“No offense. About Janice, you can’t blame her, I wasn’t that great myself. But I can’t go anywhere, I got this kid.”

“Kid, schmid. You can’t live your life that way. You got to reason outwards from Number One. To you, you’re Number One, not the kid.”

“That’s not how it feels, exactly,” Rabbit begins, then sees from the sudden gleaming globe of Pajasek’s head bent to study the smirched slips on his desk that the man doesn’t really want to talk, he wants Harry to go. So Rabbit asks, “So when do I go?”

Pajasek says, “You’ll get two months’ pay plus the benefits you’ve accumulated, but the new press is coming in this weekend, faster than we thought. Everything moves faster nowadays.”

“Except me,” Rabbit says, and goes. His father, in the bright racket of the shop, swivels away from his machine and gives him the thumbs down sign questioningly. Rabbit nods, thumbs down. As they walk down Pine Street together after work, feeling ghostly in the raw outdoor air after their day’s immersion in fluorescence, Pop says, “I’ve seen the handwriting on the wall all along, whole new philosophy operating at the top now at Verity, one of the partner’s sons came back from business school somewhere full of beans and crap. I said to Pajasek, ‘Why keep me on, I have less than a year before retirement?’ and he says, ‘That’s the reason.’ I said to him, ‘Why not let me go and give my place to Harry?’ and he says, ‘Same reason.’ He’s running scared himself, of course. The whole economy’s scared. Nixon’s getting himself set to be the new Hoover, these moratorium doves’ll be begging for LBJ to come back before Tricky Dick’s got done giving their bank accounts a squeeze!”

Pop talks more than ever now, as if to keep Harry’s mind cluttered; he clings to him like sanity. It has been a dreadful three days. All Sunday, on no sleep, he drove back and forth in Peggy’s borrowed Fury through Brewer between Mt. Judge and Penn Villas, through the municipal headache of the Columbus Day parade. The monochrome idyll of early morning, Skeeter dwindling to a brown dot in brown fields, became a four-color nightmare of martial music, throbbing exhaustion, bare-thighed girls twirling bolts of lightning, iridescent drummers pounding a tattoo on the taut hollow of Harry’s stomach, cars stalled in the sidestreets, Knights of Columbus floats, marching veterans, American flags. Between entanglements with this monster celebration, he scavenged in warm ashes and trucked useless stained and soaked furniture, including a charred guitar, to the garage at the back of the Jackson Road place. He found no wallet near the sofa, and no black bag in the closet. Jill’s bureau had been along the wall of which only charred 2 by 4s remained, yet he prodded the ashes for a scrap of the six hundred dollars. Back on Jackson Road, insurance investigators were waiting for him, and the sheriff of Furnace Township, a little apple-cheeked old man, in suspenders and a soft felt hat, who was mostly interested in establishing that his failure to be present at the fire could in no way be held against him. He was quite deaf, and every time someone in the room spoke he would twirl around and alertly croak, “Let’s put that on the record too! I want everything out in the open, everything on the record!”