Rabbit At Rest

Her hand has come to rest on her own bare foot there on the sofa cushion. She gives her toes a squeeze, and spreads them to feel air between. "Well you see how stupid I am," she says. "I thought it was all through the slums and behind most of the crime we read about."

"The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are."

She bleakly nods. Daddy used to hate it, when people blamed the government. She unfolds first one leg, resting her heel on the round glass table, and then brings the other parallel, so the bare calves touch; she arches her brown, tendony insteps as if to invite admiration. Her legs still look young, and her face never did. She jackknifes her legs down and sets her feet on the rug, all business again. "Let me heat up the coffee. And wouldn't you like to split that stale Danish with me? Just to keep it out ofyour father's stomach?"

"You can have it all," he tells her. "Pru doesn't let me eat junk like that." Janice finds this rude. She's his mother, not Pru. As she stands in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to heat, Nelson calls in to her comfortably, finding another subject, "Here's an off duty assistant fire chief hit a motorcycle with his blinkers and siren on – probably stoned. And they think it might rain on New Year's."

"We need it," Janice says, returning with the Aromaster and the Danish cut in half on a plate. "I like the weather warm, but this December has been unreal."

"Did you notice in the kitchen what time it was?"

"Getting toward noon, why?"

"I was thinking what a pain in the ass it is to have only one car down here. If nobody minds, when they get back, I could run some errands."

"What sort of errands would they be?"

"You know. Stuff at the drugstore. I could do with some Sominex. Roy has a rash from leaving his wet bathing suit on after swimming in all that chlorine; isn't there some ointment I could get him?"

"You wouldn't be going back to the people you were with in the fish restaurant the night before last? People who can sell you some lines, or rocks, or whatever you call them?"

"Come on, Mom, don't play detective. You can't grill me, I'm an adult. I'm sorry I told you half of what I did."

"You didn't tell me what really interests me, which is how much this habit is costing you."

"Not much, honest. Do you know, computers and cocaine are about the only items in the economy that are coming down in price? In the old days it cost a fortune, nobody but pop musicians could afford it, and now you can get a whole gram for a lousy seventy-five dollars. Of course, you don't know how much it's been cut, but you learn to get a dealer you can trust."

"Did you have any this morning? Before you came out ofyour bedroom to face me?"

"Hey, give me a break. I'm trying to be honest, but this is ridiculous."

"I think you did," she says, stubbornly.

He disappoints her by not denying even this. Children, why are they afraid of us? "Maybe a sniff of what was left over in the envelope, to get me started. I don't like this idea of Dad taking Judy off on a little sailboat – he can't sail for shit, and seems sort of dopey anyway these days. He seems depressed, have you noticed?"

"I can't notice everything at once. What I do notice about you, Nelson, is that you're not at all yourself. You're in what my mother used to call a state. This dealer you trust so much, do you owe him any money? How much?"

"Mom, is that any business of yours?"

He is enjoying this, she sadly perceives; he is glad to have it wormed out of him, and to place his shameful burden on her. He shows relief in just the way his voice is loosening, the way his shoulders sag in his fancy paisley bathrobe. She tells him, "Your money comes from the lot and the lot's not yours yet; it's mine, mine and your father's."

"Yeah, in a pig's eye it's his."

"How much money, Nelson?"

"There's a credit line I've developed, yeah."

"Why can't you pay your bills? You get forty-five thousand a year, plus the house."

"I know to your way of thinking that's a lot of jack, but you're thinking in pre-inflation dollars."

"You say this coke is seventy-five a gram or ten dollars a rock. How many grams or rocks can you use a day? Tell me, honey, because I want to help you."

"You do? What kind of help?"

"I can't say unless I know what kind of trouble you're in."

He hesitates, then states, "I owe maybe twelve grand."

"Oh, my." Janice feels an abyss at her feet; she had envisioned this conversation as confession and repentance and, at the end, her generous saving offer of a thousand or two. The ease with which he named a much bigger figure indicates a whole new scale of things. "How could you do it, Nelson?" she asks lamely, limply, all of Bessie Springer's righteous stiffness scared out of her.

Nelson's pale little face, sensing her shock, begins to panic, to get pink. "What's such a big deal? Twelve grand is less than a stripped Camry costs. What do you think your liquor bill runs to a year?"

"Nothing like that. Your father has never been a drinker, though back in the Murkett days he used to try."

"Those Murkett days – you know what was in them for him, doncha? Getting into Cindy Murkett's pants, that's all he cared about."

Janice stares and almost laughs. How young he is, how long ago that was, and how different from what Nelson thinks. She feels a hollowness spreading inside her. She wishes she had something to sip, a little orange juice glass of blood-red Campari, not weakened by soda the way the women down here like to have spritzers, for luncheon or out by the pool. Her half of the cherryfilled Danish feels heavy on her stomach and now in her nervousness she can't stop picking the sugar icing off Nelson's half. His refusal to eat – his acting so superior to the mild poisons she and Harry like – is the most a

"You don't smoke," he tells her.

"I don't, except when I'm around you and your wife." He shrugs and takes his pack of Camels from the table and tosses it toward her. Their complicity is complete now. The lightness of it all – the cigarette itself, the dry tingling in her nostrils as she exhales – restores matters to a scale that she can manage. She asks, "What do these men do, these dealers, when you don't pay?" She could bite her lips – she has gone over into his territory, where he is an i

"Oh," he says, enjoying posing as casually brave, shaping the ash of his cigarette on the edge of a lovely Macoma tellin he uses as an ashtray, "it's mostly talk. They say they'll break your legs. Threaten to kidnap your kids. Maybe that's what makes me so nervous about Judy and Roy. If they threaten you often enough, they have to do something eventually. But, then, they don't like to lose a good customer. It's like the banks. You owe enough, they want to keep you in business."

Janice says, "Nelson. If I gave you the twelve thousand, would you swear off drugs for good?" She strives to make eye contact.

She expects at least an eager vow from him to cinch her gift, but the boy has the audacity, the shamelessness, to sit there and say, without giving her a glance, "I could try, but I can't honestly promise. I've tried before, to please Pru. I love coke, Mom. And it loves me. I can't explain it. It's right for me. It makes me feel right, in a way nothing else does. It's like the bank. You owe enough, they want to keep you in business."

She finds herself crying, without sobs, just the dry-straw ache in the throat and the wetness on her cheeks, as if a husband were calmly confessing his love for another woman. When she gets her voice together enough to speak she says, clearly enough, "Well then I'd be foolish to contribute to your ruining yourself."