“Why?”

Her tongue flicks between her lips, a mannerism that once struck him as falsely sensual but seems inoffensive now, like licking a pencil. “Oh,” Janice says. “We’d done all we could together. He was beginning to get jittery. Your sweet sister didn’t help, either.”

“Yeah. I guess we did a number on him.” The “we”—him, her, Mim, Mom; ties of blood, of time and guilt, family ties. He does not ask her for more description. He has never understood exactly about women, why they have to menstruate for instance, or why they feel hot some times and not others, and how close the tip of your prick comes to their womb or whether the womb is a hollow place without a baby in it or what, and instinct disposes him to consign Stavros to that same large area of feminine mystery. He doesn’t want to bring back any lovelight into her eyes, that are nice and quick and hard on him, the prey.

Perhaps she had prepared to tell him more, how great her love was and how pure it will remain, for she frowns as if checked by his silence. She says, “You must help me with Nelson. All he’ll talk to me about is this terrible mini-bike your sister bought him.”

He gestures at the burned green shell. “My clothes weren’t the only thing went up in that.”

“The girl. Were she and Nelson close?”

“She was sort of a sister. He keeps losing sisters.”

“Poor baby boy.”

Janice turns and they look together at where they lived. Some agency, the bank or the police or the insurance company, has put up a loose fence of posts and wire around it, but children have freely approached, picking the insides clean, smashing the windows, storm windows and all, in the half that still stands. Some person has taken the trouble to bring a spray can of yellow paint and has hugely written NIGGER on the side. Also the word KILL. The two words don’t go together, so it is hard to tell which side the spray can had been on. Maybe there had been two spray cans. Demanding equal time. On the broad stretch of aluminum clapboards below the windows, where in spring daffodils come up and in summer phlox goes wild, yellow letters spell in half-script, Pig Power = Clean Power. Also there is a peace sign and a swastika, apparently from the same can. And other people, borrowing charred sticks from the rubble, have come along and tried to edit and add to these slogans and symbols, making Pig into Black and Clean into Cong. It all adds up no better than the cluster of commercials TV stations squeeze into the chinks between programs. A clown with a red spray can has scrawled between two windows TRICK OR TREAT.

Janice asks, “Where was she sleeping?”

“Upstairs. Where we did.”

“Did you love her?” For this her eyes leave his face and contemplate the trampled lawn. He remembers that this camel coat has a detachable hood for winter, that snaps on.