“I’m listening. I’m right here. Whatcha think—I’m going to run away?”

“You have before. I was talking to Peggy yesterday on the phone, she and Ollie are back together, and he had heard you had gone off to some other state, a newspaper in Baltimore had given you a job.”

“Fat chance.”

“And Peggy said she hadn’t heard from you at all. I think she’s hurt.”

“Why should she be hurt?”

“She told me why.”

“Yeah. She would. Hey. This is a lot of fun chatting, but did you have anything definite you want to say? You want Nelson to come live with the Springers, is that it? I suppose he might as well, he’s—” He is going to confess that the boy is unhappy, but his mother is listening and it would hurt her feelings. Considering her condition, she has really put herself out for Nelson this time.

Janice asks, “Would you like to see me? I mean, would it make you too mad, looking at me?”

And he laughs; his own laugh is unfamiliar in his ears. “It might,” he says, meaning it might not.

“Oh, let’s,” she says. “You want to come here? Or shall I come there?” She understands his silence, and confirms, “We need a third place. Maybe this is stupid, but what about the Penn Villas house? We can’t go in, but we need to look at it and decide what to do; I mean somebody’s offering to buy it, the bank talked to Daddy the other day.”

“O.K. I got to make Mom lunch now. How about two?”

“And I want to give you something,” Janice is going on, while Mom is signalling her need to be helped to the commode; her blue hand tightens white around the gnarled handle of the cane.

“Don’t let her wriggle,” is her advice, when he hangs up, “her way. Around you.” Sitting on the edge of the bed, Mom thumps the floor with her cane for emphasis, drawing an arc with the tip as illustration.

After putting the lunch dishes in the drainer Harry prepares for a journey. For clothes, he decides on the suntans he is wearing and has worn for two weeks straight, and a fresh white shirt as in his working days, and an old jacket he found in a chest in the attic: his high school athletic jacket. It carries MJ in pistachio green on an ivory shield on the back, and green sleeves emerge from V-striped shoulders. The front zips. Zipped, it binds across his chest and belly, but he begins that way, walking down Jackson Road under the chill maples; when the 12 bus lets him out at Emberly, the warmer air of this lower land lets him unzip, and he walks jauntily flapping along the curving street where the little ranch houses have pumpkins on their porchlets and Indian corn on their doors.

His own house sticks out from way down Vista Crescent: black coal in a row of candies. His station wagon is parked there. The American flag decal is still on the back window. It looks aggressive, fading.