"Lights are off downstairs," he mutters to Pru.

"I need to go down anyway," she says, softly, both of them fearful of breaking the spell that exists between the child and the television set.

Her face, as his face glided past it on the way to kiss another, exuded an aura, shampooey-powdery, just as the trees outside the house are yielding to the rain a leafy fresh tree-smell.

This green wet fragrance is present in his room too, the old sewing room, where the headless dress dummy stands. He changes into the clean pajamas Janice uncharacteristically had the foresight to bring. A blooming cottony weariness has overtaken him, enveloping him like the rain. In the narrow room its sound is more distinct than elsewhere, and complicated, a conversation involving the porch roof, the house gutter, the echoing downspout, the yielding leaves of the maples, the swish of a passing car. Closest to him, periodic spurts of dripping between the storm window and the wooden sash suggest some leakage into the walls and an eventual trouble of rot. Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.

The window is open a little for air and stray droplets prick the skin of his hands as he stands a moment looking out. Mt. Judge doesn't change much, at least here in the older section, but has dropped away beneath his life as if beneath a rising airplane. His life flowed along this shining asphalt, past these tilted lawns and brick-pillared porches, and left no trace. The town never knew him, the way he had imagined as a child it did, every pebble and milkbox and tulip bed eyelessly watching him pass; each house had been turned inward, into itself. A blurred lit window across the street displays an empty easy chair, a set of brassheaded fireplace tools, a brick mantel supporting a pair of oblivious candlesticks.

Rabbit hurries in bare feet down the hall to the bathroom and back and into bed, before it is nine o'clock. At the hospital by now the last visitors would be long gone, the flurry of bathroom-going and pill-taking that followed their departure subsided, the lights and nurses' voices in the hall turned down. There is no reading lamp in his room, just a paper-shaded overhead he resists switching on. He noticed a stack of old Consumer's Digests in the closet but figures the products they evaluated will all be off the market by now. The history book Janice gave him, that he can't get through although he is more than halfway, is back in the Penn Park den. Nor is the streetlight enough to read by. It projects rhomboidal ghosts of the windowpanes, alive with a spasmodic motion as raindrops tremblingly gather and then break downward in sudden streaks. Like the origins of life in one of those educational television shows he watches: molecules collecting and collecting at random and then twitched into life by lightning. Behind his head, past the old brown headboard with its jigsaw scrolls and mushroom-topped posts, his dead mother-in-law's sewing machine waits for her little swollen foot to press its treadle into life, and her short plump fingers to poke a wetted thread through its rusted needle. About as likely that to happen as life just rising up out of molecules. A smothered concussion, distant thunder, sounds in the direction of Brewer, and the treetops stir. Harry's head is up on two pillows so the full feeling in his chest is eased. His heart is giving him no pain, just floats wounded on the sea of ebbing time. Time passes, he doesn't know how much, before the door handle turns and clicks and a slant rod of hall light stabs into the amniotic isolation of the little borrowed room.

Pru's head, with coppery highlights on the top of her hair, pokes in. "You awake?" she asks in almost a whisper. Her voice seems roughened and her face is a milky heart-shaped shadow.

"Yep," Rabbit says. "Just lying here listening to the rain. You get Judy settled?"

"Finally," the young woman says, and with the exasperated emphasis enters the room wholly, standing erect. She is wearing that shorty bathrobe of hers, her legs cased in a white shadow descending to her ankles. "She's very upset about Nelson, naturally."

"Naturally. Sorry I blew up at her," he says. "The last thing the poor kid needs." He pushes up on his elbows, feeling himself somehow host, his heart thundering at the strangeness, though after his days in the hospital he should be used to people seeing him in bed.

"I don't know," Pru says. "Maybe it was just what she needed. A little structure. She thinks she has a right to all the TV sets in the world. Mind if I smoke?"

"Not at all."

"I mean, I see the window's a little bit open, but if it -"

"It doesn't," he says. "I like it. Other people's smoke. Almost as good as your own. After thirty years, I still miss it. How come you haven't given it up, with all this health kick?"

"I had," Pru says. Her face in the blue-green flare of her Bic lighter – a little tube as of lipstick – looks flinty, determined, a face stripped to essentials, with a long shadow leaping across her cheek from her nose. The flame goes out. She loudly exhales. Her voice continues in the renewed shadows. "Except for maybe one or two at night to keep myself from eating. But now, this thing with Nelson – why not? What does anything matter?" Her hovering face shows one profile, then the other. "There's no place to sit in here. This is an awful room."

He smells not only her cigarette smoke but her femininity, the faint department-store sweetness that clings to women, in the lotions they use, the shampoo. "It's cozy," he says, and moves his legs so she can sit on the bed.

"I bet you were asleep," Pru says. "I'll only stay for this cigarette. I just need a little adult company." She inhales like a man, deep, so the smoke comes out thin in a double jet from her mouth and nostrils, and keeps coming for several breaths. "I hope putting the kids down with Nelson gone isn't such a nightmare every night. They need so much reassurance."

"I thought he wasn't here a lot of nights."

"This time of night he usually was. The action over at the LaidBack doesn't begin until around ten. He'd come home from work, eat, be with the kids, and then get restless. I honestly think most nights he didn't plan to go out for a couple hits again, it just came over him and he couldn't help himself." She takes another drag. He hears her intake, like a sigh with several levels, and remembers how it was, to smoke. It was creating out of air an extension of yourself. "With the kids, he was helpful. However much of a shit he was to everybody else, he wasn't a bad father. Isn't. I shouldn't talk about him as if he's dead."

He asks her, "What time is it, anyway?"

"Quarter after nine or so."

Janice would get back at ten-thirty at the earliest. There was plenty of time to see this through. He relaxes back into his pillows. Good he had that nap this afternoon. "Is that how you see it?" he asks. "He was a shit to you?"

"Absolutely. Terrible. Out all night doing God knows what, then this snivelling and begging for forgiveness afterwards. I hated that worse than the chasing; my father was a boozer and a chaser, but then he wouldn't whine to Mom about it, he'd at least let her do the whining. This immature dependence of Nelson's was totally outside my experience."

Her cigarette tip glows. A distant concussion of thunder steps closer. Pru's presence here feels hot in Harry's mind, she is awkwardly big and all sharp angles in the sac of his consciousness. Her talk seems angular and tough, the gritty Akron toughness overlaid with a dismissive vocabulary learned from professional copers. He doesn't like hearing his son called immature. "You knew him for some time out at Kent," he points out, almost hostilely. "You knew what you were taking on."

"Harry, I didn't," she says, and the cigarette tip loops through an agitated arc. "I thought he'd grow, I never dreamed how enmeshed he was, with you two. He's still trying to work out what you two did to him, as if you were the only parents in the world who didn't keep wiping their kid's ass until he was thirty. I tell him: Get real, Nelson. Lousy parents are par for the course. My God. Nothing's ideal. Then he gets sore and tells me what a cold fish I am. He means sex. A thing that goes fast with coke is shame; these women that are hooked will do anything. I say to him, You're not going to give me AIDS from one of your coke whores. So he goes out again. It's a vicious circle. It's been going on for years."