Rabbit Remembered

Day Treatment Center at Elm and Eighth Streets. The clean shirt and tie establish his authority, as one of those who guard the gates of Medicare and Medicaid, which compensate the day-treatment centers that have arisen to replace the Gothic institutions that used to house what were called the insane. His title is mental-health counsellor; his salary comes to twenty-seven thousand a year. His qualifications are a bachelor's degree (major: geography) awarded by Kent State in Ohio and a counsellor's certificate earned ten years later in a year's (1990-91) course of study at the Hubert F. Johnson Community College, in new buildings along the river in South Brewer, while living, he and his three dependents, at 89 Joseph Street courtesy of the new widow. Still here, he sits with his mother and stepfather at the round kitchen table with their makeshift meal and their beverages. Nelson has the Coors, Ronnie a Miller Lite in deference to his weight and blood pressure, and Janice a continuation in an orange-juice glass of the New York State sherry she nipped on returning home, to wash away the sour aftertaste of the bridge with its realization that Doris was a failing friend, a haughty old half-deaf crab. Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.

Nelson asks, 'Mom, did you think she was conning you?' Ronnie in concluding the story had given his opinion that this was the case. Nelson generally avoids conflict with his stepfather, though when Janice first announced she might be marrying him he sounded just like Harry, putting Ronnie down.

'Well, I wasn't sure,' she says. 'She seemed sincere, but then it was kind of brazen, you could say.'

'Con artists can be sincere,' Ronnie says. 'That's what makes them good con artists. They fool even themselves.'

'What's worth conning about us?' Nelson asks with his professional mildness, making a question of everything. 'We're just scraping by, in a house too big for us, that we ought to be selling. You're retired from the insurance con game and Mom and I work at shit jobs, for not much.' His eyelashes, always long for a boy's, flutter in his deep sockets. His haircut makes him look like a Marine or monk.

Ronnie's thin-skinned face flushes. He says, 'For a guy who snorted an entire car agency up his nose, you're one to talk about con games.'

Janice intervenes, 'As I told Ronnie, she seemed to have enough money. Her clothes were good quality.'

'What kind of car did she drive?' Ronnie asks.

'You know, I was so rattled I forgot to look. No, wait.' She tries to remember the morning-the maple shadows on the street, the mail truck passing… 'A Lexus,' she announces. 'A lipstick-red Lexus, brand new.'

Nelson flicks a triumphant glare at Ronnie. 'A step up from a Taurus,' he says. To his mother he urges, 'I think it's great that she had the guts to come around at all. Not that anything that happened back then was her fault exactly. Did she look like Dad?'

'Oh Nelson, I keep being asked that. It seemed to me so, in a way, but then I was looking for it. You know how these resemblances are, something you can't put your finger on. She had a round pale face and solid long legs.'

Ronnie says, 'That could fit anybody, for Chrissake.'

'Her eyes-they were pale blue and had a little droop toward the outside corner, like Harry's.'

Nelson's eyes, brown like hers, widen with interest. It pleases his mother to see him engaged. He must be like this at work. He comes home drained and irritable and untalkative. 'I think we should have her here,' he says.

Ronnie is firm. 'That's a mistake. Give her an in, you'll never get rid of her. Why should we all get our lives disrupted because'-he gropes for a non-insulting name-'Nelson's dad screwed this dead cow back in the dark ages?'

'I thought you went with her, too,' Janice says, herself quicker than usual, alert. 'Was she such a cow then?'

'She was a big Brewer broad,' he states, after blinking, 'who would put out for anybody.'

'Not those three months,' she says. 'As I remember, Harry moved in. It was a kind of honeymoon. Me pregnant with poor little Becky, and my husband was on his honeymoon.' Putting it like that makes her furious, almost to tears. Ronnie is right, of course. The girl is an alien invader, to be repelled.

'I forbid', Ronnie says, putting down his fork and forgetting the amount of chicken salad in his mouth, 'anybody getting in touch with this twat.'

'Ronnie.' Nelson almost never uses his stepfather's name, and says it now softly. 'This twat may be my sister. Dad used to hint sometimes there might be a sister. Here she is, come to us, putting herself at our mercy.'

'But what does she want, Nelson?' Janice asks. She feels better, clearer in her mind, finding herself now on her husband's side.

'She wants money,' Ronnie insists.

'Why, she wants,' Nelson says, getting wild-eyed and high-voiced, defensive and, to his mother, touching, 'she wants what everybody wants. She wants love.'

Ronnie turns to Janice conspiratorially. 'He's as off the rails as his old man. Remember how Rabbit took that Black Panther and doped-up hippie in?'

'Love does seem a bit much,' Janice allows.

'I'll go look her up myself, then,' Nelson threatens. 'A. Byer. You say she's the only one in the phone book.'

'Nelson, believe me,' Ronnie says, trying to act the father, 'there's nothing in it for you but heartbreak. You've been a victim of Harry Angstrom since you were two, why look for more agony?'

'It wasn't only agony,' Nelson argues. 'There were positive elements in the relationship.'

Janice chimes in, 'Harry loved Nelson, it frustrated him that he could never express it properly.'

'Oh come on, you bleeding hearts,' says Ronnie, in an exasperated voice strong and angry enough to end the conversation. 'I knew Rabbit longer than either of you. I knew him since we were kids in knickers snitching penny candy off the counter at Lennert's Variety Store. That conceited showboat never loved a soul outside his own thick skin. His mother had spoiled him rotten.'

Chapter 2

'Hello?'

'Yes?' Wary. Single women have to be, the world full of phonecreeps.'Is this Annabelle Byer?'Yes.' Slightly reassured to be named.'This is Nelson Angstrom.'Oh! Nelson! How nice!'A pause; he had thought from her enthusiasm she might go on a little more. He says, 'My mother described your visit.'Did she? I wasn't sure it went very well.'Oh, yeah. She liked you. She just isn't sure what to make of the general situation. It took her by surprise.'Me, too. I mean, I was surprised at first, when my mother told me. It shouldn't matter, my being a grown woman and all.'Oh, but it has to matter.' He feels more secure, as the conversation tips toward the therapeutic.'How do you feel about it?' she asks.'I feel good,' he says. 'Why not? The more the merrier, isn't that what they say? Listen. I was wondering if we could have lunch sometime. Just to look each other over.' That was one sentence too many, but then he might as well get the curiosity issue on the table.

She hesitates. Why would she hesitate, when it was she who had come out of the woodwork? 'I think I'd like that.'

'Tomorrow? Next day? What's your schedule?' he says. 'I work at Eighth and Elm, there's a little restaurant opened up in the block on Elm toward Weiser, it's called The Greenery, but don't be put off, it's decent enough, soups and sandwiches and salads, kind of neo-New Age, but they have booths for a little privacy.'

'Sounds cute,' she says. That slightly puts him off. This may be an airhead, sister or not. After all, what does she have for genes? Nothing that promising. She asks, 'Would you mind not until next Thursday? Until then I'm on day duty, it's an Alzheimer's patient who needs round-the-clock.'

'Great,' he says. 'Thursday the sixteenth. Twelve-thirty O.K.? I'll be waiting outside. Medium height, short haircut these days.'

'I'm,' she began to say, then giggled, not knowing how to describe herself. 'I'll be in fat white shoes.'

Wouldn't you know, they have picked the one day in September when a hurricane called Floyd is supposed to hit. All sorts of wind damage and heavy flooding in North Carolina, and then predicted to come right up the Chesapeake into southeastern Pennsylvania. But these forecasters are paid to whip everybody up, and though the