Rabbit Remembered

"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 to television news, "So what do you think? Should the little Cuban boy be sent back to his father in that miserable country or kept in Disney World?"

"Sent back to his father."

"I agree." It was as uncanny as the weather, the way he and she agreed about everything.

The phone does ring one evening, while he's watching a Star Trek rerun. It's not a woman but a male voice from the past, Billy Fosnacht. "I got the number from your mother. I heard from little Ron Harrison you moved out. His wife is one of my patients."

"What a bitch she is. She's far Christian right."

"If you knew her jawbone like I do, you'd feel sorry for her. It's chalk. I've done three implants, with my fingers crossed."

Billy went to dental school in Boston, near Boston, Tufts it was called. He and Nelson, friends in childhood, saw each other around Brewer in Nelson's bad-boy days, up at the Laid-Back and other local hangouts, but since Nelson got clean ten years ago there's been a fading away. "What's an implant?" he asks.

"Nellie, how can you not know what an implant is? It's what I do. It's an osseous-integrated artificial tooth. The best ones are made in Sweden. You pull the real tooth, which is rotten by now right down to the root, otherwise you'd set a gold post in the root and crown it, and you open up the gum and insert a titanium screw with an inner thread as well as an outer, and if the bone bonds with it in five or six months you screw a fake tooth into it and the bite is as good as new. Better than new. I do three, four a day. It's the only time I'm happy, when I'm doing implants."

"You're not happy, Billy?"

"Forget I said that. I'll fill you in later. Let's have lunch. On me. I'm flush, and no wife to spend it for me."

Billy has learned a new way of talking-punchy, self-mocking, rapid. In their shared boyhood he had been four months older, a few inches taller, and the one to get the latest kiddie-fad for a present first. His mother and Dad had a little episode in the sexual mess of the Sixties, everybody splitting up back then. Since then Mrs. Fosnacht has died of breast cancer and Billy's father-a weedy little guy who used to run the music store above the old Baghdad movie theatre on Weiser Street, where the great hole in the ground is now-faded south to New Orleans, where jazz came from. The old playmates' conversation reveals that, though their clienteles rarely overlap, they both work at giving fresh starts to members of the Brewer population, and that in middle age both are at personal loose ends. "Sure," says Nelson, of lunch.