“Still full of sauce, isn’t she?”

“She tries to be. Cheerful.”

“Hard as nails, I’d say.”

“Inch by inch,” Mom says.

“Huh?”

“That was on one. Of the children’s programs. Earl leaves the set on and makes me watch. Inch by inch.”

“Yeah, go on.”

“Life is a cinch. Yard by yard. Life is hard.”

He laughs appreciatively, making the bed bounce more. “Where do you think I went wrong?”

“Who says. You did?”

“Mom. No house, no wife, no job. My kid hates me. My sister says I’m ridiculous.”

“You’re. Growing up.”

“Mim says I’ve never learned any rules.”

“You haven’t had to.”

“Huh. Any decent kind of world, you wouldn’t need all these rules.”

She has no ready answer for this. He looks out of her windows. There was a time—the year after leaving, even five years after—when this homely street, with its old-fashioned high crown, its sidewalk blocks tugged up and down by maple roots, its retaining walls of sandstone and railings of painted iron and two-family brickfront houses whose siding imitates gray rocks, excited Rabbit with the magic of his own existence. These mundane surfaces had given witness to his life; this cup had held his blood; here the universe had centered, each downtwirling maple seed of more account than galaxies. No more. Jackson Road seems an ordinary street anywhere. Millions of such American streets hold millions of lives, and let them sift through, and neither notice nor mourn, and fall into decay, and do not even mourn their own passing but instead grimace at the wrecking ball with the same gaunt façades that have outweathered all their winters. However steadily Mom communes with these maples—the branches’ misty snake-shapes as inflexibly fixed in these two windows as the leading of stained glass—they will not hold back her fate by the space of a breath; nor, if they are cut down tomorrow to widen Jackson Road at last, will her staring, that planted them within herself, halt their vanishing. And the wash of new light will extinguish even her memory of them. Time is our element, not a mistaken invader. How stupid, it has taken him thirty-six years to begin to believe that. Rabbit turns his eyes from the windows and says, to say something, “Having Mim home sure makes Pop happy”; but in his silence Mom, head rolling on the pillow, her nostrils blood-red in contrast with the linen, has fallen asleep.

He goes downstairs and makes himself a peanut-butter sandwich. He pours himself a glass of milk. He feels the whole house as balanced so that his footsteps might shake Mom and tumble her into the pit. He goes into the cellar and finds his old basketball and, more of a miracle still, a pump with the air needle still screwed into the nozzle. In their frailty things keep faith. The backboard is still on the garage but years have rusted the hoop and loosened the bolts, so the first hard shots tilt the rim sideways. Nevertheless he keeps horsing around and his touch begins to come back. Up and soft, up and soft. Imagine it just dropping over the front of the rim, forget it’s a circle. The day is very gray so the light is nicely even. He imagines he’s on television; funny, watching the pros on the box how you can tell, from just some tone of their bodies as they go up, if the shot will go in. Mim comes out of the house, down the back steps, down the cement walk, to him. She is wearing a plain black suit, with wide boxy lapels, and a black skirt just to the knee. An outfit a Greek would like. Classic widow. He asks her, “That new?”