Did they ever have a language of their own? Rabbit can’t remember it, he just remembers them being here together, in this house season after season, for grade after grade of school, setting off down Jackson Road in the aura of one holiday after another, Hallowe’en, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, in the odors and feel of one sports season succeeding another, football, basketball, track; and then him being out and Mim shrunk to a word in his mother’s letters; and then him coming back from the Army and finding her grown up, standing in front of the mirror, ready for boys, maybe having had a few, tinting her hair and wearing hoop earrings; and then Janice took him off; and then both of them were off and the house empty of young life; and now both of them are here again. The smoke from her cigarette seems what the room needs, has needed a long time, to chase these old furniture and sickness smells away. He is sitting on the piano stool; he perches forward and reaches toward her. “Gimme a weed.”

“I thought you stopped.”

“Years ago. I don’t inhale. Unless it’s grass.”

“Grass yet. You’ve been living it up.” She fishes in her purse, a big bright patchy bag that matches her slacks, and tosses him a cigarette. It is menthol, with a complicated filter tip. Death is easily fooled. If the churches don’t work, a filter will do.

He says, “I don’t know what I’ve been doing.”

“I would say so. Mom talked to me for an hour. The way she is now, that’s a lot of talking.”

“What d’ya think of Mom now? Now that you have all this perspective.”

“She was a great woman. With nowhere to put it.”

“Well, is where you put it any better?”

“It involves less make-believe.”

“I don’t know, you look pretty fantastic to me.”

“Thanks.”

“What’d she say? Mom.”

“Nothing you don’t know, except Janice calls her a lot.”

“I knew that. She’s called a couple times since Sunday, I can’t stand it to talk to her.”

“Why not?”

“She’s too wild. She doesn’t make any sense. She says she’s getting a divorce but never starts it, she says she’ll sue me for burning her house and I tell her I only burned my half. Then she says she’ll come get Nelson but never comes, I wish the hell she would.”

“What does it mean to you, her being wild like this?”

“I think she’s losing her buttons. Probably drinking like a fish.”

Mim turns her profile to blunt the cigarette in the saucer serving as an ashtray. “It means she wants back in.” Mim knows things, Rabbit realizes proudly. Wherever you go in some directions, Mim has been there. The direction where she hasn’t been is the one that has Nelson in it, and the nice hot slap of the slug being made beside your left hand. But these are old directions, people aren’t going that way any more. Mim repeats, “She wants you back.”