"Nelson's not your enemy. He's your boy and needs you more now than ever though he can't say it."
Rain, the last proof left to him that God exists. "I feel," he says, "there's something I don't know."
Janice admits, "There is."
"What is it?" Receiving no answer, he asks then, "How do you know it?"
"Mother and Melanie talk."
"How bad is it? Drugs?"
"Oh Harry no." She has to hug him, his ignorance must make him seem so vulnerable. "Nothing like that. Nelson's like you are, underneath. He likes to keep himself pure."
"Then what the fuck's up? Why can't I be told?"
She hugs him again, and lightly laughs. "Because you're not a Springer."
Long after she has fallen into the steady soft rasping of sleep he lies awake listening to the rain, not willing to let it go, this sound of life. You don't have to be a Springer to have secrets. Blue eyes so pale in the light coming into the back seat of that Corolla. Janice's taste is still on his lips and he thinks maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea for Sealtest. Twice as he lies awake a car stops outside and the front door opens: the first time from the quietness of the motor and the lightness of the steps on the porch boards, Stavros dropping off Melanie; the next time, not many minutes later, the motor brutally raced before cut-off and the footsteps loud and defiant, must be Nelson, having had more beers than was good for him. From the acoustical quality surrounding the sounds of this second car Rabbit gathers that the rain is letting up. He listens for the young footsteps to come upstairs but one set seems to trap the other in the kitchen, Melanie having a snack. The thing about vegetarians, they seem always hungry. You eat and eat and it's never the right food. Who told him that, once? Tothero, he seemed so old there at the end but how much older than Harry is now was he? Nelson and Melanie stay in the kitchen talking until the eavesdropper wearies and surrenders. In his dream, Harry is screaming at the boy over the telephone at the lot, but though his mouth is open so wide he can see all his own teeth spread open like in those dental charts they marked your cavities on that looked like a scream, no sound comes out; his jaws and eyes feel frozen open and when he awakes it seems it has been the morning sun, pouring in hungrily after the rain, that he has been aping.
The display windows at Springer Motors have been recently washed and Harry stands staring through them with not a fleck of dust to show him he is not standing outdoors, in an airconditioned outdoors, the world left rinsed and puddled by last night's rain, with yet a touch of weariness in the green of the tree across Route 111 behind the Chuck Wagon, a dead or yellow leaf here and there, at the tips of the crowded branches that are dying. The traffic this weekday flourishes. Carter keeps talking about a windfall tax on the oil companies' enormous profits but that won't happen, Harry feels. Carter is smart as a whip and prays a great deal but his gift seems to be the old Eisenhower one of keeping much from happening, just a little daily seepage.
Charlie is with a young black couple wrapping up the sale of a trade-in, unloading a '73 Buick eight-cylinder two-tone for three K on good folks too far behind in the rat race to know times have changed, we're running out of gas, the smart money is into foreign imports with sewing-machine motors. They even got dressed up for the occasion, the wife wears a lavender suit with the skirt old-fashionedly short, her calves hard and high up on her skinny bow legs. They really aren't shaped like we are; Skeeter used to say they were the latest design. Her ass is high and hard along the same lines as her calves as she revolves gleefully around the garish old Buick, in the drench of sunshine, on the asphalt still wet and gleaming. A pretty sight, out of the past. Still it does not dispel the sour unease in Harry's stomach after his short night's sleep. Charlie says something that doubles them both up laughing and then they drive the clunker off. Charlie comes back to his desk in a corner of the cool showroom and Harry approaches him there.
"How'd you dig Melanie last night?" He tries to keep the smirk out of his voice.
"Nice girl." Charlie keeps his pencil moving. "Very straight."
Harry's voice rises indignantly. "What's straight about her? She's kooky as a bluebird, for all I can see."
"Not so, champ. Very level head. She's one of those women you worry about, that they see it all so clearly they'll never let themselves go."
"You're telling me she didn't let herself go with you."
"I didn't expect her to. At my age – who needs it?"
"You're younger than I am."
"Not at heart. You're still learning."
It is as when he was a boy in grade school, and there seemed to be a secret everywhere, flickering up and down the aisles, bouncing around like the playground ball at recess, and he could not get his hands on it, the girls were keeping it from him, they were too quick. "She mention Nelson?"
"A fair amount."
"Whatcha think is going on between them?"
"I think they're just buddies."
"You don't think anymore they got to be fucking?"
Charlie gives up, slapping his desk and pushing back from his paperwork. "Hell, I don't know how these kids have it organized. In our day if you weren't fucking you'd move on. With them it may be different. They don't want to be killers like we were. If they are fucking, from the way she talks about him it has about the charge of cuddling a teddy bear before you go to sleep."
"She sees him that way, huh? Childish."
"Vulnerable is the way she'd put it."
Harry offers, "There's some piece missing here. Janice was dropping hints last night."
Stavros delicately shrugs. "Maybe it's back in Colorado. The piece."
"Did she say anything specific?"
Stavros ponders before answering, pushing up his amber glasses with a forefinger and then resting that finger on the bridge of his nose. "No."
Harry tries outright grievance. "I can't figure out what the kid wants."
"He wants to get started at the real world. I think he wants in around here."
"I know he wants in, and I don't want him in. He makes me uncomfortable. With that sorehead look of his he couldn't sell -"
"Coke in the Sahara," Charlie finishes for him. "Be that as it may, he's Fred Springer's grandson. He's engonaki."
"Yeah, both Janice and Bessie are pushing, you saw that the other night. They're driving me wild. We have a nice symmetrical arrangement here, and how many cars'd we move in July?"
Stavros checks a sheet of paper under his elbow. "Twentynine, would you believe. Thirteen used, sixteen new. Including three of those Celica GTs for ten grand each. I didn't think it would go, not against all the little sports coming out of Detroit at half the price. Those Nips, they know their market research."
"So to hell with Nelson. There's only one month left in the summer anyway. Why screw Jake and Rudy out of sales commission just to accommodate a kid too spoiled to take a job in the shop? He wouldn't even have had to dirty his hands, we could have put him in Parts."
Stavros says, "You could put him on straight salary here on the floor. I'd take him under my wing."
Charlie doesn't seem to realize he is the one to get pushed out. You try to defend somebody and he undermines you while you're doing it. But Charlie sees the problem after all; he expresses it: "Look. You're the son-in-law, you can't be touched. But me, the old lady is my connection here, and it's sentimental at that, she likes me because I remind her of Fred, of the old days. Sentiment doesn't beat out blood. I'm in no position to hang tough. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Furthermore I think I can talk to the kid, do something for him. Don't worry, he'll never stick in this business, he's too twitchy. He's too much like his old man."
"I see no resemblance," Harry says, though pleased.
"You wouldn't. I don't know, it seems to be hard these days, being a father. When I was a kid it seemed simple. Tell the kid what to do and if he doesn't do it sock him one. Here's my thought. When you and Jan and the old lady are taking your weeks in the Poconos, has Nelson been planning to come along?"