“I don’t remember that. Stavros is really great, huh?”

Mim picks up her white gloves from the grass. “He’s nice.” She slaps her palm with the gloves, studying her brother. “Also,” she says.

“What?” He braces for the worst, the hit that will leave nothing there.

“I bought Nelson a mini-bike. Nobody in this Godforsaken household seems to remember it, but tomorrow is his birthday. He’s going to be thirteen, for Cry-eye. A teenager.”

“You can’t do that, Mim. He’ll kill himself. It’s not legal on the streets here.”

“I’m having it delivered over to the Fosnachts’ building. They can share it on the parking lot, but it’ll be Nelson’s. The poor kid deserves something for what you put him through.”

“You’re a super aunt.”

“And you’re so dumb you don’t even know it’s raining.” In the darkening drizzle she sprints, still knock-kneed and speedy, up the walk through their narrow backyard, up the stairs of their spindly back porch. Harry hugs the ball and follows.

In his parents’ house Rabbit not only reverts to peanut-butter sandwiches and cocoa and lazing in bed when the sounds of Pop and Nelson leaving have died; he finds himself faithfully masturbating. The room itself demands it: a small long room he used to imagine as a railway car being dragged through the night. Its single window gives on the sunless passageway between the houses. As a boy in this room he could look across the space of six feet at the drawn shade of the room that used to be little Carolyn Zim’s. The Zims were night owls. Some nights, though he was three grades ahead of her, Carolyn would go to bed later than he, and he would strain to see in the chinks of light around her shade the glimmer of her undressing. And by pressing his face to the chill glass by his pillow he could look at a difficult diagonal into Mr. and Mrs. Zim’s room and one night glimpsed a pink commotion that may have been intercourse. But nearly every morning the Zims could be heard at breakfast fighting and Mom used to wonder how long they would stay together. People that way plainly wouldn’t be having intercourse. In those days this room was full of athletes, mostly baseball players, their pictures came on school tablet covers, Musial and DiMag and Luke Appling and Rudy York. And for a while there had been a stamp collection, weird to remember, the big blue album with padded covers and the waxpaper mounts and the waxpaper envelopes stuffed with a tumble of Montenegro and Sierra Leone cancelleds. He imagined then that he would travel to every country in the world and send Mom a postcard from every one, with these stamps. He was in love with the idea of travelling, with running, with geography, with Parcheesi and Safari and all board games where you roll the dice and move; the sense of a railroad car was so vivid he could almost see his sallow overhead light, tulip-shaped, tremble and sway with the motion. Yet travelling became an offense in the game he got good at.