Pop asks, “What kind of work did Disney have you do, Mim?”

“I wore a little Colonial get-up and led people through a replica of Mt. Vernon.” She curtseys and with both hands in artificial unison points to the old gas stove, with its crusty range and the crazed mica window in the oven door. “The Fa-ther of our Coun-try,” she explains in a sweet, clarion, idiot voice, “was himself nev-er a fa-ther.”

“Mim, you ever get to meet Disney personally?” Pop asks.

Mim continues her act. “His con-nu-bi-al bed, which we see before us, measures five feet four and three-quarter inches from rail to rail, and from head-board to foot-board is two inch-es under sev-en feet, a gi-ant’s bed for those days, when most gentle-men were no bigger than warming pans. Here”—she plucks a plastic fly swatter off the fly-specked wall—“you see a warm-ing pan.”

“If you ask me,” Pop says to himself, having not been answered, “it was Disney more than FDR kept the country from going under to the Commies in the Depression.”

“The ti-ny holes,” Mim is explaining, holding up the fly-swatter, “are de-signed to let the heat e-scape, so the fa-ther of our coun-try will not suf-fer a chill when he climbs into bed with his be-lov-ed Mar-tha. Here”—Mim gestures with two hands at the Verity Press giveaway calendar on the wall, turned to October, a grinning jack-o-lantern—“is Mar-tha.”

Nelson is still laughing, but it is time to let go, and Mim does. She pecks her father on the forehead and asks him, “How’s the Prince of Pica today? Remember that, Daddy? When I thought pica was the place where they had the leaning tower.”

“North of Brewer somewhere,” Nelson tells her, “I forget the exact place, there’s some joint that calls itself the Leaning Tower of Pizza.” The boy waits to see if this is funny, and though the grown-ups around the table laugh obligingly, he decides that it wasn’t, and shuts his mouth. His eyes go wary again. “Can I be excused?”

Rabbit asks sharply, “Where’re you going?”

“My room.”

“That’s Mim’s room. When’re you going to let her have it?”

“Any time.”

“Whyncha go outdoors? Kick the soccer ball around, do something positive, for Chrissake. Get the self-pity out of your system.”

“Let. Him alone,” Mom brings out.

Mim intercedes. “Nelson, when will you show me your famous mini-bike?”

“It’s not much good, it keeps breaking down.” He studies her, his possible playmate. “You can’t ride it in clothes like that.”

“Out West,” she says, “everybody rides motorcycles in trendy knits.”

“Did you ever ride a motorcycle?”

“All the time, Nelson. I used to be den mother for a pack of Hell’s Angels. We’ll ride over and look at your bike after supper.”

“It’s not the kid’s bike, it’s somebody else’s,” Rabbit tells her.

“It’ll be dark after supper,” Nelson tells Mim.

“I love the dark,” she says. Reassured, he clumps upstairs, ignoring his father. Rabbit is jealous. Mim has learned, these years out of school, what he has not: how to manage people.