A shape, a shade, comes forward from the kitchen. He expects it to be his father, but it is his mother, shuffling, in a bathrobe, yet erect and moving. She leans forward unsmiling to accept his kiss. Her wrinkled cheek is warm; her hand steadying itself on his wrist is knobbed and cold.

“Happy birthday, Mom.” He hugs the massager against his chest; it is too early to offer it. She stares at the package as if he has put a shield between them.

“I’m sixty-five,” she says, groping for phrases, so that her sentences end in the middle. “When I was twenty. I told my boy friend I wanted to be shot. When I was thirty.” It is not so much the strange tremulous attempt of her lips to close upon a thought as the accompanying stare, an unblinking un-gathering gaze into space that lifts her eyes out of any flow and frightens Rabbit with a sense of ultimate blindness, of a blackboard from which they will all be wiped clean.

“You told Pop this?”

“Not your dad. Another. I didn’t meet your dad till later. This other one, I’m glad. He’s not here to see me now.”

“You look pretty good to me,” Rabbit tells her. “I didn’t think you’d be up.”

“Nelson. How do I look. To you?” Thus she acknowledges the boy. She has always been testing him, putting him on the defensive. She has never forgiven him for not being another Harry, for having so much Janice in him. Those little Springer hands. Now her own hands, held forgotten in front of her bathrobe belt, constantly work in a palsied waggle.

“Nice,” Nelson says. He is wary. He has learned that brevity and promptness of response are his best defense.

To take attention off the kid, Rabbit asks her, “Should you be up?”

She laughs, an astonishing silent thing; her head tips back, her big nose glints from the facets of its tip and underside, her hand stops waggling. “I know, the way Earl talks. You’d think from the way he wants me in bed. I’m laid out already. The doctor. Wants me up. I had to bake a cake. Earl wanted. One of those tasteless paps from the Half-A-Loaf. Where’s Janice?”

“Yeah, about that. She’s awfully sorry, she couldn’t come. She had to go off with her mother to the Poconos, it took us all by surprise.”

“Things can be. Surprising.”

From upstairs Earl Angstrom’s thin voice calls anxiously, with a wheedler’s borrowed triumph, “They’re down! Eagle has landed! We’re on the moon, boys and girls! Uncle Sam is on the moon!”

“That’s just. The place for him,” Mom says, and with a rough gesture sweeps her distorted hand back toward her ear, to smooth down a piece of hair that has wandered loose from the bun she still twists up. Funny, the hair as it grays grows more stubborn. They say even inside the grave, it grows. Open coffins of women and find the whole thing stuffed like inside of a mattress. Pubic hair too? Funny it never needs to be cut. Serafina’s looked threadbare, mangy. When he touches his mother’s arm to help her up the stairs to look at the moon, the flesh above her elbow is disconcerting—loose upon the bone, as on a well-cooked chicken.