“Well, or vice versa. We never had another child.” That had been Eccles’ advice, in those first months of reconciliation, when he and Janice were starting fresh and even going to the Episcopal church together. Then Eccles had been called to a church nearer Philadelphia. They had heard a year or two later, by way of Janice’s mother, that he had run into some trouble in his new parish; then nothing. And here he was again, grayer but looking no older: if anything, younger, slimmer through the middle, in self-consciously good condition, hard and tan in a way few in Brewer bother to cultivate, and with that young, startled look to his eyes. His hair is long, and curls at the back of his shirt collar. Rabbit asks him, “And what about things with you?” He is wondering where Eccles could have been, to board the bus at the side of the mountain. Nothing there but the gas station, a diner, a view of the viaduct, and some rich men’s homes tucked up among the spruces, behind iron fences.

“Ça va. It goes. I’ve been buried; and yet I live. I’ve parted company with the ministry.” And his jaw stays open, propped as if to emit a guffaw, though no sound comes, and those strangely purified eyes remain watchful.

“Why’d you do that?” Rabbit asks.

Eccles’ chuckle, which always had something exploratory and quizzical about it, has become impudent, mocking, if not quite unafraid. “A variety of reasons. I was rather invited to, for one. I wanted to, for another.”

“You no longer believe it?”

“In my fashion. I’m not sure I believed it then.”

“No?” Rabbit is shocked.

“I believed,” Eccles tells him, and his voice takes on an excessive modulation, a self-caressing timbre, “in certain kinds of human interrelation. I still do. If people want to call what happens in certain relationships Christ, I raise no objection. But it’s not the word I choose to use anymore.”

“How’d your father feel about this? Wasn’t he a bishop?”

“My father—God rest his, et cetera—was dead when my decision was reached.”

“And your wife? She was nifty, I forget her name.”

“Lucy. Dear Lucy. She left me, actually. Yes, I’ve shed many skins.” And the mouth of this pale-throated, long-haired man holds open on the possibility of a guffaw, but silently, watchfully.

“She left ya?”

“She fled my indiscretions. She remarried and lives in Wilmington. Her husband’s a painfully ordinary fellow, a chemist of some sort. No indiscretions. My girls adore him. You remember my two girls.”

“They were cute. Especially the older one. Since we’re on the subject, Janice has left me, too.”

Eccles’ pale active eyebrows arch higher. “Really? Recently?”

“The day before the moon landing.”

“She seemed more the left than the leaving type. Look, Harry, we should get together in a more, ah, stationary place and have a real conversation.” In his leaning closer for emphasis, as the bus sways, his arm touches Rabbit’s. He always had a certain surprising muscularity, but Eccles has become burlier, more himself. His fluffed-up head seems huge.