Peggy says, “He’s not here, Harry. Sorry.” Her voice is frosted with all she knows, Janice burbling into her ear yesterday. Then more warmly she asks, “How’s everything going?” He reads the equation, Ollie left me; Janice left you: hello.

He says hastily, “Great. Hey, if Nelson comes by tell him I want him. We got to go to his grandmother’s.”

Her voice cools in saying goodbye, joins the vast glaring ice-face of all those who know. Nelson seems the one person left in the county who doesn’t know: this makes him even more precious. Yet, when the boy returns, red-faced and damp-haired from hard pedalling, he tells his father, “I was at the Fosnachts.”

Rabbit blinks and says, “O.K. After this, let’s keep in better touch. I’m your mother and your father for the time being.” They eat lunch, Lebanon baloney on stale rye. They walk up Emberly to Weiser and catch a 12 bus east into Brewer. It being Sunday, they have to wait twenty minutes under the cloudless colorless sky. At the hospital stop a crowd of visitors gets on, having done their duty, dazed, carrying away dead flowers and read books. Boats, white arrowheads tipping wrinkled wakes, are buzzing in the black river below the bridge. A colored kid leaves his foot in the aisle when Rabbit tries to get off; he steps over it. “Big feet,” the boy remarks to his companion.

“Fat lips,” Nelson, following, says to the colored boy.

They try to find a store open. His mother was always difficult to buy presents for. Other children had given their mothers cheerful junk: dime-store jewelry, bottles of toilet water, boxes of candy, scarves. For Mom that had been too much, or not enough. Mim always gave her something she had made: a woven pot holder, a hand-illustrated calendar. Rabbit was pretty poor at making things so he gave her himself, his trophies, his headlines. Mom had seemed satisfied: lives more than things concerned her. But now what? What can a dying person desire? Grotesque prosthetic devices—arms, legs, battery-operated hearts—run through Rabbit’s head as he and Nelson walk the dazzling, Sunday-stilled downtown of Brewer. Up near Ninth and Weiser they find a drugstore open. Thermos bottles, sunglasses, shaving lotion, Kodak film, plastic baby pants: nothing for his mother. He wants something big, something bright, something to get through to her. Realgirl Liquid Make-Up, Super Plenamins, Non-Smear polish remover, Nudit for the Legs. A rack of shampoo-in hair color, a different smiling cunt on every envelope: Snow Queen Blond, Danish Wheat, Killarney Russet, Parisian Spice, Spanish Black Wine. Nelson plucks him by the sleeve of his white shirt and leads to where a Sunbeam Clipmaster and a Roto-Shine Magnetic Electric Shoe Polisher nestle side by side, glossily packaged. “She doesn’t wear shoes any more, just slippers,” he says, “and she never cut her hair that I can remember. It used to hang down to her waist.” But his attention is drawn on to a humidifier for $12.95. From the picture on the box, it looks like a fat flying saucer. No matter how immobile she gets, it would be there. Around Brewer, though, the summers are as humid as they can be anyway, but maybe in the winter, the radiators dry out the house, the wallpaper peels, the skin cracks; it might help. It would be there night and day, when he wasn’t. He moves on to a Kantleek Water Bottle and a 2½-inch reading glass and dismisses both as morbid. His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill. He comes to the Quik-ease Electric Massager with Scalp Comb. It has the silhouettes of naked women on the box, gracefully touching their shoulders, Lesbians, caressing the backs of their necks, where else the box leaves to the imagination, with what looks like a hair brush on a live wire. $11.95. Bedsores. It might help. It might make her laugh, tickle, buzz: it is life. Life is a massage. And it costs a dollar less than the humidifier. Time is ticking. Nelson tugs at his sleeve and wants a maple walnut ice cream soda. While the kid is eating it, Rabbit buys a birthday card to go with the massager. It shows a rooster crowing, a crimson sun rising, and green letters shouting on the outside It’s Great to Get Up in the A.M.… and on the inside … to Wish You a Happy Birthday, MA! Ma. Am. God, what a lot of ingenious crap there is in the world. He buys it anyway, because the rooster is bright orange and jubilant enough to get through to her. Her eyes aren’t dim necessarily but because her tongue gropes they could be. Play it safe.