to talk. Everything I try to tell him at the lot he goes and does the opposite. Some guy comes in to buy this Mercury that was the other one of the convertibles the kid wrecked that time and offers a snowmobile on the trade-in. I thought it was a joke until the other day I go in and the Mercury's gone and this little yellow Kawasaki snowmobile is sitting up in the front row with the new Tercels. I hit the roof and Nelson tells me to stop being so uptight, he allowed the guy four hundred on it and it'll give us more publicity than twice that in ads, the crazy lot that took a snowmobile on trade-in."

Janice makes a soft noise that were she less tired would be laughter. "That's the kind of thing Daddy used to do."

"And then behind my back he's taken on about ten grand's worth of old convertibles that get about ten miles to the gallon nobody'll want and this caper with Pru is running up a fucking fortune. There's no benefits covering her."

"Shh. Mother can hear."

"I want her to hear, she's the one giving the kid all his high and mighty ideas. Last night, you hear them cooking up how he's going to have his own car for him and Pru, when that old Newport of hers just sits in the garage six days out of seven?" A muffled sound of chanting comes through the papered wall, Iranians outside the Embassy demonstrating for the benefit of the TV cameras. Rabbit's throat constricts with frustration. "I got to get out, honey."

"Tell me about the house," Janice says, taking his hand in hers and returning it to her pussy. "How many rooms would it have?"

He begins to massage, dragging his fingers along the crease on one side, then the other, of the triangle, and then bisecting with a thoughtful stroke, looking for the fulcrum, the nub, of it. Cindy's hair had looked darker than Janice's, less curly, alive maybe with needles of light like the fur of Ma Springer's old coat. "We wouldn't need a lot of bedrooms," he tells Janice, `just a big one for us, with a big mirror you can see from the bed -"

"A mirror! Where'd you get the idea of a mirror?"

"Everybody has mirrors now. You watch yourself making love in them."

"Oh, Harry. I couldn't."

"I think you could. And then at least another bedroom, in case your mother has to come live with us, or we have guests, but not next to ours, with at least a bathroom between so we don't hear her television, and downstairs a kitchen with all new equipment including a Cuisinart -"

"I'm scared of them. Doris Kaufinann says for the first three weeks she had hers everything came out mush. One night it was pink mush and the next night green mush was the only difference."

"You'll learn," he croons, drawing circles on her front, circles that widen to graze her breasts and beaver and then diminish to feather into her navel like the asshole of that olive bitch along 422, "there are instruction books, and a refrigerator with an automatic ice-maker, and one of those wall ovens that's at the height of your face so you don't have to bend over, and I don't know about all this microwave, I was reading somewhere how they fry your brains even if you're in the next room…" Moist, she is so moist her cunt startles him, touching it, like a slug underneath a leaf in the garden. His prick undergoes such a bulbous throb it hurts. "… and this big sunken living room with lights along the side where we can give parties."

"Who would we give these parties for?" Her voice is sinking into the pillow like the dust of a mummy's face, so weak.

"Oh…" His hand continues to glide, around and around, carrying the touch of wetness up to her nipples and adorning first one then the other with it like tinsel on the tips of a Christmas tree. "… everybody. Dons Kaufinann and all those other tennis Lesbians at the Flying Eagle, Cindy Murkett and her trusty sidekick Buddy Inglefinger, all the nice girls who work their pretty asses off for a better America down at the Gold Cherry, all the great macho guys in the service and parts department of Springer Motors -"

Janice giggles, and simultaneously the front door downstairs slams. After visiting Pru, Nelson has been going to that bar that used to be the Phoenix and bumming around with that creepy crowd that kills time there. It oppresses Harry, this freedom: if the kid has been excused from evening floor duty to visit Pru for the week then he has no business going out getting stewed on the time. If the kid was so shook up when she took her tumble he ought to be doing something better than this out of gratitude or penance or whatever. His footsteps below sound drunken, one plunked down on top of the other, bump, bump, across the living room between the sofa and the Barcalounger and past the foot of the stairs, making the china in the sideboard tingle, on into the kitchen for one more beer. Harry's breath comes quick and short, thinking of that surly puzzled face sucking the foam out of one more can: drinking and eating up the world, and out of sheer spite at that. He feels the boy's mother at his side listening to the footsteps and puts her hand on his prick; in expert reflex her fingers pump the loose skin of the sides. Simultaneous with Nelson's footsteps below as he treads back into the living room toward the Barcalounger, Harry thrusts as hard as if into the olive chick's ass into the socket Janice's wifely hand makes and speeds up his hypnotic tracing of rapid smooth circles upon the concave expectancy of her belly, assuring her hoarsely, of the house he wants, "You'll love it. You'll love it."

Nelson says to Pru, as they drive together into Brewer in Ma Springer's stately old navy-blue Chrysler, "Now guess what. He's talked Mom into them getting a house. They've looked at about six so far, she told me. They all seem too big to her but Dad says she should learn to think big. I think he's flipping out."

Pru says, quietly, "I wonder how much it has to do with us in moving in." She had wanted them to find an apartment of their own, in the same general neighborhood as Slim and Jason and Pam, and couldn't understand Nelson's need to live with his grandmother.