Pop busies his hands, touching her, hanging up his coat, steering her into the dismal living room. "When did you get here? Straight from the West Coast? You fly straight to Idlewild, they do it non-stop now, don't they?"
"Pop, they don't call it Idlewild any more. I flew in a couple days ago, I had some stuff in New York to do before I drove down. Jersey was breathtaking, once you got past the oil tanks. Everything still so green."
"Where'd you get the car, Mim? Rent it from Hertz?" The old man's washed-out eyes sparkle at her daring, at her way with the world.
Mim sighs. "A guy lent it to me." She sits in the caneback rocker and puts her feet up on the very hassock that Rabbit as a child had once dreamed about: he dreamed it was full of dollar bills to solve all their problems. The dream had been so vivid he had tested it; the stitched scar of his incision still shows. The stuffing had been disagreeable fiber deader than straw.
Mim lights a cigarette. She holds it in the exact center of her mouth, exhales twin plumes around it, frowns at the snuffed match.
Pop is enchanted by the routine, struck dumb. Rabbit asks her, "How does Mom seem to you?"
"Good. For someone who's dying."
"She make sense to you?"
"A lot of it. The guy who doesn't make much sense to me is you. She told me what you've been doing. Lately."
"Hang's had a hell of a time lately," Pop chimes in, nodding as if to mesh himself with this spinning wheel, his dazzling daughter. "Today in at Verity, get this, they gave him his notice. They kept me on and canned a man in his prime. I saw the handwriting on the wall but I didn't want it to be me who'd tell him, it was their meatloaf, let them deliver it, bastards, a man gives them his life and gets a boot in the fanny for his pains."
Mim closes her eyes and lets a look of weary age wash over her and says, "Pop, it's fantastic to see you. But don't you want to go up and look in on Mom for a minute? She may need to be led to the pot, I asked her but with me she could be shy still."
Pop rises quickly, obliging; yet then he stands in a tentative crouch, offering to say away her brusqueness. "You two have a language all your own. Mary and I, we used to marvel, I used to say to her, There couldn't ever have been a brother and a sister closer than Harry and Miriam. These other parents used to tell us, you know, about kids fighting, we didn't know what they were talking about, we'd never had an example. I swear to God above we never heard a loud word between the two of you. A lot of boys, all of six when Mim arrived, might have expressed resentment, you know, settled in with things pretty much his own way up to then: not Harry. Right from the start, right from that first summer, we could trust you alone with him, alone in the house, Mary and I off to a movie, about the only way to forget your troubles in those days, go off to a motion picture." He blinks, gropes among these threads for the one to pull it all tight. "I swear to God, we've been lucky," he says, then weakens it by adding, "when you look at some of the things that can happen to people," and goes up; his tears spark as he faces the bulb burning at the head of the stairs, before cautiously returning his eyes to the treads.
Did they ever have a language of their own? Rabbit can't remember it, he just remembers them being here together, in this house season after season, for grade after grade of school, setting off down Jackson Road in the aura of one holiday after another, Hallowe'en, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, in the odors and feel of one sports season succeeding another, football, basketball, track; and then him being out and Mim shrunk to a word in his mother's letters; and then him coming back from the Army and finding her grown up, standing in front of the mirror, ready for boys, maybe having had a few, tinting her hair and wearing hoop earrings; and then Janice took him off; and then both of them were off and the house empty of young life; and now both of them are here again. The smoke from her cigarette seems what the room needs, has needed a long time, to chase these old furniture and sickness smells away. He is sitting on the piano stool; he perches forward and reaches toward her. "Gimme a weed."
"I thought you stopped."
"Years ago. I don't inhale. Unless it's grass."
"Grass yet. You've been living it up." She fishes in her purse, a big bright patchy bag that matches her slacks, and tosses him a cigarette. It is menthol, with a complicated filter tip. Death is easily fooled. If the churches don't work, a filter will do.
He says, "I don't know what I've been doing."
"I would say so. Mom talked to me for an hour. The way she is now, that's a lot of talking."
"What d'ya think of Mom now? Now that you have all this perspective."
"She was a great woman. With nowhere to put it."
"Well, is where you put it any better?"
"It involves less make-believe."
"I don't know, you look pretty fantastic to me."
"Thanks."
"What'd she say? Mom."
"Nothing you don't know, except Janice calls her a lot."
"I knew that. She's called a couple times since Sunday, I can't stand it to talk to her."
"Why not?"
"She's too wild. She doesn't make any sense. She says she's getting a divorce but never starts it, she says she'll sue me for burning her house and I tell her I only burned my half. Then she says she'll come get Nelson but never comes, I wish the hell she would."
"What does it mean to you, her being wild like this?"
"I think she's losing her buttons. Probably drinking like a fish."
Mim turns her profile to blunt the cigarette in the saucer serving as an ashtray. "It means she wants back in." Mim knows things, Rabbit realizes proudly. Wherever you go in some directions, Mim has been there. The direction where she hasn't been is the one that has Nelson in it, and the nice hot slap of the slug being made beside your left hand. But these are old directions, people aren't going that way any more. Mim repeats, "She wants you back."
"People keep telling me that," Rabbit says, "but I don't see much evidence. She can find me if she wants to."
Mim crosses her pants legs, aligns the stripes, and lights another cigarette. "She's trapped. Her love for this guy is the biggest thing she has, it's the first step out she's taken since she drowned that baby. Let's face it, Harry. You kids back here in the sticks still believe in ghosts. Before you screw you got to square it with old Jack Frost, or whatever you call him. To square skipping out with herself she has to make it a big deal. So. Remember as kids those candy jars down at Spottsie's you reached inside of to grab the candy and then you couldn't get your fist out? If Janice lets go to pull her hand out she'll have no candy. She wants it out, but she wants the candy too; no, that's not exactly it, she wants the idea of what she's made out of the candy in her own mind. So. Somebody has to break the jar for her."
"I don't want her back still in love with this greaseball."
"That's how you have to take her."
"The son of a bitch, he even has the nerve, sitting there in these snappy suits, he must make three times what I do just cheating people, he has the fucking nerve to be a dove. One night we all sat in this restaurant with him and me arguing across the table about Vietnam and them playing touch-ass side by side. You'd like him, actually, he's your type. A gangster."
Patiently Mim is sizing him up: one more potential customer at the bar. "Since when," she asks, "did you become such a war lover? As I remember you, you were damn glad to wriggle out of that Korean thing."