“She? Oh hell, in fine form.”

Rabbit wonders if this means what it seems. The tip of his tongue freezes on his palate, unable to think of a delicate way to probe. He says, “They don’t have a waitress in the afternoon. I’ll get a Daiquiri for myself, what for you?”

“Just soda water. Lots of ice.”

“No hootch?”

“Never touch it.” Stavros clears his throat, smooths back the hair above his sideburns with a flat hand that is, nevertheless, slightly trembling. He explains, “The medicos tell me it’s a no-no.”

Coming back with their drinks, Rabbit asks, “You sick?”

Stavros says, “Nothing new, the same old ticker. Janice must have told you, heart murmur since I was a kid.”

What does this guy think, he and Janice sat around discussing him like he was their favorite child? He does remember Janice crying out he couldn’t marry, expecting him, Harry, her husband, to sympathize. Oddly, he had. “She mentioned something.”

“Rheumatic fever. Thank God they’ve got those things licked now, when I was a kid I caught every bug they made.” Stavros shrugs. “They tell me I can live to be a hundred, if I take care of the physical plant. You know,” he says, “these doctors. There’s still a lot they don’t know.”

“I know. They’re putting my mother through the wringer right now.”

“Jesus, you ought to hear Janice go on about your mother.”

“Not so enthusiastic, huh?”

“Not so at all. She needs some gripe, though, to keep herself justified. She’s all torn up about the kid.”

“She left him with me and there he stays.”

“In court, you know, you’d lose him.”

“We’d see.”

Stavros makes a small chopping motion around his glass full of soda bubbles (poor Peggy Fosnacht; Rabbit should call her) to indicate a new angle in their conversation. “Hell,” he says, “I can’t take him in. I don’t have the room. As it is now, I have to send Janice out to the movies or over to her parents when my family visits. You know I just don’t have a mother, I have a grandmother. She’s ninety-three, speaking of living forever.”

Rabbit tries to imagine Stavros’s room, which Janice described as full of tinted photographs, and instead imagines Janice nude, tinted, Playmate of the month, posed on a nappy Greek sofa olive green in color, with scrolling arms, her body twisted at the hips just enough to hide her gorgeous big black bush. The crease of the centerfold cuts across her navel and one hand dangles a rose. The vision makes Rabbit for the first time hostile. He asks Stavros, “How do you see this all coming out?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you.”

Rabbit asks, “She going sour on you?”

“No, Jesus, au contraire. She’s balling me ragged.”

Rabbit sips, swallows that, probes for another nerve. “She miss the kid?”

“Nelson, he comes over to the lot some days and she sees him weekends anyhow, I don’t know that she saw much more of him before. I don’t know as how motherhood is Janice’s best bag anyway. What she doesn’t much care for is the idea of her baby just out of diapers shacking up with this hippie.”