Rabbit Remembered

table in the booth suggests that she is still hopeful, still a player in whatever the game is.

The waitress, too middle-aged for her short green uniform, comes over from behind the counter and hands them menus prettily printed with leafy borders but already smudged and tattered by many hands. 'Also,' she tells them, 'we've added hamburgers and hot dogs.'

Nelson says, 'I thought those were against your principles.'

She is lumpy and sallow but not above being amused. 'They were, but people kept asking for them. We still won't do pizzas and French fries.'

'Way out,' Nelson says. Laconic responses have become, these eight years, his professional habit, but this occasion will demand more: he will have to give, to lead. To be a provider.

'I love healthy food,' says Annabelle Byer.

'Do you know already?' the waitress asks. 'Or would you like a few minutes?' Nelson has been coming here once or twice a week since the place opened last spring, but she is showing him new deference now that he has appeared with a companion. Annabelle is a little round-faced and bland compared with the narrow-hipped Latina in high heels and jeans, but she is not an embarrassment as a date; she could be a colleague at the Center, like Katie Shirk.

'I know,' he tells the waitress. 'A cup of that broccoli soup you make-'

'It's not a cream soup,' the waitress interrupts. 'It's a clear soup, some of the customers call it watery.'I want it,' Nelson insists, 'and then the spinach salad, with raspberry vinaigrette, and don't go easy on the bacon bits.'

'That's just what I want,' Annabelle says, more gleefully than Nelson thinks she needs to. The waitress is writing. 'You said do go easy on the bacon bits, or don't?'

'Don't,'Nelson and Annabelle answer in unison. Nelson adds,'And, to drink, in view of the horrible weather, a cup of hot tea. Not herbal, caffeine. Lipton's if you have it.'

'Me, too,' his sister says. He is beginning to see the downside of having one.

'Don't you have any ideas of your own?' he asks her.'Almost nothing but. If you'd have let me order first, as you should have, you'd be seeming to copy me. '

'I'd have thought of something different. Their lo-cal Caesar with strips of range-fed chicken can be terrific.'I love healthy food.'

'You said that.'Well, I'm nervous. This is strange, meeting your brother at last, and it was your idea.'

'Yeah, and showing up giving my mother the scare of her life was your idea. Sorry about your mother, by the way.'

'Thank you. She didn't seem scared, yours. Almost feisty, you could say. She thought I was after her money.'

'Well, what else? Not that she has that much.' He feels, what he had not expected, at ease enough with this person to be combative, as if they had rehearsed their competition years ago. 'You and I met, by the way,' he says. 'Twenty or so years ago, at a party in an apartment along Locust Boulevard. The hosts were a couple called Jason and Pam and a fag they lived with called Slim.' He wouldn't say 'fag' at work-he has worked with a number of gays, on both sides of the client-caregiver divide, and has no problem with it, once he outgrew the fantasy that they were going to grab his crotch -but being with this girl brings out an older, less p.c. self. 'I was with my wife. She was very pregnant, and got drunk and fell down the stairs.' The memory still shames him: he had given Pru the bump that sent her off-balance, and the image of her skidding down the metal-edged stairs, with the legs of the orange tights she had on splayed wide like a sexual invitation on the edge of disaster, has stayed with him as a turning point in his life. I must do better than this, he had thought at the time.

'I don't remember any of that,' Annabelle says with her annoying, faintly defiant blandness.

'I remember you' he accuses, 'and thinking how nice you were. I admired your ear. You were going with a boy called Jamie and worked at some old people's place out around the old the fairgrounds.'

'Sunnyside,' she says. 'My ear?' she asks. Self-consciously she touches her right ear, exposed by the fluffy short-cut hair there. Her hair, a touch damp from waiting in the rain, is brown, with auburn highlights that seem natural and a fair amount of gray sprinkled in. Time is pressing on her though her face pretends not to feel it.

'It hadn't been pierced.' He doesn't say it reminded him of his own. He had also liked the way she bulged toward him in certain places, her plump upper lip and the fronts of her thighs when she stood. Some would say she is heavy now but in this county the men are accustomed to that. How had she avoided getting married?

'My mother wouldn't let me,' Annabelle was saying. 'I guess it was superstitious of her, she said she liked me natural, the way I had been born. Boy, I wonder what she would say with some of the girls now. Even the young nurses, the body piercing, navel, nipple, you name it. I ask them, how can it be sanitary, and they say their boyfriends like it. One more thing to play with, I guess.' She blushes and lowers her eyes.

The soup comes, the flowery thin soup The Greenery cooks up with broccoli florets and frothy bean sprouts and slices of water chestnut so thin as to be transparent. Nelson and Annabelle bow their faces into the heat of the soups and realize that their time together is being consumed. 'I'm sorry,' she says, 'I don't remember that party better. Maybe I was stoned.'

'No, no, it was me who was stoned. Stoned or wired, that's what I usually was back then. After my father died I got religion, more or less, and earned the certificate to be a mental-health counsellor. Don't you think it's strange, by the way, how both you and I are caregivers?'

'Not if we're related,' she says. 'I believe in genetics. And health care is an expanding field, as the world fills up with people that would have been dead a hundred years ago. Everybody winds up needing care, pretty much.'

'Yeah, you wonder if it's worth all the effort. I mean, you're keeping these Alzheimer's wrecks going when they don't even know enough to thank you, and I knock myself out to keep a bunch of depressive loonies from killing themselves, when if they did it it would save the government a fair amount of money.'

She looks at him, her mouth prim until she swallows the spoonful of soup, and says, 'Nelson. You don't mean that. In the abstract, you can feel that way, but not when you're face to face with the patient. I go on these teams Hospice sends around. Even at the very end, there's something in there, a soul or whatever, you have to love.'

'Especially when you're being paid to love it,' he says, wondering if one of the water-chestnut slices has gone bad. A specialty place like this, you don't get the turnover to keep the produce fresh; they give it one more day than they should. The other customers here when they entered are one by one leaving, though a small cluster hangs this side of the door, waiting for a sudden sideways squall of rain to let up. The ceiling lights glow as if evening is coming on, though it's not yet one o'clock.

'Tell me about him,' Annabelle demands.

'Who?' Though he knows.

'Our father.'

Nelson shrugs. 'What's to say? He was narcissistically impaired, would be my diagnosis. Intuitive, but not very empathic. He never grew up. It occurred to me just now, passing a bunch of old guys in a barbershop coming over here, that he died when he did because he wanted to. Those of us around him were begging him not to die but he wouldn't listen.' Nelson has rephrased Pru's sleeping with his father just out of the hospital as a way of begging him not to die. Not a bad reframe, he thinks.

'Why didn't you want him to die, if he was so awful?'

'Did I say he was awful? He was careless and self-centered, but he had his points. People liked being around him. He was upbeat.

Since he never grew up himself, he could be good with children, even with me when I was little. The smaller they were, the better he related. He was a better grandfather than a father, since he could clown around and have no direct responsibility and not give you a sinking feeling. Me he kept giving a sinking feeling. I mean, he did things, too. He ran away from Mom to shack up with your mother. He got involved with a megalomaniacal black guy and a masochistic runaway while girl and got our house burned down. He had a crush on this nitwit young wife of a friend of my parents when they were in a country-club phase. Then he had a long secret affair with his oldest friend's wife. I say friend, but in fact he and Ronnie always hated each other. I mean, this is not a constructive personality we're talking about.'

'Yet you didn't want him to die.'