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.People liked being around him.He was upbeat. Rabbit Remembered 76Since he never grew up himself, he could be good with children,even with me when I was little.The smaller they were, the betterhe related.He was a better grandfather than a father, since hecould clown around and have no direct responsibility and not giveyou a sinking feeling.Me he kept giving a sinking feeling.I mean,he did things, too.He ran away from Mom to shack up with yourmother.He got involved with a megalomaniacal black guy and amasochistic runaway white girl and got our house burned down.He had a crush on this nitwit young wife of a friend of my parentswhen they were in a country-club phase.Then he had a long secretaffair with his oldest friend s wife.I say friend, but in fact he andRonnie always hated each other.I mean, this is not a constructivepersonality we re talking about. Yet you didn t want him to die. What do you want me to say? Hell, he was the only father I had.What am I supposed to do, wish him dead? Annabelle smiles.Her soup bowl is empty. Some would say thatwould be normal. That Oedipal crap, you mean? Freud is fun to read, but in theworkplace he doesn t hack it.Nobody in the business uses Freudany more. But he is more stunned by her saying that than heshows.Would be normal.He had wanted his father to live, tocontinue to take care of him, to be a shelter however shaky.Thereis a louder scream of wind outside, old tropical storm Floyd.Theceiling lights flicker and then go out.At the same moment, the waitress brings their salads. Oops, shesays. Can you two lovebirds see to eat, or shall I hunt up somecandles? We can see enough, Nelson says.In the gloomy light, flickeringas the wind outside lashes the trees, Nelson leans forward andsoftly explains to his sister, He was tall, about eight inches tallerthan me, and had an athlete s nice easy way of carrying himself.It Rabbit Remembered 77pained him that I wasn t more like him.He had been a wonderfulbasketball player in high school, back when it was still a whitegame. That doesn t exactly make a life, does it though? Annabelle asks,lifting the first forkful of salad to her face.She has a slightly eagerway of eating, keeping her mouth closed in a satisfied smile as shechews, her upper lip shiny with salad oil. That s what everybody kept telling him all his life, says Nelson. But I don t know.At least it was something, to remember aboutyourself.I have nothing like that to remember about myself. What about your family? she asks, before taking the next bite,being careful to keep the bacon bits balanced on the piece ofspinach. They left me.My wife, Pru, who you saw pregnant that time atthe party that you ve forgotten all about, left me over a year agoand took the kids.Back to Ohio, where she s from.Akron.I mether when I was a student at Kent State. He doesn t say she was asecretary, and older than he; he is embarrassed about that. Mygirl, Judy, is nineteen, twenty next January, and off everybody shands except a bunch of boyfriends , and the boy, Roy, and I keepin touch by e-mail.He s fourteen and knows more aboutcomputers than I ever will. Why did she leave? Pru. I don t know.I guess I disappointed her.She thinks I m apipsqueak. She waits to finish chewing and says urgently, Nelson, you re not.You re a caring, intelligent man. Yeah, well.You can be that and a pipsqueak too.I can befrustrating.Pru always wanted us to get a house of our own and Icould never see the point, my mother sitting on all those roomsover in Mt.Judge.I didn t want to leave her alone.My mother. Rabbit Remembered 78 But now she s married. Yeah.But then I didn t want to leave her alone with my prettyawful stepfather.Hey do I sound normal, or do I sound sick?When I m over with my sickos I don t have to listen to myself.Ijust let them talk.Boy, do some of them babble! Everybody thinkstheir little story is the story of the universe. The waitress comes back from the kitchen and puts an unlit candlein a pottery holder on the booth table and lights it. You didn thave to do that, Nelson tells her. We re about to go. Why go? The waitress saunters to the door and looks out its half-window at the whipped, glistening city. Pitch black in the east, she says. Over behind the courthouse. A cardboard sign tuckedinto the molding says on this side in Day-Glo letters CLOSED.Shetakes this sign and reverses it so that CLOSED faces the street.Thecouple in the booth hear the lock click. The stove and grill areout, the waitress explains.Nearer, Nelson hears this other female voice, as soft, as transparentas the voice inside his head, say, Tell me more about your father,as you saw him. The girl is trying so hard to be sweet.Maybe sheis sweet.But Nelson dislikes talking about his father.It pullssomething too obscure and precious out of him.When he tries tothink back to what it was like growing up he keeps getting apicture of his father and him in the front seat of a car, both ofthem having nothing to say but the silence comfortable, the sharedforward motion satisfying.Nelson is being driven somewhere.Tothe piano lessons that gave him butterflies because he neverpracticed enough during the week, as Mr.Schiffner with hislavender shirts and tiny Hitler mustache always detected.Tosoccer practice when he was in that weekend league of middleteens and had hopes of being a star, small but agile.To BillyFosnacht s or some other friend s, there weren t that many, for asleepover.Meanwhile his father s big head was happy with his Rabbit Remembered 79daydreams and his hands were light and pale on the steeringwheel, with big translucent moons on the nails, usually one handwhile the other absent-mindedly patted and stroked the back ofhis head in a gesture that maybe went back to the days when teen-agers had wet ducktails, like Sal Mineo or James Dean in the oldrebel movies Nelson could watch on TV.His father had been arebel of a sort, and a daredevil, but as he got older and tame heradiated happiness at just the simplest American things, drivingalong in an automobile, the radio giving off music, the heatergiving off heat, delivering his son somewhere in this urban areathat he knew block by block, intersection by intersection.At night,in the underlit ghostliness of the front seat, their two shadowswere linked it seemed forever by blood.To Nelson as a child hisown death seemed possible in so perilous a world but he didn tbelieve his father would ever die. I saw him, eventually, Nelson says, as a loser, who never foundhis niche and floated along on Mom s money, which was moneyher father made.Mom-mom my grandmother on my mother sside, the Springers would always say how I resembled Fred, herhusband.He was on the shortish side like me, and sharp atbusiness stuff, and bouncy.But being a loser wasn t the way myfather saw himself.He saw himself as a winner, and until I wastwelve or so I saw him the same way. I loved my father, too, says Annabelle, the man I thought wasmy father.He could fix anything you know how around a farmeverything is always breaking down, he never let on he wasflummoxed, just would sigh and settle down to it.He had thiswonderful confident, calm touch with my mother, too, whenshe d let her temper fly
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