Rabbit Remembered

'What do you want me to say? Hell, he was the only father I had. What am I supposed to do, wish him dead?'

Annabelle smiles. Her soup bowl is empty. 'Some would say that would be normal.'

'That Oedipal crap, you mean? Freud is fun to read, but in the workplace he doesn't hack it. Nobody in the business uses Freud any more.' But he is more stunned by her saying that than he shows. Would be normal. He had wanted his father to live, to continue to take care of him, to be a shelter however shaky. There is a louder scream of wind outside, old tropical storm Floyd. The ceiling lights flicker and then go out.

At the same moment, the waitress brings their salads. 'Oops,' she says. 'Can you two lovebirds see to eat, or shall I hunt up some candles?'

'We can see enough,' Nelson says. In the gloomy light, flickering as the wind outside lashes the trees, Nelson leans forward and softly explains to his sister, 'He was tall, about eight inches taller than me, and had an athlete's nice easy way of carrying himself. It pained him that I wasn't more like him. He had been a wonderful basketball player in high school, back when it was still a white game.'

'That doesn't exactly make a life, does it though?' Annabelle asks, lifting the first forkful of salad to her face. She has a slightly eager way of eating, keeping her mouth closed in a satisfied smile as she chews, her upper lip shiny with salad oil.

'That's what everybody kept telling him all his life,' says Nelson. 'But I don't know. At least it was something, to remember about yourself. I have nothing like that to remember about myself.'

'What about your family?' she asks, before taking the next bite, being careful to keep the bacon bits balanced on the piece of spinach.

'They left me. My wife, Pru, who you saw pregnant that time at the party that you've forgotten all about, left me over a year ago and took the kids. Back to Ohio, where she's from. Akron. I met her when I was a student at Kent State.' He doesn't say she was a secretary, and older than he; he is embarrassed about that. 'My girl, Judy, is nineteen, twenty next January, and off everybody's hands except a bunch of boyfriends', and the boy, Roy, and I keep in touch by e-mail. He's fourteen and knows more about computers than I ever will.'

'Why did she leave? Pru.'

'I don't know. I guess I disappointed her. She thinks I'm a pipsqueak.'

She waits to finish chewing and says urgently, 'Nelson, you're not. You're a caring, intelligent man.'

'Yeah, well. You can be that and a pipsqueak too. I can be frustrating. Pru always wanted us to get a house of our own and I could never see the point, my mother sitting on all those rooms over in Mt. Judge. I didn't want to leave her alone. My mother.'

'But now she's married.'

'Yeah. But then I didn't want to leave her alone with my pretty awful stepfather. Hey-do I sound normal, or do I sound sick? When I'm over with my sickos I don't have to listen to myself. I just let them talk. Boy, do some of them babble! Everybody thinks their little story is the story of the universe.'

The waitress comes back from the kitchen and puts an unlit candle in a pottery holder on the booth table and lights it. 'You didn't have to do that,' Nelson tells her. 'We're about to go.'

'Why go?' The waitress saunters to the door and looks out its half-window at the whipped, glistening city. 'Pitch black in the east,' she says. 'Over behind the courthouse.' A cardboard sign tucked into the molding says on this side in Day-Glo letters CLOSED. She takes this sign and reverses it so that CLOSED faces the street. The couple in the booth hear the lock click. 'The stove and grill are out,' the waitress explains.

Nearer, Nelson hears this other female voice, as soft, as transparent as the voice inside his head, say, 'Tell me more about your father, as you saw him.' The girl is trying so hard to be sweet. Maybe she is sweet. But Nelson dislikes talking about his father. It pulls something too obscure and precious out of him. When he tries to think back to what it was like growing up he keeps getting a picture of his father and him in the front seat of a car, both of them having nothing to say but the silence comfortable, the shared forward motion satisfying. Nelson is being driven somewhere. To the piano lessons that gave him butterflies because he never practiced enough during the week, as Mr. Schiffner with his lavender shirts and tiny Hitler mustache always detected. To soccer practice when he was in that weekend league of middle teens and had hopes of being a star, small but agile. To Billy Fosnacht's or some other friend's, there weren't that many, for a sleepover. Meanwhile his father's big head was happy with his daydreams and his hands were light and pale on the steering wheel, with big translucent moons on the nails, usually one hand while the other absent-mindedly patted and stroked the back of his head in a gesture that maybe went back to the days when teenagers had wet ducktails, like Sal Mineo or James Dean in the old rebel movies Nelson could watch on TV. His father had been a rebel of a sort, and a daredevil, but as he got older and tame he radiated happiness at just the simplest American things, driving along in an automobile, the radio giving off music, the heater giving off heat, delivering his son somewhere in this urban area that he knew block by block, intersection by intersection. At night, in the underlit ghostliness of the front seat, their two shadows were linked it seemed forever by blood. To Nelson as a child his own death seemed possible in so perilous a world but he didn't believe his father would ever die.

'I saw him, eventually,' Nelson says, 'as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. Mom-mom-my grandmother on my mother's side, the Springers-would always say how I resembled Fred, her husband. He was on the shortish side like me, and sharp at business stuff, and bouncy. But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way.'

'I loved my father, too,' says Annabelle, 'the man I thought was my father. He could fix anything-you know how around a farm everything is always breaking down, he never let on he was flummoxed, just would sigh and settle down to it. He had this wonderful confident, calm touch-with my mother, too, when she'd let her temper fly. Whenever the excitable of my patients get to acting up, I try to think of him and act like he'd act.'

Nelson's inner ear tells him there is something wrong with this. He is being sold something. But it may be that his ear is jaded, hearing all day about families, dealing with all the variations of dependency and resentment, love and its opposite, all the sickly inturned can't-get-away-from-itness of close relations. If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence.

'He sounds great,' he grunts. 'Every time my father tried to fix anything around the house, it got broken worse.' He hears these words and wonders if they are fair. He remembers his father digging in a garden he had made in the back yard, even building a little wire fence to defend the vegetables against rabbits. He remembers his father on one of their car trips somewhere pleading with him not to get married, not to get himself trapped in marriage, even though Pru was pregnant and the wedding day set: he shocked his son by suggesting an abortion and offering to pay her off. I just don't like seeing you caught, you're too much me.

I'm not you! I'm not caught!

Nellie, you 're caught. They've got you and you didn't even squeak.

He had fought his father off, accused him of being jealous, denied the resemblance the old man was pushing. You don't necessarily have to lead my life, I guess is what I want to say. Well, he hadn't, exactly, and marrying Pru hadn't worked out, exactly, but what pains Nelson now is seeing that his father had been trying as far as his narcissism allowed to step out of his selfish head and help his son, trying to shelter him from one of those disasters that most decisions entail. He had tried to be a better father than Nelson could give him credit for, even now. He says with an effort, 'But he wasn't all bad. We used to have great games of catch in the back yard. And he'd take me to Blasts games out at the stadium. Once we even drove down to Philly for a Flyers game, somebody had given him tickets.'

'I met him, you know. At the car lot. He seemed nice. Of course I had no idea he was my father, but he acted fatherly, And funny.'

'What did he say funny?'

'Nelson, how can you expect me to remember?' And then it comes to her. The bright June day, the Toyota agency tucked over on Route 111 across the river, the drive with Jamie at the wheel, and the heavy tall middle- aged salesman with his pale fine hair in the front. He sat in the death seat, Annabelle in the back. She says, 'It was the time of the gas shortage. He said all the hardware stores in Brewer were selling out of siphons and soon we'd