"No, Harry, you can keep her." A joke. "I'll be by twelvetwenty, twelve-thirty."
He hangs up. Janice is gone from the kitchen. He finds her in the living room crying. He goes and kneels beside the sofa and puts his arms around her but these actions feel like stage directions followed woodenly. A button is off on her blouse and the sallow curve of breast into the bra mixes with her hot breath in his ear. She says, "You can't understand, how good he was. Not sexy or funny or anything, just good."
"Sure I can. I've known some good people. They make you .feel good."
"They make you feel everything you do and are is good. He never told me how dumb I am, every hour on the hour like you do, even though he's much smarter than you could ever imagine. He would have gone to college, if he hadn't been a Greek."
"Oh. Don't they let Greeks in now? The nigger quota too big?"
"You say such sick things, Harry."
"It's because nobody tells me how good I am," he says, and stands. The back of her neck is vulnerable beneath him. One good karate chop would do it.
The driveway crackles outside; it's much too early for Springer. He goes to the window. A teal-blue Fury. The passenger door swings open and Nelson gets out. On the other side appears Peggy Gring, wearing sunglasses and a miniskirt that flashes her big thighs like a card dealer's thumbs. Unhappiness -being deserted – has made her brisk, professional. She gives Rabbit hardly a hello and her sunglasses hide the eyes that he knows from school days look northeast and northwest. The two women go into the kitchen. From the sound of Janice snuffling he guesses a confession is in progress. He goes outside to finish the yard work he began last night. All around him, in the back yards of Vista Crescent, to the horizons of Penn Villas with their barbecue chimneys and aluminum wash trees, other men are out in their yards; the sound of his mower is echoed from house to house, his motions of bending and pushing are carried outwards as if in fragments of mirror suspended from the hot blank sky. These his neighbors, they come with their furniture in vans and leave with the vans. They get together to sign futile petitions for better sewers and quicker fire protection but otherwise do not connect. Nelson comes out and asks him, "What's the matter with Mommy?"
He shuts off the mower. "What's she doing?"
"She's sitting at the table with Mrs. Fosnacht crying her eyes out."
"Still? I don't know, kid; she's upset. One thing you must learn about women, their chemistries are different from ours."
"Mommy almost never cries."
"So maybe it's good for her. Get lots of sleep last night?"
"Some. We watched an old movie about torpedo boats."
"Looking forward to the Blasts game?"
"Sure."
"But not much, huh?"
"I don't like sports as much as you do, Dad. It's all so competitive."
"That's life. Dog eat dog."
"You think? Why can't things just be nice? There's enough stuff for everybody to share."
"You think there is? Why don't you start then by sharing this lawnmowing? You push it for a while."
"You owe me my allowance." As Rabbit hands him a dollar bill and two quarters, the boy says, "I'm saving for a mini-bike."
"Good luck."
"Also, Dad -?"
"Yeah?"
"I think I should get a dollar twenty-five an hour for work. That's still under the federal minimum wage."
"See?" Rabbit tells him. "Dog eat dog."
As he washes up inside, pulling grass bits out of his cuffs and putting a Band-aid on the ball of his thumb (tender place; in high school they used to say you could tell how sexy a girl was by how fat she was here), Janice comes into the bathroom, shuts the door, and says, "I've decided to tell him. While you're at the ball game I'll tell him." Her face looks taut but pretty dried-out; patches of moisture glisten beside her nose. The tile walls amplify her sniffs. Peggy Gring's car roars outside in leaving.
"Tell who what?"
"Tell Charlie. That it's all over. That you know."
"I said, keep him. Don't do anything for today at least. Calm down. Have a drink. See a movie. See that space movie again, you slept through the best parts."
"That's cowardly. No. He and I have always been honest with each other, I must tell him the truth."
"I think you're just looking for an excuse to see him while I'm tucked away at the ball park."
"You would think that."
"Suppose he asks you to sleep with him?"
"He wouldn't."
"Suppose he does, as a graduation present?"
She stares at him boldly: dark gaze tempered in the furnace of betrayal. It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere. "I would," she says.
"Where are you going to find him?"
"At the lot. He stays on until six summer Saturdays."
"What reason are you going to give him? For breaking it off" "Why, the fact that you know."
"Suppose he asks you why you told?"
"It's obvious why I told. I told because I'm your wife."
Tears belly out between her lids and the tension of her face breaks like Nelson's when a hidden anxiety, a D or a petty theft or a headache, is confessed. Harry denies his impulse to put his arm around her; he does not want to feel wooden again. She teeters, keeping her balance while sobbing, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, while the plastic shower curtain rustles at her shoulder.
"Aren't you going to stop me?" she brings out at last.
"Stop you from what?"
"From seeing him!"
Given this rich present of her grief, he can afford to be cruel. Coolly he says, "No, see him if you want to. Just as long as I don't have to see the bastard." And, avoiding the sight of her face, he sees himself in the cabinet mirror, a big pink pale man going shapeless under the chin, his little lips screwed awry in what wants to be a smile.
The gravel in the driveway crackles again. From the bathroom window he sees the boxy dun top of Springer's spandy new Toyota wagon. To Nelson he calls, "Grandpa's here. Let's go-o." To Janice he murmurs, "Sit tight, kid. Don't commit yourself to anything." To his father-in-law, sliding in beside him, across a spaghetti of nylon safety straps, Rabbit sings, "Buy me some peanuts and crack-er jack .. ."