She doesn't seem to hear, gazing at the fence-high heap of pruned branches.
He says, "If you're so in charge of the indoors, what are we having for dinner?"
"Damn," she says. "I meant to stop by at the farm stand there at the end of the bridge and pick up some sweet corn, but then I had so much else on my mind I sailed right by. I thought we'd have the corn with what's left of Tuesday's meatloaf and those dinner rolls in the breadbox before they get moldy. There was a wonderful tip in the Standard about how to freshen stale bread in the microwave, I forget what exactly, something to do with water. There must be a frozen veg in the freezer part we can have instead of sweet corn."
"Or else we could sprinkle salt and sugar on ice cubes," he says. "One thing I know's in the fridge is ice cubes."
"Harry, it's been on my mind to go shopping, but the IGA is so far out of the way and the prices at the Turkey Hill are ridiculous, and the convenience store over on Penn Boulevard has those surly kids behind the counter who I think punch extra figures into the cash register."
"You're a shrewd shopper, all right," Harry tells her. The mackerel sky is forming a solid gray shelf in the southwest; they move together toward the house, away from the shadow of coming dark.
Janice says, "So." Saying "so" is something she's picked up recently, from her fellow-students or her teachers, as the word for beginning to strike a deal. "You haven't asked me how I did on my last quiz. We got them back."
"How did you do?"
"Beautifully, really. Mr. Lister gave me a B minus but said it would have been a B plus if I could organize my thoughts better and clean up my spelling. I know it's `i' before `e' sometimes and the other way around some other times, but when?"
He loves her when she talks to him like this, as if he has all the answers. He leans the long-handled clippers in the garage against the wall behind a dented metal trash can and hangs the pruning saw on its nail. Shadowy in her sundress, she moves ahead of him up the back stairs and the kitchen light comes on. Inside the kitchen, she rummages, with that baffled frowning expression of hers, biting her tongue tip, in the refrigerator for edible fragments. He goes and touches her waist in the wheat-colored dress, lightly cups her buttocks as she bends over looking. Tenderly, he complains, "You didn't come home until late last night."
"You were asleep, poor thing. I didn't want to risk waking you so I slept in the guest room."
"Yeah, I get so groggy, suddenly. I keep wanting to finish that book on the American Revolution but it knocks me out every time."
"I shouldn't have given it to you for Christmas. I thought you'd enjoy it."
"I did. I do. Yesterday was a hard day. First Ronnie tied me on the last hole when I had the bastard all but beaten, and then he snubbed my invitation to play again. And then Nelson called all jazzed up with some crazy scheme about water scooters and Yamaha."
"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?"