Janice gets out of the driver’s seat and stands beside the car looking lumpy and stubborn in a camel-colored loden coat he remembers from winters past. He had forgotten how short she is, how the dark hair has thinned back from the tight forehead, with that oily shine that puts little bumps along the hairline. She has abandoned the madonna hairdo, wears her hair parted way over on one side, unflatteringly. But her mouth seems less tight; her lips have lost the crimp in the corners and seem much readier to laugh, with less to lose, than before. His instinct, crazy, is to reach out and pet her—do something, like tickle behind her ear, that you would do to a dog; but they do nothing. They do not kiss. They do not shake hands. “Where’d you resurrect that corny old jacket? I’d forgotten what awful school colors we had. Ick. Like one of those fake ice creams.”

“I found it in an old trunk in my parents’ attic. They’ve kept all that stuff. It still fits.”

“Fits who?”

“A lot of my clothes got burned up.” This note of apology because he sees she is right, it was an ice-cream world he made his mark in. Yet she too is wearing something too young for her, with a hairdo reverting to adolescence, parted way over like those South American flames of the Forties. Chachacha.

She digs into a side pocket of the loden coat awkwardly. “I said I had a present for you. Here.” What she hands him twinkles and dangles. The car keys.

“Don’t you need it?”

“Not really. I can drive one of Daddy’s. I don’t know why I ever thought I did need it, I guess at first I thought we might escape to somewhere. California. Canada. I don’t know. We never even considered it.”

He asks, “You’re gonna stay at your parents’?”

Janice looks up past the jacket to him, seeking his face. “I can’t stand it, really. Mother nags so. You can see she’s been primed not to say anything to me, but it keeps coming out, she keeps using the phrase ‘public opinion.’ As if she’s a Gallup poll. And Daddy. For the first time, he seems pathetic to me. Somebody is opening a Datsun agency in one of the shopping centers and he feels really personally threatened. I thought,” Janice says, her dark eyes resting on his face lightly, ready to fly if what she sees there displeases her, “I might get an apartment somewhere. Maybe in Peggy’s building. So Nelson could walk to school in West Brewer again. I’d have Nelson, of course.” Her eyes dart away.

Rabbit says, “So the car is sort of a swap.”

“More of a peace offering.”

He makes the peace sign, then transfers it to his head, as horns. She is too dumb to get it. He tells her, “The kid is pretty miserable, maybe you ought to take him. Assuming you’re through with Whatsisname.”

“We’re through.”