“You think? Why can’t things just be nice? There’s enough stuff for everybody to share.”

“You think there is? Why don’t you start then by sharing this lawnmowing? You push it for a while.”

“You owe me my allowance.” As Rabbit hands him a dollar bill and two quarters, the boy says, “I’m saving for a mini-bike.”

“Good luck.”

“Also, Dad—?”

“Yeah?”

“I think I should get a dollar twenty-five an hour for work. That’s still under the federal minimum wage.”

“See?” Rabbit tells him. “Dog eat dog.”

As he washes up inside, pulling grass bits out of his cuffs and putting a Band-aid on the ball of his thumb (tender place; in high school they used to say you could tell how sexy a girl was by how fat she was here), Janice comes into the bathroom, shuts the door, and says, “I’ve decided to tell him. While you’re at the ball game I’ll tell him.” Her face looks taut but pretty dried-out; patches of moisture glisten beside her nose. The tile walls amplify her sniffs. Peggy Gring’s car roars outside in leaving.

“Tell who what?”

“Tell Charlie. That it’s all over. That you know.”

“I said, keep him. Don’t do anything for today at least. Calm down. Have a drink. See a movie. See that space movie again, you slept through the best parts.”

“That’s cowardly. No. He and I have always been honest with each other, I must tell him the truth.”

“I think you’re just looking for an excuse to see him while I’m tucked away at the ball park.”

“You would think that.”

“Suppose he asks you to sleep with him?”

“He wouldn’t.”

“Suppose he does, as a graduation present?”

She stares at him boldly: dark gaze tempered in the furnace of betrayal. It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere. “I would,” she says.

“Where are you going to find him?”

“At the lot. He stays on until six summer Saturdays.”

“What reason are you going to give him? For breaking it off.”

“Why, the fact that you know.”

“Suppose he asks you why you told?”

“It’s obvious why I told. I told because I’m your wife.”

Tears belly out between her lids and the tension of her face breaks like Nelson’s when a hidden anxiety, a D or a petty theft or a headache, is confessed. Harry denies his impulse to put his arm around her; he does not want to feel wooden again. She teeters, keeping her balance while sobbing, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, while the plastic shower curtain rustles at her shoulder.

“Aren’t you going to stop me?” she brings out at last.

“Stop you from what?”

“From seeing him!”

Given this rich present of her grief, he can afford to be cruel. Coolly he says, “No, see him if you want to. Just as long as I don’t have to see the bastard.” And, avoiding the sight of her face, he sees himself in the cabinet mirror, a big pink pale man going shapeless under the chin, his little lips screwed awry in what wants to be a smile.