The rum is beginning to work. Rabbit has ceased to feel cold, his heart is beginning to lift off. The air in here seems thinner, his eyes adjusting to the dark. He asks, “How’s her mind? You aren’t saying they should start giving her crazy pills.”

“In honest truth, I won’t lie to you Harry, it’s as clear as a bell, when her tongue can find the words. And as I say she’s gotten hipped lately on this Janice idea. It would help a lot, Jesus I hate to bother you but it’s the truth, it would help a lot if you and Janice could spare the time to come over tonight. Not seeing you too often her imagination’s free to wander. Now I know you’ve promised Sunday for her birthday, but think of it this way: if you’re stuck in bed with nobody but the idiot box and a lot of malicious biddies for company a week can seem a year. If you could make it up there some evening before the weekend, bring Janice along so Mary could look at her—”

“I’d like to, Pop. You know I would.”

“I know, Jesus I know. I know more than you think. You’re at just the age to realize your old man’s not the dope you always thought he was.”

“The trouble is, Janice works in the lot office until ten, eleven all the time and I don’t like to leave the kid alone in the house. In fact I better be getting back there now just in case.” In case it’s burned down. In case a madman has moved in. These things happen all the time in the papers. He can read in his father’s face—a fishy pinching-in at the corners of the mouth, a tightened veiling of the washed-out eyes—the old man’s suspicions confirmed. Rabbit sees red. Meddling old crock. Janice: who’d have that mutt? In love with her father and there she stuck. Happy as a Girl Scout since she began to fill in at the lot, half these summer nights out way past supper, TV dinners, tuck Nelson in alone and wait up for her to breeze in blooming and talkative; he’s never known her to be so full of herself, in a way it does his heart good. He resents his father trying to get at him with Janice and hits back with the handiest weapon, Mom. “This doctor you have, does he ever mention a nursing home?”

The old man’s mind is slow making the switch back to his own wife. Harry has a thought, a spark like where train wheels run over a track switch. Did Mom ever do it to Pop? Play him false. All this poking around about life in bed hints at some experience. Hard to imagine, not only who with but when, she was always in the house as long as he could remember, nobody ever came to visit but the brush man and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, yet the thought excites him, like Pop’s rumor chills him, opens up possibilities. Pop is saying, “… at the beginning. We want to hold off at least until she’s bedridden. If we reach the point where she can’t take care of herself before I’m on retirement and there all day, it’s an option we might be forced into. I’d hate to see it, though. Jesus I’d hate to see it.”