Rabbit Remembered

'We don't divide them up that way, but I had counselled him. I thought he was getting better-more engaged, and reporting no auditory hallucinations. Shows how little I know.'

'Well, you shouldn't blame yourself,' Annabelle went on in her practical, kind, slightly out-of-focus voice. 'We're caregivers, not miracle workers. Just before I went away Mr. Potteiger died. He was eighty-six and terribly frail, with hardly any use of his legs, but such a sharp, frisky mind. He used to flirt! One morning I showed up at his rooms, he was in elderly housing over toward Oriole, and a little Post-it note on the door said he'd passed away. Just those words. 'Passed Away.''

'It's not exactly the same,' Nelson begins to explain, but she cuts him short.

'How's your lovely family? Did they arrive?'

'Yeah, sort of.'

'Sort of?'

'Judy didn't come. She wanted to stay with her boyfriend in his apartment, the roommate is off for the holidays skiing in Colorado, and then go with him, the boyfriend, to this big millennial blast in formal clothes in some fancy home the boyfriend knows the son of up in Silver Lake, old rubber money. The guy sounds like a real sponge.'

'I knew you'd say 'sponge'!'

'She and Pru had a big fight about it and finally Pru gave up. After all the kid will be twenty next month, and she didn't ask to go to Akron, she's just trying to make the best of the situation her messed-up parents handed her. She drove all the way herself, Pru, just with Roy; she was beat when she arrived, about nine o'clock Monday night, they had kept stopping at what used to be Howard Johnson'ses.' It makes him weary just to think about his aging, uncontrollable family.

'Where are they staying?'

'What's with all these questions? At Mom's. It's too small and crummy here, and the morning traffic out on Eisenhower shakes the place.' He does not tell her that last night, Tuesday night, he went over after work for a dinner Pru had made in Mom's kitchen and stayed the night in his old room at the back of the house, while Pru took Judy's old room in front and Roy the little room with the computer, on a cot. They all just fell into place, except that he wanted to be in bed with Pru, or at least see her in her underwear, and had tossed and turned. There were too many people in his head, like that Christmas plaque Jo Foote had made him. Among other things he was afraid if he fell asleep he would see that man practicing chip shots in the back yard again.

'That's sad, Nelson,' his sister was saying. 'Roy at least should be over with you.'

'Yeah, but I have to work, the Center is shorthanded this week, the suicide has driven the clients crazier. And Roy and Ronnie get along oddly great. They talk about megabytes and RAMs and sit up there at the computer all day, cruising the Internet for God knows what. Filth, probably. Last night Ron took him to a high-school basketball game. I guess there's this holiday tournament on in the county, a big deal, girls' and boys' teams both.'

'And how do you feel about your daughter's not coming to visit? Are you hurt?'

'Relieved, in a way. She's gotten to be a handful. She's a redhead, like her mother.'

'But she needs to see her father.'

'Pru told her that, and Judy said if he doesn't care enough about me to come out here why should I go there and miss an event that only comes once every thousand years? She doesn't seem to think it'll happen in Brewer, only in Akron.'

'Well,' Annabelle says primly, 'it doesn't sound very satisfactory. When am I going to meet Pru, and my dear little nephew?'

'That's what we need to talk about. What are you doing Friday night?'

'That's the-'

'I know. The last of the last.'

'I was just going to go to bed and let it all wash over me.'

'Yeah, me too, but Pru is as bad as her daughter. She wants to do something. I didn't want you to come to Mom's house ever again, not after Thanksgiving, but maybe we could swing by that evening and pick up Pru and say hello to Roy and go out to a meal and a movie. I don't want to go to any dance or anything.'

'You with two women? That's weird, Nelson.'

'No kidding. I agree. But there's this guy I used to play with as a kid, my best friend you could say, now he's a dentist who does Swedish implants, who called me up for lunch the other week and really seems a kind of lost soul. He was married twice but isn't now. Suppose he joined us? His name is Billy Fosnacht.'

'It still sounds weird. Two people I never met, and you.'

'Listen, do you trust your brother or not? You'll have no problem with Pru, everybody likes her, she used to be beautiful, and Billy's a kind of loser-my father used to call him a goon-but it's not like it's a date, he'll just be along. He makes great money, by the way. You have any better plans? Like with that girlfriend and her husband? Or have they seen enough of you lately?' This is cruel, perhaps.

She doesn't say yes or no. She says, 'They say there may be terrorist attacks.'

'In Brewer? On what, the pretzel factories?'

'The mayor of Seattle cancelled their celebration today.'

'He has the Space Needle to worry about.'

'Nelson, I hope you know what you're doing.' This is Annabelle's way of agreeing.

'No,' he says, feeling cheerful for the first time this terminal week, 'I don't, frankly.'

'And this is my son, Roy.'

Annabelle says in auntly fashion, 'What a tall boy! It's wonderful to meet you, Roy.'

They are all, including Billy Fosnacht, bunched awkwardly in the living room, crowded in the insufficient space between the cut-plush sofa and cobbler's-bench coffee table on one side and the Christmas tree and the Zenith television with its jumbly crown of knickknacks on the other. Pru and Annabelle have shaken hands like two big cats brushing whiskers, and Ronnie and Mom have been excessively friendly to this round-faced girl who first appeared at the door in September. Annabelle is wearing a short red dress with a high collar and a diagonal zipper across the bosom, and dark net stockings on her prominent legs-all a little whorish, Nelson thought when he picked her up in his Corolla on East Muriel Street. Maybe Ronnie sensed something. Pru has found a dove-colored shot-silk dress with a boxy jacket that makes her hips look not too wide and sends out zigzags of shimmer; the gray goes from silver to a kind of purple when she moves. She has thickened in the waist and jaw and has crow's feet and tiny creases on her cheeks and even chin that come and go when she smiles her crooked, dissatisfied smile. Nelson can't remember if her nose was always so hooked, with so sharp a point. The long-limbed, green-eyed beauty he and his father had both desired is cobwebbed over with a certain gauze of age and disappointment yet those who remember can see through it; he thinks for forty-four she is holding up pretty well. Her hair, once lank and long and carrot-colored, wears a tint now that looks suspiciously even and shiny next to Annabelle's many-colored shaggy do, which she is letting grow out, making her solid white neck look less naked. Pru sees Billy as one of the gang who nearly ruined Nelson back in the Laid-Back days and greets him coolly, though in fact Billy was never a big user; his parents had crumped out early and he had had to take care of himself. Mom in her nervousness and maybe boosted by some tipple before dinner squeals 'Billy Fosnacht!' and embraces him almost in tears, blurting, 'I loved your dear mother so!'

Roy is taller than his grandmother and about the same height as Nelson and Ronnie and Pru and Annabelle, but he will get taller; at fifteen his growth spurt has years to go. The dark Springer genes have overruled the Angstrom pallor in the boy's hair and brows and the long curved eyelashes, like his father's but without the deepset wary look. His upper lip is fuzzy and his ears stick out and his eyes are bright; the new century is his. He puts his knuckly hand in Annabelle's competent soft one and tells her, 'My sister is sorry not to meet you this time. She had a message I was to give you: your father was a doll.'

'A doll?' Annabelle smiles.

'A neat guy, I think she meant. He died when she was eight so she has a lot more memories of him than I do.'

Nelson interposes, 'She remembers Dad's saving her life once in Florida, in a Sailfish that capsized. Another way to frame it would be that he nearly killed her.'

'Nelson,' Pru says in half-hearted wifely rebuke.

Roy volunteers, 'I remember going to visit him in the hospital once, the high white bed and all these tubes