his gray eyes seem round and as pale as glass. “Can I give you a lift?”
“No. Hell. Don’t bother.”
“I’d like to talk to you.”
“No; you don’t really want to, do you?”
“I do, yes. Very much.”
“Yeah. O.K.” Rabbit picks up his clothes and walks around the front of the Buick and gets in. The interior has that sweet tangy plastic new-car smell; he takes a deep breath of it and cools his fear. “This is about Janice?”
Eccles nods, staring out the rear window as he backs away from the curb. His upper lip overhangs his lower; there are scoops of weary violet below his eyes.
“How is she? What did she do?”
“She seems much saner today. She and her father came to church this morning.” They drive down the street. Eccles adds nothing, just gazes through the windshield, blinking. He pokes the lighter in on the dashboard.
“I thought she’d be with them,” Rabbit says. He is getting slightly annoyed at the way the minister isn’t bawling him out or something; he doesn’t seem to know his job.
The lighter pops. Eccles puts it to his cigarette, inhales, and seems to come back into focus. “Evidently,” be says, “when you didn’t come back in half an hour she called your parents and had your father bring your boy over to your apartment. Your father, I gather, was very reassuring and told her you had probably been sidetracked somewhere. She remembered you had been late getting home because of some street game and thought you might have gone back to it. I believe your father even walked around town looking for the game.”
“Where was old man Springer?”
“She didn’t call them. She didn’t call them until two o’clock that morning, when I suppose the poor thing had given up all hope.” “Poor thing” is one word on his lips, worn smooth.
Harry asks, “Not until two?” Pity grips him; his hands tighten on the bundle, as if comforting Janice.
“Around then. By then she was in such a state, alcoholic and otherwise, that her mother called me.”
“Why you?”
“I don’t know. People do.” Eccles laughs. “They’re supposed to; it’s comforting. To me at least. I always thought Mrs. Springer hated me. She hadn’t been to church in months.” As he turns to face Rabbit, to follow up this joke, a little quizzical pang lifts his eyebrows and forces his broad mouth open.
“This was around two in the morning?”
“Between two and three.”
“Gee, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you out of bed.”
The minister shakes his head irritably. “That’s not to be considered.”
“Well I feel terrible about this.”
“Do you? That’s hopeful. Uh, what, exactly, is your plan?”
“I don’t really have a plan. I’m sort of playing it by ear.”
Eccles’ laughter surprises him; it occurs to Rabbit that the minister is a connoisseur of affairs like this, broken homes, fleeing husbands, and that “playing it by ear” has struck a fresh note. He feels flattered; Eccles has this knack.
“Your mother has an interesting viewpoint,” Eccles says. “She thinks it’s all an illusion your wife and I have, that you’ve deserted. She says you’re much too good a boy to do anything of the sort.”
“You’ve been busy on this, haven’t you?”
“This, and a death yesterday.”
“Gee, I’m sorry.”
They have been driving idly, at low speed, through the familiar streets; once they passed the ice plant, and at another point rounded a corner from which you can see across the valley. “Say, if you really want to give me a lift,” Rabbit says, “you could drive over into Brewer.”
“You don’t want me to take you to your wife?”
“No. Good grief. I mean I don’t think it would do any good, do you?”
For a long time it seems that the other man didn’t hear him; his tidy, tired profile stares through the windshield as the big car hums forward steadily. Harry has taken the breath to repeat himself when Eccles says, “Not if you don’t want good to come of it.”
The matter seems ended this simply. They drive down Potter Avenue toward the highway. The sunny streets have just children on them, some of them still in their Sunday-school clothes. Little girls in pink bell dresses that stick straight out from their waists. Their ribbons match their socks.
Eccles asks, “What did she do that made you leave?”
“She asked me to buy her a pack of cigarettes.”
Eccles doesn’t laugh as he had hoped; he seems to dismiss the remark as impudence, a little over the line. But it was the truth. “It’s the truth. It just