Mom has the phone by her bed; downstairs Rabbit hears it ring, then hears it stop, but some time passes before she makes him understand it is for him. She cannot raise her voice above a kind of whimper now, but she has a cane, an intimidating knobby briar Pop brought home one day from the Brewer Salvation Army store. She taps on the floor with it until attention comes up the stairs. She is quite funny with it, waving it around, thumping. “All my life,” she says. “What I wanted. A cane.”

He hears the phone ring twice and then only slowly the tapping of the cane sinks in; he is vacuuming the living-room rug, trying to get some of the fustiness up. In Mom’s room, the smell is more powerful, the perverse vitality of rot. He has read somewhere that what we smell are just tiny fragments of the thing itself tickling a plate in our nose, a subtler smoke. Everything has its cloud, a flower’s bigger than a rock’s, a dying person’s bigger than ours. Mom says, “For you.” The pillows she is propped on have slipped so she sits at a slant. He straightens her and, since the word “Janice” begins with a sound difficult for her throat muscles to form, she is slow to make him understand who it is.

He freezes, reaching for the phone. “I don’t want to talk to her.”

“Why. Not.”

“O.K., O.K.” It is confusing, having to talk here, Janice’s voice filling his ear while Mom and her rumpled bed fill his vision. Her blue-knuckled hands clasp and unclasp; her eyes, open too wide, rest on him in a helpless stare, the blue irises ringed with a thin white circle like a sucked Life Saver. “Now what?” he says to Janice.

“You could at least not be rude right away,” she says.

“O.K., I’ll be rude later. Let me guess. You’re calling to tell me you’ve finally gotten around to getting a lawyer.”

Janice laughs. It’s been long since he heard it, a shy noise that tries to catch itself halfway out, like a snagged yo-yo. “No,” she says, “I haven’t gotten around to that yet. Is that what you’re waiting for?” She is harder to bully now.

“I don’t know what I’m waiting for.”

“Is your mother there? Or are you downstairs?”

“Yes. Up.”

“You sound that way. Harry—Harry, are you there?”

“Sure. Where else?”

“Would you like to meet me anyplace?” She hurries on, to make it business. “The insurance men keep calling me at work, they say you haven’t filled out any of the forms. They say we ought to be making some decisions. I mean about the house. Daddy already is trying to sell it for us.”

“Typical.”

“And then there’s Nelson.”

“You don’t have room for him. You and your greaseball.”

His mother looks away, shocked; studies her hands, and by an effort of will stops their idle waggling. Janice has taken a quick high breath. He cannot bump her off the line today. “Harry, that’s another thing. I’ve moved out. It’s all decided, everything’s fine. I mean, that way. With Charlie and me. I’m calling from Joseph Street, I’ve spent the last two nights here. Harry?”