“You used to sail?”

“All summer until October. Not only that. In the spring we all used to have to scrape it and caulk it and paint it. I liked that almost the best, we all used to work at it together, my parents and me and my brothers.”

“How many brothers did you have?”

“Three. The middle one was about your age. Thirteen?”

He nods. “Almost.”

“He was my favorite. Is my favorite.”

A bird outside hoarsely scolds in sudden agitation. Cat? The refrigerator purrs.

Nelson abruptly volunteers, “I had a sister once but she died.”

“What was her name?”

His father has to answer for him. “Rebecca.”

Still Jill doesn’t look toward him, but concentrates on the boy. “May I eat breakfast, Nelson?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t want to take the last of your favorite breakfast cereal or anything.”

“You won’t. I’ll show you where we keep them. Don’t take the Rice Krispies, they’re a thousand years old and taste like floor fluff. The Raisin Bran and Alphabits are O.K., we bought them this week at the Acme.”

“Who does the shopping, you or your father?”

“Oh—we share. I meet him on Pine Street after work sometimes.”

“When do you see your mother?”

“A lot of times. Weekends sometimes I stay over in Charlie Stavros’s apartment. He has a real gun in his bureau. It’s O.K., he has a license. I can’t go over there this weekend because they’ve gone to the Shore.”

“Where’s the shore?”

Delight that she is so dumb creases the corners of Nelson’s mouth. “In New Jersey. Everybody calls it just the Shore. We used to go to Wildwood sometimes but Dad hated the traffic too much.”

“That’s one thing I miss,” Jill says, “the smell of the sea. Where I grew up, the town is on a peninsula, with sea on three sides.”

“Hey, shall I make you some French toast? I just learned how.”

Jealousy, perhaps, makes Rabbit impatient with this scene: his son in spite of his smallness bony and dominating and alert, Jill in her sheet looking like one of those cartoon figures, Justice or Liberty or Mourning Peace. He goes outside to bring in the Sunday Triumph, sits reading the funnies in the sunshine on the porchlet steps until the bugs get too bad, comes back into the living room and reads at random about the Egyptians, the Phillies, the Onassises. From the kitchen comes sizzling and giggling and whispering. He is in the Garden Section (Scorn not the modest goldenrod, dock, and tansy that grow in carefree profusion in fields and roadside throughout these August days; carefully dried and arranged, they will form attractive bouquets to brighten the winter months around the corner) when the kid comes in with milk on his mustache and, wide-eyed, pressingly, with a new kind of energy, asks, “Hey Dad, can she come along on the boat? I’ve called up Billy and he says his father won’t mind, only we have to hurry up. You can come too.”