Her voice sounds tired and wary, answering. “Brewer Fealty, Mrs. Fosnacht. May I help you?”

“Peggy? Hi, it’s Harry Angstrom.”

“So it is.” A new sarcastic note. “I don’t believe it!” Overexpressive. Too many men.

“Hey, remember you said about Nelson and Billy going fishing this Sunday and inviting me for Saturday dinner?”

“Yes, Harry, I do remember.”

“Is it too late? For me to accept?”

“Not at all. What’s brought this about?”

“Nothing special. Just thought it might be nice.”

“It will be nice. I’ll see you Saturday.”

“Tomorrow,” he clarifies. He would have talked on, it was his lunch hour, but she cuts the conversation short. Press of work. Don’t count your chickens.

• • •

After work as he walks home from the bus stop on Weiser, two men accost him, at the corner where Emberly Avenue becomes a Drive, beside a red-white-and-blue mailbox. “Mr. Angstrom?”

“Sure.”

“Might we talk to you a minute? We’re two of your neighbors.” The man speaking is between forty and fifty, plump, in a gray suit that has stretched to fit him, with those narrow lapels of five years ago. His face is soft but pained. A hard little hook nose at odds with the puffy patches below his eyes. His chin is two damp knobs set side by side, between them a dimple where the whiskers hide from the razor. He has that yellow Brewer tint and an agile sly white-collar air. An accountant, a schoolteacher. “My name is Mahlon Showalter. I live on the other side of Vista Crescent, the house, you probably noticed, with the new addition in back we added on last summer.”

“Oh, yeah.” He recalls distant hammering but had not noticed; he really only looks at Penn Villas enough to see that it isn’t Mt. Judge: that is, it is nowhere.

“I’m in computers, the hardware end,” Showalter says. “Here’s my card.” As Rabbit glances at the company name on it Showalter says, “We’re going to revolutionize business in this town, file that name in your memory. This here is Eddie Brumbach, he lives around the further crescent, Marigold, up from you.”

Eddie presents no card. He is black-haired, shorter and younger than Harry. He stands the way guys in the Army used to, all buttoned in, shoulders tucked back, an itch for a fight between their shoulder blades. Only in part because of his brush cut, his head looks flattened on top, like the heads on Rabbit’s television set. When he shakes hands, it reminds him of somebody else. Who? One side of Brumbach’s face has had a piece of jawbone removed, leaving a dent and an L-shaped red scar. Gray eyes like dulled tool tips. He says with ominous simplicity, “Yessir.”

Showalter says, “Eddie works in the assembly shop over at Fessler Steel.”

“You guys must have quit work early today,” Rabbit says.

Eddie tells him, “I’m on night shift this month.”

Showalter has a way of bending, as if dance music is playing far away and he wants to cut in between Rabbit and Eddie. He is saying, “We made a decision to talk to you, we appreciate your patience. This is my car here, would you like to sit in it? It’s not too comfortable, standing out like this.”