Benny comes over to where Harry stands at the window looking out and asks, "Whajja do for Father's Day?"

Harry is pleased to have an answer. "Nelson's wife brought our grandchildren over in the afternoon and I did a cookout for everybody on the outdoor grill." It sounds ideally American but had its shaky underside. Their grill, for one thing, is a metal sphere that Consumer Reports said years ago was a classic but that Harry never has quite the patience for, you must wait until the briquettes are gray and ashy, but he's afraid of waiting too long, so there was a lot of staring at the raw hamburger patties not cooking, with Janice annoying him by offering to cook them in the kitchen, since the children were being eaten alive by mosquitoes. For another, the grandchildren brought him cute grandfather's cards, all right, both by this new artist Gary Larson that everybody else thinks is so funny, but this uniformity – they were even signed by the same red pen, Judy's with quite a girlish flourish to the "y" and Roy's a bunch of aimless but intense pre-literate stabs – suggested a lack of planning, a quick stop at the drugstore on the way over from the Flying Eagle. Pru and the kids arrived with their hair wet from the pool. She brought a bowl of salad she had made at home.

"Sounds terrific," Benny says, in his husky small voice.

"Yeah," Harry agrees, explaining, as if his image of Pru with her wet long hair holding this big wooden bowl of lettuce and sliced radishes on her hip was visible to them both, "we've arranged a temporary membership for Nelson's wife over at the country club, and they'd been swimming over there most of the day."

"Nice," Benny says. "She seems a nice gal, Teresa. Never came over here to the lot much, but I hate to see a family like that having a hard time."

"They're managing," Harry says, and changes the subject. "D'jou watch any of the Open?" Somebody really should go out and pick up all the wrappers that blow over from the Pizza Hut and get caught in the struggling little yew hedge. But he doesn't like to bend over, and doesn't quite feel he can order Benny to do it.

"Naa, I can't get turned on by games," the pudgy young sales representative says, more aggressively than the question requires. "Even baseball, a game or two, I'm bored. You know, what's in it for me? So what?, if you follow me."

There used to be a stately old maple tree across Route 111 that the Pizza Hut cut down to expand its red-roofed facility. The roof is shaped like a hat, with two slants. He ought to be grateful, Harry thinks, to have a lively business along this struggling little strip. "Well," he tells Benny, not wanting to argue, "with the Phils in last place you aren't missing much. The worst record in baseball, and now they've traded away two of their old all-stars. Bedrosian and Samuel. There's no such thing as loyalty any more."

Benny continues to explain himself, unnecessarily. "Me, I'd rather do something myself f on a nice Sunday, not sit there like a couch potato, you know what I mean? Get outdoors with my little girl at the neighbor's pool, or go take the family for a walk up the mountain, if it's not too hot, you know."

These people who keep saying "you know": as if if they don't keep nailing your attention to their words it'll drift off. "That's the way I used to be," Harry tells him, relaxing as the disturbing image of Pru holding the great bowl on her hip recedes, and feeling philosophical and pleasurably melancholic the way he usually does gazing out this big window. Above his head the big blue paper banner spelling ArnAUATOYoT with the sun shining through it is beginning to come unstuck from the glass. "Always doing some sport as a kid, and up until recently out on the golf course, flogging the stupid ball."

"You could still do that," Benny says, with that Italian huskiness, faintly breathless. "In fact, I bet your doc advises it. That's what mine advises, exercise. You know, for my weight."

"I probably should do something," Harry agrees, "to keep the circulation going. But, I don't know, golf suddenly seemed stupid. I realized I'd never get any better at it, at this point. And the guys I had my old foursome with have pretty well moved away. It's all these blond beefy yuppie types up at the club, and they all ride carts. They're in such a fucking hurry to get back to making money they ride around in carts, wearing the grass off the course. I used to like to walk and carry. You'd strengthen your legs. That's where the power of a golf swing is, believe it or not. In the legs. I was mostly arms. I knew the right thing to do, I could see it in the other guys and the pros on TV, but I couldn't make myself do it."

The length and inward quality of this speech make Benny uneasy. "You ought to be getting some exercise," he says. "Especially with your history."

Rabbit doesn't know if he means his recent medical history, or his ancient history of high-school athletics. The framed blowups of his old basketball photos have come out of Nelson's office and back onto the walls, rose-colored though they are, above the performance board. That was something he did carry through on, unlike the rotting bark mulch. ANGSTROM HITS FOR 42. "When Schmidt quit, that got to me," he tells Benny, even though the guy keeps saying he is no sports nut. Maybe he enjoys bullying him with it, boring him. He wonders how much Benny was in on Nelson's shenanigans, but didn't have the heart or energy to fire him when he came back to run the lot. Get through the day, and the cars sell themselves. Especially the Carnry and Corolla. Who could ask for anything more?

"All he had to do," he explains to Benny, "to earn another half million was stay on the roster until August fifteenth. And he began the season like a ball of fire, two home runs the first two games, coming off that rotator-cuff surgery. But, like Schmidt himself said, it got to the point where he'd tell his body to do something and it wouldn't do it. He knew what he had to do and couldn't do it, and he faced the fact and you got to give him credit. In this day and age, he put honor over money."

"Eight errors," Elvira Ollenbach calls in her deep voice from over in her booth, on the wall toward Paraguay, where she has been filling out the bill of sale and NV-1 for an ivory Corolla LE she sold yesterday to one of these broads that come in and ask to deal with her. They have jobs, money, even the young ones that used to be home making babies. If you look, more and more, you see women driving the buses, the delivery trucks. It's getting as bad as Russia; next thing we'll have women coalminers. Maybe we already do. The only difference between the two old superpowers is they sell their trees to Japan in different directions. "An error each in the last two games against the Giants," Elvira inexorably recites. "And hitting.203, just two hits his last forty-one at bats." Her head is full, between her pretty little jug ears, with figures. Her father was a sports addict, she has explained, and to communicate with him she followed all this stuff and now can't break the habit.

"Yeah," Rabbit says, he feels weakly, taking some steps toward her desk. "But still, it took a lot of style. Just a week ago, did you see, there was this interview in some Philadelphia paper where he said how great he felt and he was only in a slump like any overeager kid? Then he was man enough to change his mind. When all he had to do was hang around to collect a million and a half total. I like the way he went out," Rabbit says, "quick, and on his own nickel."

Elvira, not looking up from her paperwork, her pendulous gold earrings bobbing as she writes, says, "They would have cut him by August, the way he was going. He spared himself the humiliation."

"Exactly," Harry says, still weakly, torn between a desire to strike an alliance with this female and an itch to conquer her, to put her in her place. Not that she and Benny have been difficult to deal with. Docile, rather, as if anxious that they not be swept out of the lot along with Lyle and Nelson. It was easiest for Harry to accept them as innocents and not rock the agency worse than it was being rocked. Both of them have connections in Brewer and move Toyotas, and if the conversations during idle time "down" time, young people called it now – weren't as satisfying, as clarifying, as those he used to have with Charlie Stavros, perhaps the times were less easy to clarify. Reagan left everybody in a daze, and now the Communists were acting confused too. "How about those elections in Poland?" he says. "Voting the Party out – who ever would have thought we'd live to see the day? And Gorby telling all the world the contractors who put up those sand castles in Armenia were crooks? And in China, what's amazing isn't the crackdown but that the kids were allowed to run the show for a month and nobody knew what to do about it! It's like nobody's in charge of the other side any more. I miss it," he says. "The cold war. It gave you a reason to get up in the morning."