His father is more with him than he suspects, for the old man draws still closer and says, “One thing it’s been on my mind to say, Harry, forgive me talking out of turn, but I hope you’re taking all the precautions, knock up one of these minors, the law takes a very dim view. Also, they say they’re dirty as weasels and giving everybody the clap.” Absurdly, as the clock ticks the last minute and the end-of-break bell rasps, the old man claps.

In his clean crisp after-work shirt he opens the front door of the apple-green house and hears guitar music from above. Guitar chords slowly plucked, and two high small voices moving through a melody. He is drawn upstairs. In Nelson’s room, the two are sitting on the bed, Jill up by the pillows in a yoga position that displays the crotch of her black lace underpants. A guitar is cradled across her thighs. Rabbit has never seen the guitar before; it looks new. The pale wood shines like a woman oiled after a bath. Nelson sits beside Jill in Jockey shorts and T-shirt, craning his neck to read from the sheet of music on the bedspread by her ankles. The boy’s legs, dangling to the floor, look suddenly sinewy, long, beginning to be shaded with Janice’s dark hair, and Rabbit notices that the old posters of Brooks Robinson and Orlando Cepeda and Steve McQueen on a motorcycle have been removed from the boy’s walls. Paint has flaked where the Scotch tape was. They are singing, “… must a man wa-alk down”; the delicate thread breaks when he enters, though they must have heard his footsteps on the stairs as warning. The kid’s being in his underclothes is O.K.: far from dirty as a weasel, Jill has gotten Nelson to take a shower once a day, before his father’s homecoming, perhaps because her own father came home to Stonington only on Fridays and deserved a ceremony.

“Hey, Dad,” Nelson says, “this is neat. We’re singing harmony.”

“Where did you get the guitar?”

“We hustled.”

Jill nudges the boy with a bare foot, but not quick enough to halt the remark.

Rabbit asks him, “How do you hustle?”

“We stood on streetcorners in Brewer, mostly at Weiser and Seventh, but then we moved over to Cameron when a pig car slowed down to look us over. It was a gas, Dad. Jill would stop these people and tell ’em I was her brother, our mother was dying of cancer and our father had lit out, and we had a baby brother at home. Sometimes she said a baby sister. Some of the people said we should apply to welfare, but enough gave us a dollar or so so finally we had the twenty dollars Ollie promised was all he’d charge us for a forty-four dollar guitar. And he threw in the music free after Jill talked to him in the back room.”

“Wasn’t that nice of Ollie?”

“Harry, it really was. Don’t look like that.”