This fall Nelson has discovered soccer; the junior high school has a team and his small size is no handicap. Afternoons Harry comes home to find the child kicking the ball, sewn of black-and-white pentagons, again and again against the garage door, beneath the unused basketball backboard. The ball bounces by Nelson, Harry picks it up, it feels bizarrely seamed in his hands. He tries a shot at the basket. It misses clean. “The touch is gone,” he says. “It’s a funny feeling,” he tells his son, “when you get old. The brain sends out the order and the body looks the other way.”

Nelson resumes kicking the ball, vehemently, with the side of his foot, against a spot on the door already worn paintless. The boy has mastered that trick of trapping the ball to a dead stop under his knees.

“Where are the other two?”

“Inside. Acting funny.”

“How funny?”

“You know. The way they act. Dopey. Skeeter’s asleep on the sofa. Hey, Dad.”

“What?”

Nelson kicks the ball once, twice, hard as he can, until it gets by him and he has worked up nerve to tell. “I hate the kids around here.”

“What kids? I never see any. When I was a kid, we were all over the streets.”

“They watch television and go to Little League and stuff.”

“Why do you hate them?”

Nelson has retrieved the ball and is shuffling it from one foot to the other, his feet clever as hands. “Tommy Frankhauser said we had a nigger living with us and said his father said it was ruining the neighborhood and we’d better watch out.”

“What’d you say to that?”

“I said he better watch out himself.”

“Did you fight?”

“I wanted to but he’s a head taller than me even though we’re in the same grade and he just laughed.”

“Don’t worry about it, you’ll shoot up. All us Angstroms are late bloomers.”

“I hate them, Dad, I hate them!” And he heads the ball so it bounces off the shadow-line shingles of the garage roof.

“Mustn’t hate anybody,” Harry says, and goes in.

Jill is in the kitchen, crying over a pan of lamb chops. “The flame keeps getting too big,” she says. She has the gas turned down so low the little nipples of blue are sputtering. He turns it higher and Jill screams, falls against him, presses her face into his chest, peeks up with eyes amusement has dyed deep green. “You smell of ink,” she tells him. “You’re all ink, so clean, just like a new newspaper. Every day, a new newspaper comes to the door.”

He holds her close; her tears tingle through his shirt. “Has Skeeter been feeding you anything?”

“No, Daddy. I mean lover. We stayed in the house all day and watched the quizzes, Skeeter hates the way they always have Negro couples on now, he says it’s tokenism.”

He smells her breath and, as she has promised, there is nothing, no liquor, no grass, just a savor of innocence, a faint tinge of sugar, a glimpse of a porch swing and a beaded pitcher. “Tea,” he says.