Rabbit Remembered

The waitress says, lowering her voice confidentially, "It tends to be a little dry. My advice would be to have it with a scoop of the frozen vanilla yogurt. On the house. If the power stays off, it'll all be melting anyway."

"You're wicked," Annabelle tells her. Her plump face beams, her eyes shine like a birthday child's as she assents. She still has, after living twenty years in the city, a country-girl innocence that, if she is taken as his date, embarrasses Nelson. In his embarrassment he studies the wall above the booths, whose theme is greenery-ferns and bushes and overhanging branches, brushed on in many forest shades. What he has never noticed before, all those noons grabbing a bite at the counter, is that a pair of children are in the mural, in the middle distance with their backs turned, a boy and a girl wearing old-fashioned German outfits, pigtails and lederhosen, holding hands, lost.

"So," he says. "I don't think I've told you much about my-our- father. Mom has a lot of photos and clippings back at the house- would you like to look them over sometime?" He wants to give her her father, his father, but when he holds out his hands the dust pours through them, too fine and dry and dead to hold. Time has turned the spectacular man to powder, in just ten years.

"I don't think your mother wants me in the house again," says Annabelle.

"Of course she does," he says, knowing she doesn't, and adding, "It's my house, too," when it isn't, yet.

"I thought one of you said green tea," the waitress says, putting down two cold desserts and two steaming cups. "The water was still hot, and they all claim it's good for you. The Japanese live longer than anybody. They had on Sixty Minutes last Sunday these two female twins, over a hundred years old each, that are like rock stars to them."

"Green is great," Nelson says, to chase this motherly woman away. When the siblings have their privacy back, he says to his sister, "This is great, meeting you. I just wish my father could have known you. He hated not having a daughter."

"That's unusual, a bit. Weren't all men his age male chauvinists?"

"He wasn't crazy about males, me included. I think he saw other men as competition. For the women. He was very scared of his homoerotic side. He suppressed it. His only male friend, really- do you want to hear this?"

"Oh, yes."

"-was a car salesman who was screwing my mother for a while. That made it all right somehow, to have a little male intimacy. Charlie, that was the guy's name, he died too, a couple years ago. Another lousy ticker, though unlike Dad he went the full route- triple bypass, pig valves, pacemaker, God knows what all. It worked for a while, but not forever, as you would know, being a nurse. My mother kept in touch with him, even married to Ron. That generation, once they"-he rejects the obvious verb-"once they went to bed together, they didn't get over it." This has taken him a long way sideways. It's true, what the psych instructors at Johnson Community said, if you let somebody talk enough, everything comes out, underside first. "So Dad and Charlie are up there in Heaven," he ironically concludes, "seeing us get together."

"When will we get together again, I wonder," Annabelle says, unironically. She has this frontal mode, part of her innocence.

How innocent can you be, at the age of thirty-nine, in the year 1999?

"Soon," he promises. He wonders what he has taken on. "I want to work something out. You should meet more people than just me."

"Oh?"

"Sure," Nelson says in confident, big-brother style. In the same style he signals to the waitress, who has been standing behind the counter, looking out at the storm through the window beside the tall aluminum urns of cooling coffee and hot water.

"I keep waiting for branches to fall," she tells them, "but they don't, quite."

"Pennsylvania can't afford a good hurricane," he kids her. "We should all move to the Carolinas." He hungers for a hurricane, he realizes-for an upheaval tearing everything loose.

The twilight gloom in the place does seem to be lifting. Nelson cups his hand behind the flame and blows out the candle. The waitress brings their bill handwritten on the back of a menu card torn in half: S11.48. "I hope you have the right change, because with the power out I can't get into the cash register to make any."

Nelson looks into his wallet and has one one and the rest twenties. The MellPenn ATMs only dish out twenties, encouraging consumers to spend faster. New bills, too. He hates how big Jackson's face has gotten, and the way it's off-center. His expression is more wimpy. They've turned this old Indian-killer into a Sensitive New Age Guy. It looks like play money.

Annabelle sees Nelson hesitate and asks, "Do you want some money from me?"

"Absolutely not."