Pop busies his hands, touching her, hanging up his coat, steering her into the dismal living room. “When did you get here? Straight from the West Coast? You fly straight to Idlewild, they do it non-stop now, don’t they?”

“Pop, they don’t call it Idlewild any more. I flew in a couple days ago, I had some stuff in New York to do before I drove down. Jersey was breathtaking, once you got past the oil tanks. Everything still so green.”

“Where’d you get the car, Mim? Rent it from Hertz?” The old man’s washed-out eyes sparkle at her daring, at her way with the world.

Mim sighs. “A guy lent it to me.” She sits in the caneback rocker and puts her feet up on the very hassock that Rabbit as a child had once dreamed about: he dreamed it was full of dollar bills to solve all their problems. The dream had been so vivid he had tested it; the stitched scar of his incision still shows. The stuffing had been disagreeable fiber deader than straw.

Mim lights a cigarette. She holds it in the exact center of her mouth, exhales twin plumes around it, frowns at the snuffed match.

Pop is enchanted by the routine, struck dumb. Rabbit asks her, “How does Mom seem to you?”

“Good. For someone who’s dying.”

“She make sense to you?”

“A lot of it. The guy who doesn’t make much sense to me is you. She told me what you’ve been doing. Lately.”

“Harry’s had a hell of a time lately,” Pop chimes in, nodding as if to mesh himself with this spinning wheel, his dazzling daughter. “Today in at Verity, get this, they gave him his notice. They kept me on and canned a man in his prime. I saw the handwriting on the wall but I didn’t want it to be me who’d tell him, it was their meatloaf, let them deliver it, bastards, a man gives them his life and gets a boot in the fanny for his pains.”

Mim closes her eyes and lets a look of weary age wash over her and says, “Pop, it’s fantastic to see you. But don’t you want to go up and look in on Mom for a minute? She may need to be led to the pot, I asked her but with me she could be shy still.”

Pop rises quickly, obliging; yet then he stands in a tentative crouch, offering to say away her brusqueness. “You two have a language all your own. Mary and I, we used to marvel, I used to say to her, There couldn’t ever have been a brother and a sister closer than Harry and Miriam. These other parents used to tell us, you know, about kids fighting, we didn’t know what they were talking about, we’d never had an example. I swear to God above we never heard a loud word between the two of you. A lot of boys, all of six when Mim arrived, might have expressed resentment, you know, settled in with things pretty much his own way up to then: not Harry. Right from the start, right from that first summer, we could trust you alone with him, alone in the house, Mary and I off to a movie, about the only way to forget your troubles in those days, go off to a motion picture.” He blinks, gropes among these threads for the one to pull it all tight. “I swear to God, we’ve been lucky,” he says, then weakens it by adding, “when you look at some of the things that can happen to people,” and goes up; his tears spark as he faces the bulb burning at the head of the stairs, before cautiously returning his eyes to the treads.