“Yes-s.” Her bright eyes passed over his head. “Over the phone, I was so stupid, you mentioned explaining.”

Had he? What had he wanted to explain? That it was not his fault. Yet Nelson thought it was. For taking her in? But she was unsheltered. For fucking her? But it is all life, sex, fire, breathing, all combination with oxygen, we shimmer at all moments on the verge of conflagration, as the madhouse windows tell us. Rabbit tried to remember. “You had asked about Skeeter, why I was sure he hadn’t set the fire.”

“Yes. Why were you?”

“He loved her. We all did.”

“You all used her?”

“In ways.”

“In your case”—strange precision, clubwoman keeping a meeting within channels, the vowels roughened by cigarettes and whisky, weathered in the daily sunslant of cocktails—“as a concubine?”

He guessed at what the word meant. “I never forced it,” he said. “I had a house and food. She had herself. We gave what we had.”

“You are a beast.” Each word was too distinct; the sentence had been lying in her mind and had warped and did not quite fit.

“O.K., sure,” he conceded, refusing to let her fly, to let that caged outrage escape her face and scream. Stepdaddy behind her coughed and shifted weight, preparing to be embarrassed. Harry’s guts felt suspended and transparent, as before a game. He was matched against this glossy woman in a way he was never matched with Jill. Jill had been too old for him, too wise, having been born so much later. This little pug, her money and rasping clubwoman voice aside, was his generation, he could understand what she wanted. She wanted to stay out of harm’s way. She wanted to have some fun and not be blamed. At the end she wanted not to have any apologizing to do to any heavenly committee. Right now she wanted to tame the ravenous miracle of her daughter’s being cast out and destroyed. Mrs. Aldridge touched her cheeks in a young gesture, then let her hands hang heavy beside her hips.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There are always … circumstances. I wanted to ask, were there any … effects.”

“Effects?” He was back with blackened bones, patterns of teeth, melted bracelets. He thought of the bracelets girls in high school used to wear, chains with name-tags, Dorene, Margaret, Mary Ann.

“Her brothers asked me … some memento …”

Brothers? She had said. Three. One Nelson’s age.

Mrs. Aldridge stepped forward, bewildered, hoping to be helpful. “There was a car.”

“They sold the car,” Rabbit said, too loudly. “She ran it without oil and the engine seized up and she sold it for junk.”

His loudness alarmed her. He was still indignant, about the waste of that car. She took a step backward, protesting, “She loved the car.”

She didn’t love the car, she didn’t love anything we would have loved, he wanted to tell Mrs. Aldridge, but maybe she knew more than he, she was there when Jill first saw the car, new and white, her father’s gift. Rabbit at last found in his mind an “effect.” “One thing I did find,” he told Mrs. Aldridge, “her guitar. It’s pretty well burned, but—”