"I'm not dominating. I'm a pushover, if you ask me."
"You are to him. Psychologically dominating. You're certainly a lot taller. And were a wonderful athlete."
"Were is right. A wonderful athlete whose doctors say he has to ride a golf cart and not do anything more violent than brisk walking."
"And you don't do it, Harry. I haven't seen you walk further than to the car and back."
"I've been doing some gardening."
"If you can call it that."
He likes to get out into their yard toward the end of the day and break off last year's dead flower stalks and bone-white old poke plants and burn them in a fire kindled on the day's newspaper, the Brewer Standard. The lawn needed a mowing badly when they arrived and the bulb beds should have been uncovered in March. The snowdrops and crocuses came and went while they were in Florida; the hyacinths are at their peak and the tulips up but still with pointy green heads. Rabbit feels peace at the moment of the day when the light dims and the weeping cherry glows in the dusk, its florets like small pink bachelor buttons and the whole droop-branched womanly forgiving shape of it gathering to itself a neon pallor as the shadows lengthen and dampen; the earth's revolution advances a bit more and the scraps of sunlight linger longer under the April sky with its jet trails and icy horsetails, just a few golden rags caught in the shaggy forsythia over toward the neighboring mansion built of thin yellow bricks, and the struggling hemlock, and the tallest of the rhododendrons by the palisade fence you see from the kitchen window. Janice put up a bird feeder in the hemlock a few falls ago, even though Doris Kaufmann or some other busybody told her it was cruel to birds to put up a feeder when you weren't there in the winter, a plastic sphere tilted like Saturn, and he fills it with sunflower seed when he thinks of it. Putting up bird feeders was the sort of thing her mother used to do but would never have occurred to Janice when they were younger and old Bessie was still alive. Our genes keep unfolding as long as we five. Harry tastes in his teeth a sourness that offended him on his father's breath. Poor Pop. His face yellowed like a dried apricot at the end. Bessie had the feeders all on wires and poles in her Joseph Street back yard to frustrate the squirrels. The copper beech by their old bedroom, with the nuts that would pop on their own all night, attracted the squirrels, she would say, making her lap and setting her hands on her knees as if God had cooked up squirrels just to bedevil her. Harry had liked Bessie, though she screwed him in her will. Never forgave him for that time in '59. Died of diabetes and its circulatory complications the day after Princess Di gave birth to little Prince William, the last living thing Bessie was interested in, would there be a future king of England? – that and the Hinckley trial, she thought they should hang the boy on the steps of the Capitol, right there in the sunshine, letting him off as insane was a scandal. The old lady was terrified of having her legs amputated at the end the way her own mother had. Harry can even remember Bessie's mother's name. Hannah. Hannah Koerner. Hard to believe he will ever be as dead as Hannah Koerner.
Before the April evening falls, the birds, big and little, that the feeder attracts flutter and hop to take a drink or splash their feathers in the blue-bottomed cement pond some earlier owner of this little place, this snug limestone cottage tucked in among the bigger Penn Park homes, created. The cement pool is cracked but still holds water. Like himself, Rabbit thinks, turning toward his house with its lit windows that seem as far away and yet as strangely close as his parents' house used to when he was a kid playing Twentyone or Horse with Mim and the other children of the neighborhood out at the backboard on the garage in the alley behind their long narrow yard on Jackson Road. Then as now, waking from twilit daydreams, he discovered himself nearer a shining presence than he thought, near enough for it to cast a golden shadow ahead of his steps across the yard; then it was his future, now it is his past.
During those spring months with Ruth on Summer Street, he used to wonder what it would be like to run to the end of the street, straight as far as the eye could see. In the thirty years since, he has often driven this way, to Brewer's northwestern edge and beyond, where the highway with its motels (Economy Lodge, Coronet, Safe Haven) melts into farmland and signs pointing the way to Harrisburg and Pittsburgh begin to appear. One by one the farms and their stone buildings, the bank bams put together with pegs and beams and the farmhouses built square to the compass with walls two feet thick, are going under to real-estate developments. Two miles beyond the pike to Maiden Springs, where the Murketts used to live before they got divorced, there is a fairly new development called Arrowdale after the old Arrowhead Farm that was sold off by the nieces and nephews of the old spinster who lived there so many years and had wanted to leave it to some television evangelist as a kind of salvation park, a holy-roller retreat, but whose lawyers kept talking her out of it. Rabbit as these recent years have gone by has watched the bulldozed land lose its raw look and the trees and bushes grow up so it almost seems houses have always been here. The streets curve, as they did in the Murketts' development, but the houses are more ordinary – ranch houses and split levels with sides of aluminum clapboards and fronts of brick varied by flagstone porchlets and unfunctional patches of masonry facing. Cement walks traverse small front yards with azaleas not quite in bloom beneath the picture windows. Bark mulch abounds, and matching porch furniture, and a tyrannical neatness absent in the older more blue-collar towns like Mt. Judge and West Brewer.
Ronnie and Thelma Harrison moved to one of these modest new houses when their three boys grew up and went off. Alex, the oldest, is an electronics engineer somewhere south of San Francisco; the middle boy, Georgie, who had had reading problems in school, is trying to be a dancer and musician in New York City; and their youngest, Ron junior, has stayed in the county, as a part-time construction worker, though he put in two years of college at Lehigh. Thelma doesn't complain about her sons or her house, though to Harry they seem disappointing, disappointingly ordinary, for a woman of Thelma's intelligence and, in his experience of her, passion.
Thelma's disease, systemic lupus erythematosus, has cost a fortune over the years, even with the benefits from Ronnie's insurance company's health plan. And it has meant that she has not been able to go back to teaching elementary school when her boys were gone, as she had hoped. Her health has been too erratic; it has kept her at home, where Harry could usually find her. This noon when he called from a pay phone in Brewer he expected her to answer and she did. He asked ifhe might drive over and she said he might. She didn't sound happy to hear from him, but not distressed either: resigned, merely. He leaves the Celica out front at the curving curb, though usually over the years she opened the garage for him and closed the door electronically from within the kitchen, to hide the evidence. But now that he is as sick as if not sicker than she, he doesn't know how much they still have to conceal. The neighborhood is empty during the midday, until the buses bring the children home from school. A single whining engine is at work somewhere out of sight in Arrowdale, and the air holds a pervasive vibration and hum of traffic from the Maiden Springs Pike. Also out of sight, some birds are chirping, raucous in their nesting frenzy, though the development is skimpy on trees. A robin hops on the bit of lawn beside Thelma's cement walk, and thrashes into the air as Harry approaches. He doesn't remember robins as seeming such big fierce birds; this one looked the size of a crow. He climbs two flagstone steps and crosses a little porch; Thelma opens the front door before he can ring the bell.
She seems smaller, and her hair grayer. Her prim, rather plain face always had a sallow tinge, and this jaundice has deepened, he can observe through the makeup she uses to soften her butterfly rash, a reddening the disease has placed like a soreness across her nose and beneath her eyes. Nevertheless, her deeply known presence stirs him. They lightly kiss, when she has closed the door, a long light-blocking green shade pulled down over its central pane of bevelled glass. Her lips are cool, and faintly greasy. She stays a time within his embrace, as if expecting something more to happen, her body relaxed against his in unspeakable confession.