“Why, the ones who come to visit her now she spends half the day in bed. Mamie Kellog, for one. Julia Arndt’s another. I hate like the Jesus to bother you with it, Harry, but her talk is getting wild and with Mim on the West Coast you’re the only one to help me straighten out my own mind. I hate to bother you but her talk is getting so wild she even talks of telephoning Janice.”

“Janice! Why would she call Janice?”

“Well.” A pull on the Schlitz. A wiping of the wet upper lip with the bony back of the hand, fingers half-clenched in an old man’s clutching way. A loose-toothed grimacing getting set to dive in. “Well the talk is about Janice.”

“My Janice?”

“Now Harry, don’t blow your lid. Don’t blame the bearer of bad tidings. I’m trying to tell you what they say, not what I believe.”

“I’m just surprised there’s anything to say. I hardly see her any more, now that she’s over at Springer’s lot all the time.”

“Well, that’s it. That may be your mistake, Harry. You’ve taken Janice for granted ever since—the time.” The time he left her. The time the baby died. The time she took him back. “Ten years ago,” his father needlessly adds. Harry is beginning, here in this cold bar with cactuses in plastic pots on the shelves beneath the mirrors and the little Schlitz spinner doing its polychrome parabola over and over, to feel the world turn. A hopeful coldness inside him grows, grips his wrists inside his cuffs. The news isn’t all in, a new combination might break it open, this stale peace.

“Harry, the malice of people surpasses human understanding in my book, and the poor soul has no defenses against it, there she lies and has to listen. Ten years ago, wouldn’t she have laid them out? Wouldn’t her tongue have cut them down? They’ve told her that Janice is running around. With one certain man, Harry. Nobody claims she’s playing the field.”

The coldness spreads up Rabbit’s arms to his shoulders, and down the tree of veins toward his stomach. “Do they name the man?”

“Not to my knowledge, Harry. How could they now, when in all likelihood there is no man?”

“Well, if they can make up the idea, they can make up a name.”

The bar television is running, with the sound turned off. For the twentieth time that day the rocket blasts off, the numbers pouring backwards in tenths of seconds faster than the eye until zero is reached: then the white boiling beneath the tall kettle, the lifting so slow it seems certain to tip, the swift diminishment into a retreating speck, a jiggling star. The men dark along the bar murmur among themselves. They have not been lifted, they are left here. Harry’s father mutters at him, prying. “Has she seemed any different to you lately, Harry? Listen, I know in all probability it’s what they call a crock of shit, but—has she seemed any, you know, different lately?”