"I'm sure Ronnie has his reasons," Janice says. "I'm surprised he played with you at all. How do you feel about Brussels sprouts?"
"I don't mind them."
"To me, they always taste spoiled; but they're all we have. I promise to get to the IGA tomorrow and stock up for the long weekend."
"We going to have Nelson and his tribe over?"
"I thought we might all meet at the club. We've hardly used it this summer."
"He sounded hyper on the phone – do you think he's back on the stuff already?"
"Harry, Nelson is very straight now. That place really has given him religion. But I agree, Yamaha isn't the answer. We must raise some capital and put ourselves on a solvent basis before we start courting another franchise. I've been talking to some of the other women getting their licenses -"
"You discuss our personal financial problems?"
"Not ours as such, just as a case study. It's all purely hypothetical. In real-estate class we always have a lot of case studies. And they all thought it was grotesque to be carrying a mortgage amounting to over twenty-five hundred a month on the lot when we have so much other property."
Rabbit doesn't like the trend here. He points out, "But this place is already mortgaged. What do we pay? Seven hundred a month."
"I know that, silly. Don't forget, this is my business now." She has stripped the Brussels sprouts of their waxpaper box and put them in the plastic safe dish and put it in the microwave and punches out the time – three blips, a peep, and then a rising hum. "We bought this place ten years ago," she tells him, "for seventyeight thousand and put fifteen down and have about ten or fifteen more in equity by now, it doesn't accumulate very fast in the first half of payback, there's a geometric curve they tell you about, so let's say there's still fifty outstanding; in any case, housing prices have gone way up in this area since 1980, it's been flattening out but hasn't started to go down yet, though it might this winter, you'd begin by asking two twenty, two thirty let's say, with the Penn Park location, and the seclusion, the fact that it has real limestone walls and not just facing, it has what they call historic value; we certainly wouldn't settle for less than two hundred, which minus the fifty would give us one fifty, which would wipe out two-thirds of what we owe Brewer Trust!"
Rabbit has rarely heard this long an utterance from Janice, and it takes him a few seconds to understand what she has been saying. "You'd sell this place?"
"Well, Harry, it is very extravagant to keep it just for the summer essentially, especially when there's all that extra room over at Mother's."
"I love this place," he tells her. "It's the only place I've ever lived where I felt at home, at least since Jackson Road. This place has class. It's us."
"Honey, I've loved it too, but we must be practical, that's what you've always been telling me. We don't need to own four properties, plus the lot."
"Why not sell the condo, then?"
"I thought of that, but we'd be lucky to get out of it what we paid for it. In Florida, places are like cars – people like them brand new. The new malls and everything are to the east."
"What about the Poconos place?"
"There's not enough money there either. It's an unheated shack. We need two hundred thousand, honey."
"We didn't roll up that debt to Toyota – Nelson did it, Nelson and his faggy boyfriends."
"Well, you can say that, but he can't pay it back, and he was acting as part of the company."
"What about the lot? Why can't you sell the lot? That much frontage on Route 111 is worth a fortune; it's the real downtown, now that people are scared to go into the old downtown because of the spics."
A look of pain crosses Janice's face, rippling her exposed forehead; for once, he realizes, he is thinking slower than she is. "Never," she says curtly. "The lot is our number-one asset. We need it as a base for Nelson's future, Nelson's and your grandchildren's. That's what Daddy would want. I remember when he bought it after the war, it had been a country gas station, with a cornfield next to it, that had closed during the war when there were no cars, and he took Mother and me down to look at it, and I found this dump out back, out in that brambly part you call Paraguay, all these old auto parts and green and brown soda bottles that I thought were so valuable, it was like I had discovered buried treasure I thought, and I got my school dress all dirty so that Mother would have been mad if Daddy hadn't laughed and told her it looked like I had a taste for the car business. Springer Motors won't sell out as long as I'm alive and well, Harry. Anyway," she goes on, trying to strike a lighter note, "I don't know anything about industrial real estate. The beauty of selling this place is I can do it myself and get the salesperson's half of the broker's commission. I can't believe we can't get two for it; half of six per cent of two hundred thousand is six thousand dollars -all mine!"
He is still playing catch-up. "You'd sell it – I mean, you personally?"
"Of course, you big lunk, for a real-estate broker. It would be my entrée, as they call it. How could Pearson and Schrack, for instance, or Sunflower Realty, not take me on as a rep if I could bring in a listing like that right off the bat?"
"Wait a minute. We'd live in Florida most of the time -"
"Some of the time, honey. I don't know how much I could get away at first, I need to establish myself. Isn't Florida, honestly, a little boring? So flat, and everybody we know so old."
"And the rest of the time we'd live in Ma's old house? Where would Nelson and Pru go?"
"They'd be there, obviously. Harry, you seem a little slow. Have you been taking too many pills? Just the way we and Nelson used to live with Mother and Daddy. That wasn't so bad, was it? In fact, it was nice. Nelson and Pru would have built-in babysitters, and I wouldn't have to do all this housekeeping by myself."
"What housekeeping?"
"You don't notice it, men never do, but there's an awful lot of simple drudgery to keeping two separate establishments going. You know how you always worry about one place being robbed while we're in the other. This way, we'd have one room at Mother's, I mean Nelson's – I'm sure they'd give us our old room back – and we'd never have to worry!"
Those bands of constriction, with their edges pricked out in pain, have materialized across Harry's chest. His words come out with difficulty. "How do Nelson and Pru feel about us moving in?"
"I haven't asked yet. I thought I might this evening, after I ran it by you. I really don't see how they can say no; it's my house, legally. So: what do you think?" Her eyes, which he is used to as murky and careful, often blurred by sherry or Campari, shine at the thought of her first sale.
He isn't sure. There was a time, when he was younger, when the thought of any change, even a disaster, gladdened his heart with the possibility of a shake-up, of his world made new. But at present he is aware mostly of a fluttering, binding physical resistance within him to the idea of being uprooted. "I hate it, offhand," he tells her. "I don't want to go back to living as somebody's tenant. We did that for ten years and finally got out of it. People don't live all bunched up, all the generations, any more."
"But they do, honey – that's one of the trends in living, now that homes have become so expensive and the world so crowded."
"Suppose they have more children."
"They won't."
"How do you know?"
"I just do. Pru and I have discussed it."
"Does Pru ever feel crowded, I wonder, by her mother-in-law?"
"I wouldn't know why. We both want the same thing – a happy and healthy Nelson."
Rabbit shrugs. Let her stew in her own juice, the cocky little mutt. Going off to school and thinking she's learned everybody's business. "You go over after supper and see how they like your crazy plan. I'm dead set against it, if my vote counts. Sell off the lot and tell the kid to get an honest job, is my advice."