"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."

"You should call and apologize." This incident has given her an edge, and anger enough to use it. He had seen in the girl this dead woman he had fucked, and moved toward her, and made an assault in his frustration. This did not speak well of what his wife meant to him. What she meant, she saw when she cleared her head, was a kind of revenge on Harry, and the possession of this house. This is my house, he had said, but it was not, it was her house, the house she had been raised in, the house her mother's pride had cleaned and polished and her father's money had maintained. They were surrounded by Koerner and Springer things; the Angstroms and the Harrisons had contributed hardly a stick of furniture, they were nobodies in the county, they would leave nothing behind but their headstones.

"I'm not ready," Ronnie tells her. "I can't trust myself to do the right thing. She's a Clinton-lover, for Chrissake. She must hang around with a bunch of North Brewer weirdos."

He wanted to fuck the girl, Janice perceives, and is wife enough to feel sorry for him, thinking of his burdensome prick that hangs at such loose ends below his furry pot belly, a prick with a flat upper side, a heavy mournful club, circumsized, unlike Harry's. Nowhere to hide its head. "Then call Nelson at least," she says.

"We don't know where he is, do we?" He is correctly guessing that she knows more than he. A long weekend has gone by since Thanksgiving. Nelson came over while Ronnie was at church Sunday. Ronnie faithfully goes to that no-name fundamentalist church beyond Arrowdale that he and Thelma used to attend. Once when Janice asked him why he bothered, he snapped, "The same reason anybody goes. Because we're all sinners." Janice felt this as a slap in her face. Harry would never have said it; he never thought he sinned. She tries not to hate Thelma now that she is dead but she shouldn't have to share both husbands with her. Janice has inherited Episcopalianism from her mother but without Bessie Springer's habit of attendance. There has been for years too much to do on a Sunday morning, her women's tennis group at the Flying Eagle in the summer and in the winter her sessions on the Stepmaster at the Fitness Center at the dying mall on the way to Brewer. She is determined not to get fat like Mother. Her trim little figure is the thing she likes best about herself. Anyway, Mother had friends to go with after Daddy was gone—Grace Stuhl, Amy Gehringer—and Janice has none. So she stays home Sunday mornings with the Brewer Standard in all its color-printed sections while her husband communes with the dead.

Knowing this, Nelson called five minutes after Ronnie stepped out the door and was there in his car fifteen minutes later. He took away two armfuls of clothes and said he'd be back for one of the television sets and a couple of upstairs chairs when he had a place of his own. He was sleeping on Annabelle's floor over on East Muriel Street until he could begin to look for a room on Monday. She was fine, just cried a lot because all of the Harrisons hated her. He had told her that Georgie didn't hate her, and the others were out of touch with their true feelings. Anyway, it had been his mistake. Another mistake, he realized, had been hanging on in this house so long, for lack of a better idea and having the delusion that his mother needed him. "You don't need me, Mom. You're doing fine. Ronnie's fine, for being a fat-headed bozo. Tell him sometime that he was good to put up with me so long."

She couldn't argue, really. She loved Nelson for all they had been through together but she was past the age when she could oblige his neediness. She and Ronnie left alone tended to each other's needs, one of which, never stated, was getting ready for death, which could start any time now. A pain in the night, a sour number on the doctor's lab tests, and the skid would begin. They had seen their spouses go that way. She had felt her baby slip from her soapy hands and for some few seconds be unfindable in the tub's opaque gray water. If there was any truth in what the churches said she would be reunited with her baby, not so far from now. Death had that to offer her.

She had given Nelson a piece of mince pie that she had saved in the freezer for him and said how sorry she was about what had happened. Everybody felt terrible about it, except Deet and the three children, she guessed. "No," Nelson said, "it was clarifying. It showed me what a pipsqueak leech I tend to be. There was no reason to drag you all in, my sister is something that concerns Dad and me, not you."

That was yesterday. She tells Ronnie now, "You could call him at work." He understands it as a command, for his having overstepped.

It is not an easy call to make, but no worse than hounding a prospect into buying insurance. You construct a shell for yourself, and speak from within it. "Nelson, got a minute?"

"A minute, yes." He has the Relationships group in ten minutes.

"Listen, I feel rotten about the way I spoke to Annabelle."

His using her name offends Nelson, but he listens.

"I must have been drunk," Ronnie goes on.

"Were you that drunk? Mentioning her mother's cunt?" The clients at the Center may be dysfunctional but they have rabbit ears. Through the open door of his tiny office Nelson sees several heads out in the milieu turn, including that of Rosa, who talks to Jesus. She is with a new client, a forty-seven-year-old female obsessive-compulsive. During the intake he was struck by the new client's hands, so painfully scrubbed and chapped, and the fingernails nibbled down to the pink parts. Pru had had such long red hands, he remembers—gawky in the wrists, tender at the tips.

"Look," Ronnie's voice presses on, "I'm calling to say I'm sorry, you're not supposed to make it harder."

"I'm not? Some would say that you owe the apology not to me but to Annabelle."

"I don't trust myself to talk to her. Her being such a bleeding heart for Clinton still pisses me off."

"Was it really Clinton that pissed you off? Tell me, Ronnie, when you looked at her, what did you see?"

"I saw a bleeding-heart broad too big for her miniskirt."

"Anything else? Come on. Help yourself. Think."

"I saw Ruth Leonard back in the Fifties. She'd fuck anybody."

"More. Who else did you see?"

Ronnie is silent, but his silence conveys less animosity than an attempt to think. This is the best conversation Nelson has ever had with Ronnie. His moving out has done that, in just four days. For the first lime, Ronnie owes him some respect. "You want me to say your father," he comes up with.

"Only if it's true."

"It's true. She has more of him in her than you do. Stop asking all these questions trying to make me spill my guts. You're sore at me and always have been because I ball your mother."

"Are you sure about that? Maybe I like you for it; I can't do it. The fact is, I don't dislike you, Ronnie. You don't threaten me the way you did Dad, for some reason. I like you. I like the way you take care of Mom and care about that big homely barn of a house. You're a caring guy. Insurance salesmen are caring guys, worrying about the loved ones when the breadwinner packs it in. You try to make the dead effective just like I try to make the crazy effective. We're not hotshots but we're responsible citizens. What bugs you about Clinton is that he seems to get away with everything. The same with my father. Let me tell you something, Ronnie, something I've observed: nobody gets away with anything. Those that escape punishment inflict it on themselves. We all do it. We keep our own accounts."

Ronnie is silent, weighing this, looking for the hook. "What b.s.," he says at last. "Nellie, you've become a bullshit artist."

"Another reason I like you, Ronnie," Nelson rushes on, the insight having just come to him with a force that needs to be vented, "is that you and I are about the last people left on earth my father still bugs. He bugs us because we wanted his good opinion and didn't get it. He was worse than we are but also better. He beat us out. You look at Annabelle and see living proof that he beat you out— you may have fucked Ruth but he knocked her up and he stares out of her face at you. Right?"

"You've lost me," Ronnie admits. "Tell me, what does this kid do for you?"

"Me, it's like she's something my father left me to take care of, and I don't have a clue how to do it. Thanksgiving wasn't the answer. Your sons sure weren't the answer."

Ron Harrison's voice becomes pious. "Nellie, I'm going to speak the truth in love. What I say is going to help you. She's a slick little twat and can take care of herself. Let me tell you something that will shock you. Back in the kitchen, I turned her on. She wanted me to ball her. I felt it, and I had to get ugly, for everybody's sake. I sacrificed myself."

"Talk about bullshit," Nelson says, and hangs up. While he has been on the phone so long, Rosa and the new client have been scared off, horrified by what they have overheard. He ventures out into the milieu after them, to find out what they wanted, and to show them how sane and normal and trustworthy he basically is.

From: Dad [nelsang.harrison@qwikbrew.com]Sent: Friday, December 10, 1999 5:11 PMTo: royson@buckeyemedia.comSubject: change of address

Dear Roy—Sorry to let your messages and jokes accumulate. The one about how many Texas A & M students does it take to screw in a light bulb is funny but it seems a little heartless, seeing that twelve young people were killed making that bonfire pile and most were freshmen who had just been told to do this by people who should have known better. Remem-ber when you get to college to trust your own judgment. I wasted a lot of time at beery frat foolishness at Kent State until your mother took me in hand. She was a little older than I and had more of a realistic upbringing.

The reason I have been slow to answer lately is that I moved out of the house where your grandmother and Mr Harrison live, so I don't have daily access to this computer and am using it now on the sly when they are both out at the mall doing Christmas shopping and then maybe a movie, either the new James Bond or new Tom Hanks. Some rude words at Thanksgiving prompted my departure but I've been thinking of it for some time. Your mother and I used to discuss it while you and Judy were growing up there but we never got around to it, the rent was too good ($0.00).

For somewhat more than that amount ($85 a week, so tell your mother I have this new expense) I have rented a big front second-story room on Almond Street, just off Elsenhow-er Avenue three blocks from the underpass, where you and Judy and Mom if she wants can stay when you come east after Christmas. We can put mattresses on the floor and borrow sleeping bags from the two girls who live in the other half of the second floor here. They are both in their twenties and what we used to call secretaries but have titles like administra-tive assistant and corporate input organizer. I hardly ever see them but can hear them with their obnoxious dates sometimes late at night.

I have been living on Almond Street only a week but am pretty happy. The apartment comes with a cable television set and other essential furnishings and a bathroom with shower. There's no kitchen but your grandmother stood me to a little microwave, a 1.2-cubic-ft. Magic Chef, for coffee in the morning and a TV dinner at night. There's a 7-Eleven just down the street. This used to be the landlady's daughter's room until she married and moved away, so there are a lot of frilly nice touches left over.

When you come you must meet your new aunt, a half-aunt if there is such a thing, Annabelle. She is shy but very nice, and knows all about you. Those protests in Seattle reminded me of when I was about your age and people were protesting everything, rioting in the streets. Policemen were called pigs and the President was called worse, just like now. I suppose things move in cycles.

I'm glad your birthday went nicely and I'm sorry it slipped my mind. Let me know what you would like for a present and we can get it when you visit. Your own cell phone seems a bit much even if other kids have them. There is a monthly charge, you know, that you would be responsible for. You can keep using this for your e-mail to me but as I say I can't answer easily. At work they don't want you to use the comput-ers for private e-mail. But I have a phone in my apartment: 610-846-7331. Call me when you feel like a chat. Love to you and all those fabulous Akron Angstroms, Dad.

He is not surprised when Pru calls the next evening. Her voice is

lighter, more girlish than he remembers. "Nelson, what got into

you to leave your mother's at last?"

"It felt crowded. Ronnie's a prick, like my father always said."

"This so-called sister—did she put you up to it?"

"No, Annabelle would never apply pressure that way."

"Well, she got you to do something I never could."

"Oh? You were never that clear. You were ambivalent, like me. It was a free ride, with a built-in babysitter."

She pauses, checking her memory against his. He can picture her lips, drawn back in thought in her bony face, like an astronaut's when the G's of force begin to tug. She says, "Maybe it was Pennsylvania I needed to get out of. It's all very dear and friendly, but there's this thick air or whatever, this moral undertone. I think Judy is better off without all that to rebel against."

"And Roy?"

"He's scary, of course, spending so much time at the computer, but a lot of his friends are like that too. Where you and I see a screen full of more or less the same old crap, they see a magic space, full of tunnels and passageways and pots of gold. He's grown up with it."

He is being invited, he realizes, to talk as a parent, a collaborator in this immense accidental enterprise of bringing another human being into the world. "Yeah, well, there's always something. TV, cars, movies, baseball. Lore. People have to have lore. Anyway, Roy has always been kind of a space man."

"He masturbates like crazy, though. There's all this porn on the Internet. And he doesn't have the housekeeping sense to wipe up the sheet with a handkerchief."

Nelson sighs, seeing sex loom ahead for Roy as a dark and heartless omnivore. "Well, yes. He thinks it doesn't show. I thought the same thing, I guess. How's your life, by the way, in the romance department?"

He wouldn't have dared ask a week ago, but moving out has given him a fresh footing with not only his stepfather but his estranged wife. Pru is a year older than he and that year has figured in their relationship from the start, making her seem a greater prize when they dated at Kent State, enlarged by adult features like a secretary's salary and a car (a salt-rotted tan Valiant) and an apartment of her own up in Stow and knowing how to fuck, muscling her clitoris against his pelvic bone and coming matter-of-factly as if it was her woman's plain right. But then once they were married that year's difference became an embarrassment, as if he had just switched mothers. No wonder she and Dad got together. Then in recent years the year's difference had swung back to mattering less, a slightly awkward fact like her also being left-handed, once they outgrew the year when she was forty and he only thirty-nine. He was forty-one when she left him, leaving in the muggy heat of August to enroll the children in Akron schools. She had complained for years about living with his mother and Ronnie and about his dead-end job babysitting these pathetic dysfunctionals, boosting his own ego at their expense, caring more about them than he did about his own wife and children, but what it boiled down to in his baffled mind was something she once shouted, her green eyes bright as broken glass in her reddened face: My life with you is too small! Too small. As if being a greaseball lawyer's input organizer and easy lay was bigger. But the size of a life is how you feel about it. Pru was one of seven children and, though her father, a former steamfitter, is dead of too many Buds and her wispy little lace-curtain-Irish-Catholic mother sits in assisted-living housing, she has six siblings and their broods to give her a big noisy theatre to do an aunt act in. Whereas Aunt Mim had only him. And now Annabelle.

"It's great, Mr. Nosy," says Pru. "Actually, I've given Gekopoulos notice, beginning next year. I'd like something more having to do with people, maybe in public relations. Slapping up injury claims and divorce settlements out of glossarized boilerplate isn't exactly non-repetitive."

He suppresses the insight that life as a whole isn't exactly non-repetitive. "It doesn't sound as if the job uses all your abilities."

"Well, thanks, but what abilities? somebody might ask. Still I have this crazy idea I must be good for something. I mean, I can be pleasant. People like me, at least at first. Maybe I should enlist with Judy in stewardess school. Except my palms get all sweaty whenever I fly. I hate how long it takes to land, skimming in over all these highways and cemeteries."

She is spending Christmas with her mother and siblings and then driving to him, all the way across the great Commonwealth, its mountains and quarries, its mills and farms, along the Turnpike for eight or nine hours, Judy spelling her at the wheel, Roy playing video games at every rest stop. "When you come here after Christmas, where do you all want to sleep?" he asks. "I have only this one room. You could stay with Mom and Ronnie and I'll have the kids here in sleeping bags. Or is Judy too old for that?"

"Let's think about it," Pru says. "The basic thing is they see their father."

"Right. But can I say something? It'll be nice for me to see you, too."

"Uh-huh," she says, her tone Akron tough-girl flat.

"Let's try to have some fun when you come," he urges. "Life is too short."

"I'll put on Roy," she says. "Judy's out."

"How's it going?" he asks his son.

"O.K., good," is the guarded answer. Roy has always had this strange deep voice that takes Nelson by surprise. Judy he had no trouble loving from the start—her solemn hazel gaze, little square feet, her ankles flexible as wrists, the little split bun between her legs. Roy with his stern stare and upjutting button of a penis had a touch of the alien invader, the relentless rival demanding space, food, attention.

"You got my e-mail, I guess."

"Yeah. Thanks."

"How's school going?"

"Good."

"Are you learning anything exciting?"

"Not really. The teacher in Computer Skills showed us some faulty programming in Windows 98. He thinks Bill Gates is holding the Net-surfing technology back at this point and the government is right."

This may have been the longest utterance he has ever heard from Roy. He says, "Well, you're way ahead of me. You're more at home with this stuff than I'll ever be."

"It's easy. It's all Boolean logic."

"Is there anything you want to do in Diamond County? Shop at the outlets? Eat at the restaurant on top of Mt. Judge? Go visit that limestone cave again? They may close it in the winter, actually." As he runs through this bleak list it occurs to him that there is nothing to do in Diamond County—just be born, live, and die.

But Roy's grave, resonant voice has picked up speed and purpose. "Dad, you may not know this but one of the greatest new biotech companies in the world is in Diamond County. In Hemmigtown, you know where that is?"

"Yes, I know." Nelson is wearying of being an attentive father. His son is a nerd, he realizes, a bore to his classmates and a nag to his teachers.

"Genomics dot com. They're famous on the Internet. They're learning how to transplant genes so you can make viruses that will eat people's diseases. And counteract the parts of a cell that cause aging. And all this neat stuff."

"Roy, it sounds horrible, frankly. If nobody dies, where will all the new bodies go? But I'll check into it. You want to visit?"

"Well, I'd like at least to go look at the outside of the building."

"If you go inside, you might catch a virus."

"They wouldn't let you into that part of it."

"As I say, I'll look into it. I'm thrilled they're doing something here that you've heard of."

The boy is warming up. "Dad, did you know that eventually computer chips won't be manufactured at all, they'll be grown, like bacilli in a petri dish? Single ions will act as transistors."

"Roy, I don't want to keep you from your homework."

"Yeah. O.K. Goodbye." And the receiver rattles down before Nelson has time to say, "I love you."

Christmas lights are up in Brewer, from a string of multicolored miniature twinkle-bulbs swagged in the window of the 7-Eleven on Almond Street to the green-and-red-floodlit concrete eagles at the top of the twenty-story county courthouse. Nelson can see this top, with its red-lipped flagpole, from his apartment's side window if he presses his face against the glass. In the commercial area around the Center, Discount Office Supplies has arranged conical stacks of reams of paper and automatic pencils and boxes of computer disks in its display window and drenched them with tinsel and confetti, and PrintSmart has duplicated a picture of a wreath on one sheet each of all the colored papers it can supply and hung these on a long string like wash, like laundry for a rainbow world. Within the Center, the clients, under staff supervision, have made a brave attempt to keep the holiday blues away with cotton snow and lo-glo electric candles in the windows and a seven-foot tree as overloaded with handmade decorations as a disturbed mind is with inappropriate thoughts.

Nelson can walk home from work now, and enjoys these ten blocks west from Weiser Street past the old cough-drop factory, deserted but still smelling of menthol after all these years, and through the blocks of row houses put up, a block at a time, by workingmen's savings-and-loans associations in the century before this one, which is down to its last days. Some of the present residents have decorated their little porches and fanlighted doorways and front windows with a Catholic or Pentecostal fervor —doubled and tripled strands of gaudy colored bulbs and thick fringes of tinsel and here and there a plaster creche or an oleograph image of the adult Jesus as if to say this is what the starlit baby came to, the bearded God-Man born to be crucified.

Already they know Nelson at the 7-Eleven, and he knows the people who man the counter and guard the till: the slangy, hefty bleached blonde who sometimes has her little brown boy doing homework over in the corner behind the ten-cent photocopy machine; the frowning white girl with indifferent skin and close-cropped hair and a single tuft dyed green, always reading a fat college textbook and acting annoyed if you say anything friendly; the oldish man with a pleading, watery-eyed look and a very modest command of English, some kind of refugee from Communism's evaporated empire; the alarmingly big black guy, his head shaved, who has a rap and hip-hop station turned loud on the radio and is usually on the phone talking unintelligibly in Caribbean English; the tiny Hispanic girl with frizzy hair and a silver tongue-stud. They hardly notice now when Nelson comes in around five-thirty and buys his microwave dinner for the night and a half-pint carton of milk for his cereal, to sit overnight on the windowsill. The December nights have been so unseasonably warm, the milk quickly sours.

Nelson finds TV stupid but likes the technicolor fire of it, the way it flares up within a few seconds of his coming in the door and punching the remote. A genie when you rub a lamp, a multitude of genies. He watches until he feels his intelligence being too rudely insulted or his patience being too arrogantly tested by the commercials, which interrupt at an ever-greedier ratio whenever the program gets interesting. Yet some commercials he waits for eagerly. There is the Nicoderm commercial that features this neat-looking woman about his age, with a slight crimp in her chin indicating maturity and experience, in a straight-shouldered dress, telling you what a sensible, efficient method this patch provides for quitting smoking. He loves the level, not-quite-smiling way she looks at you, implying that once you quit she and you will go on together on a purified basis. And he loves even more the younger woman advertising Secret Platinum, "the strongest deodorizer you can buy without a prescription." She is dark-complected and with utterly no fat on her except in her quite full lips, and as her pitch progresses, and her body jigs and jags across the screen, she sweats in growing torrents and at the commercial's climax pops a muscle, cocking her arm with a devilish sideways look right out at him. She works out hard and would fuck hard, the implication is. He needs a woman, Christ. Some nights, like in the joke his son e-mailed him, there isn't enough skin left to close his eyes. He tries to analyze himself: why do these two women in the commercials get to him? Both are strong, he sees. He wants a woman who will take over. The possibilities at work for him are poor: clients are off-bounds and your colleagues should be, even if they were more appealing than plain, earnest Katie Shirk, or pouty, snotty Andrea, the art therapist, or Elenita, the Dominican receptionist, with her hair dyed orange and heaped on her head in woolly skeins like Sideshow Bob in The Simpsons, or Esther, who is Jewish and older than he and married to a downtown lawyer and too strong. In the bars he used to go to, the girls have gotten too much younger than he, so young they seem silly, like those two on the other side of the wall. They really do say "like" and "you know" and come down funny on the ends of their words like Valley Girls, tucking the "r"s down deep into their throats. He thinks they are putting him on, imitating Lisa Kudrow, but it's just the way they naturally talk. When one of the two girls on the other side of his wall stops giggling and her voice and the rumbly one of a date entwine with fewer and fewer words into silence and animal sounds, he cannot feel too jealous; it's like undressing a Barbie doll in his mind, and finding her smooth and stiff, no nipples and the legs don't bend.

He is waiting for some woman to call. Mom calls, to check on how he is, but there is more and more space between her calls. Local real estate is lively, as if at the end of the year—the century, the millennium, the world as we've known it—people are agitated and looking for some sort of renewal by changing shelter. She herself is looking forward to Florida, where she still has the condo in Deleon, once Christmas and the visit from her grandchildren is over. "To be frank, Nelson, I almost dread it, it will seem so peculiar, with you not in the house."

He is firm. "Ronnie acted like a prick to my sister, and those other Harrisons weren't much better. You were O.K., but just barely. After all, you were married to Dad for thirty-three years."

"Well, his having a love child doesn't sweeten my memories necessarily."

He smiles at the quaint phrase "love child." Nelson has always been close to his mother. It was drummed into him that he took after the Springers—little and dark-eyed, and something of a smooth operator like his grandfather, and he wonders now if he shouldn't let go of that. This sudden sister, this love child, is a chance to draw closer to Dad, the Angstrom side within him.

Yet his third lunch with Annabelle at The Greenery feels like a pull-back. Elm Street is bleak in December, and part of the bleakness is the uncanny warmth, over sixty today, wiping out any anticipation of a white Christmas and rousing the same fear of global warming as this summer's drought. The planet is being cooked. The oceans will rise, the croplands will become deserts. The Greenery seems demoralized. The only Christmas decorations up are some flattened white spheroids of a glimmering ersatz material in the window and against the mirrors behind the counter: not round real Christmas balls but ones in two-and-a-half dimensions, like some computer graphic. Once again he apologizes to Annabelle for his extended family's bad behavior.

"It was bound to be awkward," she says. "I never should have gone."

"My mistake. I couldn't imagine anybody's not seeing you as I do."

"And how is that, Nelson?"

"As a lovely person," he says. A love child. He has an impulse to put his hands on hers where they rest, short-nailed and broad, on the Formica tabletop. She pulls her hands back as if reading his mind.

"I'm not such a lovely person, Nelson," she says. "I've done things, and had them done to me."

"We all have," he says. As the words leave his mouth they sound lamely big-brotherish to him. 'That's life," he adds, which is also dumb. But what was she talking about, exactly?

"I think," Annabelle says, "we should rest easy for a while. You're living alone and have things to sort out with your family. I'm not really your family."

Like those white Christmas balls that aren't really balls. "You are, dammit."

"I'll be going away before Christmas and some days after. That girl I mentioned, we were at St. Joe's together, she and her husband have invited me to go with them to Las Vegas, and, you know, I figured why not, I've never been there or hardly anywhere. They say if you don't gamble everything else is pretty cheap. There are all these fantastic new buildings you can wander around in for free."

"Hey, you must look up my Aunt Mim. Your Aunt Mim. Your father's sister. Seriously. I told her about you and she was enthusiastic. She's a real card, honest. She runs a beauty parlor out there. I don't know what name she uses now, she's had husbands, but Miriam Angstrom is her maiden name and I'll give you her number to call. I'll call her and warn her. Please do it. Please. It won't be awkward, I know. Aunt Mim is a real sport." It relieves him to think of Annabelle taken care of on the holiday, so he can sneak over to Ronnie and Mom's without a bad conscience. He wonders if everybody has a conscience like his, crimped early and always uneasy.

'I don't want to, Nelson. It'll be one more thing."

"Suit yourself," he says, sharply. She has rejected one of the few things he could give her, a treat and treasure out of his own genes. 'I'll leave her number on your machine but not tell her you're coming." The dispirited atmosphere inside The Greenery is getting to him. He and this half-stranger keep running out of things to say. Finally he asks her, resorting ............