Rabbit Remembered

Nelson says, "I thought those were against your principles."

She is lumpy and sallow but not above being amused. "They were, but people kept asking for them. We still won't do pizzas and French fries."

"Way out," Nelson says. Laconic responses have become, these eight years, his professional habit, but this occasion will demand more: he will have to give, to lead. To be a provider.

"I love healthy food," says Annabelle Byer.

"Do you know already?" the waitress asks. "Or would you like a few minutes?" Nelson has been coming here once or twice a week since the place opened last spring, but she is showing him new deference now that he has appeared with a companion. Annabelle is a little round-faced and bland compared with the narrow-hipped Latina in high heels and jeans, but she is not an embarrassment as a date; she could be a colleague at the Center, like Katie Shirk.

"I know," he tells the waitress. "A cup of that broccoli soup you make-"

"It's not a cream soup," the waitress interrupts. "It's a clear soup, some of the customers call it watery."I want it," Nelson insists, "and then the spinach salad, with raspberry vinaigrette, and don't go easy on the bacon bits."

"That's just what I want," Annabelle says, more gleefully than Nelson thinks she needs to. The waitress is writing. "You said do go easy on the bacon bits, or don't?"

"Don't,"Nelson and Annabelle answer in unison. Nelson adds,"And, to drink, in view of the horrible weather, a cup of hot tea. Not herbal, caffeine. Lipton's if you have it."

"Me, too," his sister says. He is beginning to see the downside of having one.

"Don't you have any ideas of your own?" he asks her."Almost nothing but. If you'd have let me order first, as you should have, you'd be seeming to copy me. "

"I'd have thought of something different. Their lo-cal Caesar with strips of range-fed chicken can be terrific."I love healthy food."

"You said that."Well, I'm nervous. This is strange, meeting your brother at last, and it was your idea."

"Yeah, and showing up giving my mother the scare of her life was your idea. Sorry about your mother, by the way."

"Thank you. She didn't seem scared, yours. Almost feisty, you could say. She thought I was after her money."

"Well, what else? Not that she has that much." He feels, what he had not expected, at ease enough with this person to be combative, as if they had rehearsed their competition years ago. "You and I met, by the way," he says. "Twenty or so years ago, at a party in an apartment along Locust Boulevard. The hosts were a couple called Jason and Pam and a fag they lived with called Slim." He wouldn't say "fag" at work-he has worked with a number of gays, on both sides of the client-caregiver divide, and has no problem with it, once he outgrew the fantasy that they were going to grab his crotch -but being with this girl brings out an older, less p.c. self. "I was with my wife. She was very pregnant, and got drunk and fell down the stairs." The memory still shames him: he had given Pru the bump that sent her off-balance, and the image of her skidding down the metal-edged stairs, with the legs of the orange tights she had on splayed wide like a sexual invitation on the edge of disaster, has stayed with him as a turning point in his life. I must do better than this, he had thought at the time.

"I don't remember any of that," Annabelle says with her annoying, faintly defiant blandness.

"I remember you" he accuses, "and thinking how nice you were. I admired your ear. You were going with a boy called Jamie and worked at some old people's place out around the old the fairgrounds."

"Sunnyside," she says. "My ear?" she asks. Self-consciously she touches her right ear, exposed by the fluffy short-cut hair there. Her hair, a touch damp from waiting in the rain, is brown, with auburn highlights that seem natural and a fair amount of gray sprinkled in. Time is pressing on her though her face pretends not to feel it.

"It hadn't been pierced." He doesn't say it reminded him of his own. He had also liked the way she bulged toward him in certain places, her plump upper lip and the fronts of her thighs when she stood. Some would say she is heavy now but in this county the men are accustomed to that. How had she avoided getting married?

"My mother wouldn't let me," Annabelle was saying. "I guess it was superstitious of her, she said she liked me natural, the way I had been born. Boy, I wonder what she would say with some of the girls now. Even the young nurses, the body piercing, navel, nipple, you name it. I ask them, how can it be sanitary, and they say their boyfriends like it. One more thing to play with, I guess." She blushes and lowers her eyes.