"Mom," Nelson asks his mother. "Why did you marry him? How could you do that to us?" The "us," he realizes, must include his dead father.

Janice looks as though she has had this conversation with her son before, and is weary to death of it. "He's good to me," she explains. "He's had too much to drink. Haven't you, Ron?"

"No," he says. "Not quite enough in fact. You drank it all at your end."

"Please forget whatever he said," she says to Annabelle. "Let's go for a walk, some of us. While the pies warm up."

"The rain has started up again," Alex points out.

Ron Junior wants to defend his father but doesn't quite know from what. "You squirt," he says to Nelson. "This was all your crazy idea, bringing her."

"It's thrown him for a loop," Georgie offers to explain, from his New York angle, seeing his father with a detachment the other two haven't managed yet, as an old man getting older. "She got him stirred up, remembering." His young-old face with its exaggerated big features reveals, in the tug of a smile crease at a corner of his lips, what he shares with his brothers, satisfaction that at last some sort of counterblow has been struck for Rabbit Angstrom's leading their mother into adultery.

"I am not stirred up," Ronnie says, with the oblivious stolidity of the insurance agent who will not go away, who will not leave the house until a policy has been sold. "This is my house and I like to have some control over who comes into it."

"Well, we're going," Nelson tells him. "This is it. Mom, I'll come by for my things when this pig isn't here."

"Nelson, you have no place to stay!"

"I'll find one. Come on, Annabelle. Here," and he dodges around Ronnie, startlingly, and rips a generous length of paper towel from the rack under the old-fashioned wooden cabinets and hands it to his sister, to dry her wet and soapy hands with.

Numb, heaped with disgrace, she follows him back into the dining room, past the tall breakfront where Ma Springer's precious Koerner china trembles at their double retreat. Annabelle has to hurry with her choppy small steps to keep up. She dressed for this occasion in a white cashmere cardigan and cinnamon-brown skirt, perhaps a little tight and short for the company. But that's how skirts come now, from New York via the buyers for the malls.

Only Margie, little Alice, and the Dietrichs are left at the Thanksgiving table. A cloud of Doris's cigarette smoke lies up against the ceiling, around the brass-plated dome fixture. Nelson stops to bend down and say loudly, "Mr. Dietrich, I'm sorry, but something has come up and we must run before the pies. Happy Thanksgiving. You too, Mrs. Dietrich. Keep being a friend to Mom, she needs you. Margie, I guess we don't agree entirely about Clinton but that's a very cute little girl you have there."

"Goodbye," Annabelle says to the table in a scarcely audible croak, her throat sore from her choked-down sobs. She dabs at her wet cheeks with the paper towel, held in the hand that Nelson isn't squeezing as he pulls her along. The two small boys have made their way ahead of them into the living room and have turned on the Zenith television. A football game: green-and-white uniforms deploy on a bright-green ground with a yellow ten-yard line supplied by computer graphics. The top of the set is crammed with knickknacks, including a heavy pale-green glass egg that since his earliest childhood seemed miraculous to Nelson. How did they get that tear-shaped bubble in there? He has no coat and her jacket hangs in the hall. The front door with its thin panes of ornamentally frosted glass sticks in the dampness of the day, but with a screech pops open, releasing them to the porch and its fresh air. It is raining; the air is chilly, alive. As a child he always loved this porch, his Springer grandparents' porch, where there was a cushioned glider that squeaked and smelled like the oilcloth mattress in his playpen. And there had been an armchair of unpainted wicker. People don't use their porches any more; the furniture was taken to the Mt. Judge dump, now closed, in some decade when he wasn't paying much attention. Being adult, it seems, consists of not paying much attention. The wicker smelled to his childish nostrils of its vegetable origin, of a willow tree in a storybook, leaning beside a pond, trailing its drooping branches and feathery leaves in the crystal-pure water. His senses feel clean again, the rain sharp on his face, the patter in the maple leaves overhead distinct, each drop, as he tugs his sister toward the tired white Corolla he brought her in. The house across the street, where the pumpkins and the woman in her bra have shone forth, is dark, empty. The neighbors are away for the holiday, and thus miss seeing the heir leave 89 Joseph Street for good.

Chapter 4

"O.K., O.K., I lost it," Ronnie admits to Janice. "There was no reason to be rude, people can't help how they got born."