Harry asks Nelson, "And who're these guys keep calling our house at all hours asking for money?"
"They think I owe them money," Nelson answers. "Maybe I do. It's temporary, Dad. It'll all work out. Come, Judy. I'll put you to bed."
"Not so fast," Harry says. "How much do you owe, and how're you going to pay 'em?"
"Like I said, I'll work it out. They shouldn't be calling your number, but they're crude guys. They don't understand term financing. Go back to Florida if you don't like your phone ringing. Change your number, that's what I did."
"Nelson, when will it end?" Janice asks, tears making her voice crack, just from looking at him. In his white shirt with his electric movements Nelson has the frailty and doomed alertness of a cornered animal. "You must get off this stuff"
"I am, Mom. I am off. Starting_tonight."
"Ha," Harry says.
Nelson insists to her, "I can handle it. I'm no addict. I'm a recreational user."
"Yeah," Harry says, "like Hitler was a recreational killer." It must be the mustache made him think of Hitler. If the kid would just shave it off, and chuck the earring, he maybe could feel some compassion, and they could make a fresh start.
But, then, Harry thinks, how many fresh starts for him are left? This room, where he spent ten years sleeping beside Janice, listening to her snore, smelling her nice little womanly sweat, her unconscious releases of gas, making some great love sometimes, that time with the Krugerrands, and other times disgustedly watching her stumble in tipsy from a night downstairs sipping sherry or Campan, this room with the copper beech outside the window leafing in and changing the light and then losing its leaves and giving the light back and the beech nuts popping like little firecrackers and Ma Springer's television mumbling on and making the bedside lamp vibrate when a certain pitch was reached on the program-ending surge of music, Ma sound asleep and never hearing it, this room soaked in his life, how many more times will he see it? He hadn't expected to see it tonight. Now all at once, as happens at his age, fatigue like an inner overflowing makes him feel soggy, dirty, distracted. Little sparks are going off and on in the corners of his eyes. Avoid aggravation. He'd better sit down. Janice has sat down on the bed, their old bed, and Nelson has pulled up the padded stool patterned with yellow roses Pru must use to perch on in her underwear when she sits putting on makeup at her dresser mirror before going out with him to the LaidBack or some yuppie buddies' party in northeast Brewer. How sorry is he supposed to feel for his son when the kid has a big tall hippy dish like that to boff?
Nelson has changed his tune. He leans toward his mother, his fingers intertwined to still their shaking, his lips tensed to bite back his nausea, his dark eyes full of an overflowing confusion like her own. He is pleadingly, disjointedly, explaining himself. "… the only time I feel human, like other people I guess feel all the time. But when I went after Pru that way tonight it was like a monster or something had taken over my body and I was standing outside watching and felt no connection with myself. Like it was all on television. You're right, I got to ease off. I mean, it's getting so I can't start the day without… a hit… and all day all I think about… That's not human either."
"You poor baby," she says. "I know. I know just what you're saying. It's lack of self-esteem. I had it for years. Remember, Harry, how I used to drink when we were young?"
Trying to pull him into it, make him a parent too. He won't have it, yet. He won't buy in. "When we were young? How about when we were middle-aged, like now even? Hey look, what's this supposed to be, a therapy session? This kid just clobbered his wife and is conning the pants off us and you're letting him!"
Judy, lying diagonally on the bed behind her grandmother, and studying them all with upside-down eyes, joins in, observing, "When Grandpa gets mad his upper lip goes all stiff just like Mommy's does."
Nelson comes out of his fog of self-pity enough to say to her, "Honey, I'm not sure you should be hearing all this."
"Let me put her back to bed," Janice offers, not moving though.
Harry doesn't want to be left alone with Nelson. He says, "No, I'll do it. You two keep talking. Hash it out. I've had my say to this jailbait."
Judy laughs shrilly, her head still upside down on the bed, her reversed eyelids monstrous. "That's a funny word," her mouth says, the teeth all wrong, big on bottom and little on top. " Jailbait.' You mean jailbird.' "
"No, Judy," Harry tells her, taking her hand and trying to pull her upright. "first you're jailbait, then you're a jailbird. When you're in jail, you're a jailbird."
"Where the holy fuck is her mother?" Nelson asks the air in front of his face. "That damn Pru, she's always telling me what a jerk I am, then she's out to lunch half the time herself. Notice how broad in the beam she's getting? That's alcohol. The kids come home from school and find her sound asleep." He says this to Janice, placating her, badmouthing his wife to his mother, then suddenly turns to Harry.
"Dad," he says. "Want to split a beer?"
"You must be crazy."
"It'll help bring us down," the boy wheedles. "It'll help us to sleep."
"I'm fighting sleep; Jesus. It's not me who's wired or whatever you call it. Come on, Judy. Don't give Grandpa a hard time. He hurts all over." The child's hand seems damp and sticky in his, and she makes a game of his pulling her off the bed, resisting to the point that he feels a squeeze in his chest. And when he gets her upright beside the bed, she goes limp and tries to collapse onto the rug. He holds on and resists the impulse to slap her. To Janice he says sharply, "Ten more minutes. You and the kid talk. Don't let him con you. Set up some kind of plan. We got to get some order going in this crazy family."
As he pulls the bedroom door halfway shut, he hears Nelson say, "Mom, how about you? Wouldn't half a beer be good? We have Mick, and Miller's."
Judy's room, wherein Ma Springer used to doze and pretend to watch television, and from whose front windows you can see patches of Joseph Street, deserted like tundra, blanched by the streetlights, through the sticky Norway maples, is crowded with stuffed toys, teddy bears and giraffes and Garfields; but Harry feels they are all old toys, that nobody has brought this child a present for some time. Her childhood is wearing out before she is done with it. She turned nine in January and who noticed? Janice sent her a Dr. Seuss book and a flowered bathing cap from Florida. Judy crawls without hesitation or any more stalling into her bed, under a tattered red puff covered with Peanuts characters. He asks her if she doesn't need to go pee-pee first. She shakes her head and stares up at him from the pillow as if amused by how little he knows about her insides. Slant slices of streetlight enter around the window shades and he asks her if she would like him to draw the curtains. Judy says No, she doesn't like it totally dark. He asks her if the cars going by bother her and she says No, only the big trucks that shake the house sometimes and there's a law that says they shouldn't come this way but the police are too lazy to enforce it. "Or too busy," he points out, always one to defend the authorities. Strange that he should have this instinct, since in his life he hasn't been especially dutiful. Jailbait himself on a couple of occasions. But the authorities these days seem so helpless, so unarmed. He asks Judy if she wants to say a prayer. She says No thanks. She is clutching some stuffed animal that looks shapeless to him, without arms or legs. Monstrous. He asks her about it and she shows him that it is a stuffed toy dolphin, with gray back and white belly. He pats its polyester fur and tucks it back under the covers with her. Her chin rests on the white profile of Snoopy wearing his aviator glasses. Linus clutches his blanket; Pigpen has little stars of dirt around his head; Charlie Brown is on his pitcher's mound, and then is knocked head over heels by a rocketing ball. Sitting on the edge of the bed, wondering if Judy expects a bedtime story, Harry sighs so abjectly, so wearily, that both are surprised, and nervously laugh. She suddenly asks him if everything will be all right.